Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse

Nigel Farage has poured poison into the well of Scottish politics by spreading a heavily edited advert that accused Anas Sarwar of prioritising the Pakistani community. In doing so, he is feeding into a standard far-right trope that Europe is under threat from “multiculturalism” and mass immigration, specifically of Muslims. Farage knows exactly what he is doing and is indulging in his now trademark racism and Islamophobia.

The National reports that: “Last week, Meta’s ad library stated that Farage’s party had spent between £8000-£9000 pushing their advert to voters in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, where a Holyrood by-election will be held on June 5. Now, the total spend is listed as between £10,000 and £15,000.”

At least he’s trying.

Poor Davy Russell or ‘Davy Hamilton’ as Sarwar calls him, continues to dodge questions … or accountability during an election campaign – he snubbed Good Morning Scotland today, and isn’t even attending hustings. He’s been accused of being more Davy McCallum than Davy Russell, and it’s hard not to conclude that Scottish Labour are either throwing the election as they would prefer to give Reform UK a boost, or are embarrassed by their own candidate.

Given that Labour won this seat as recently as 2021 by 34% this behaviour shows the extent of the Labour collapse.

Reviewing Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism, (Is This Fascism?) Daniel Trilling writes: “The rhetorical tactics of far-right populism – the denigration of critics as traitors and Lügenpresse; the lurid claims about immigrants eating dogs; the obsession with ‘woke’ forms of social etiquette – are all ‘programmatic’ … They aim to channel the multifarious resentments of a population into a ‘revolt against liberal civilisation’; in other words, into ‘barbarism’.

A Bitter Harvest

Recently, we could view Farage’s multiple parties as just an unpleasant sideshow, the sort of swivel-eyed loons residing in southern backwaters, but the extent of their threat to take power in England can’t be underestimated. If Scotland has suffered from a tepid nationalism that attempted to offset the very worst of Tory policy, England has suffered under direct rule. Sure, they elected them, but the spiralling catastrophe of the politics cultivated around Brexit has no end.

As Fintan O’Toole has written in the Irish Times: “English nationalism was and is ambiguous and largely unarticulated. For centuries, it was wrapped in a double layer of packaging – Britishness and Empire. But it never went away and Brexit was its moment to emerge. We didn’t really get to hear what it is in simple language, but we were left in no doubt about what it is not – European.”

“But Brexit was a terrible solution to the problem of English identity. It did nothing to allow ordinary people to “take back control” of their lives. Its only achievement has been to wipe about four per cent off Britain’s GDP. Instead of Britannia Unchained, there is Stagnation Nation, characterised by low public and private investment and high regional and household inequality. Low-income households in Britain are now 27 per cent poorer than their equivalents in France and a staggering 60 per cent poorer than those in Ireland.”

How then do you explain Farage’s rise?

O’Toole suggests:

“The best way to make sense of this seeming contradiction is to look at the latest edition of the ongoing Future of England survey run by the political scientists Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones. They find that “those voters in England who identify primarily as English rather than British are made both angry and fearful by contemporary political life… among those English-identifiers, we found ambivalence towards the Union as a project and a commonly held sense of grievance about the perceived cost and political influence of the other nations” within the UK.”

“What seems to have happened is that Brexit did, at first, act as a pressure valve, letting out some of the steam of English separatist resentment. But since 2022, the pressure has been building up again: over 40 per cent of people in England now say that “English” is a better fit for their sense of identity than “British”. Not surprisingly, these people are much more inclined to support Farage‘s Reform UK or the Conservatives than those who identify primarily as British. Startlingly, supporters of Farage rank “being English” above “being a parent” as a marker of who they think they are.”

“This is a profoundly unhappy tribe.”

Now we are told that Reform’s rise is inexorable and they are whitewashed and normalised. The mainstream parties – and the incumbents – are so inept and disastrous that people are flocking to Farage’s party. That is the narrative we are told repeatedly.

But it’s a narrative worth challenging. There is no doubt that there is deep, widespread disaffection with mainstream politics, and no doubt that this is justified. The issue is why voters in Scotland should turn to an English nationalist party led by someone who is an admirer of both Trump and Putin and whose party has literally nothing to say about Scottish politics – other than some of their leaders openly advocating cancelling Holyrood and Devolution.

Why, if you are angry with the political class should you vote for Reform UK? I guess for Scottish Tories the transference is easy enough, and for many hearing the surround-sound of media about them it seems like a protest vote. But the reality of Farage’s repellent politics, its empty one-dimensional hopelessness needs called out again and again, otherwise we will be the beneficiaries of someone else’s ‘bitter harvest’.