Common Ground

There’s an ongoing debate about which piece of dystopian sci-fi you are living in. The traditional favourites are Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984. Others suggest that the blurring of lines between reality and digital spaces reflects Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or the climate dystopia of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. I think we’re closer to Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta.

On Saturday, the BBC told us that “John Swinney told a news conference in Edinburgh that the SNP was by a “country mile” the leading party and would form the next government. He said the leaders of all other Holyrood parties would be invited individually to talks from next week to seek common ground – except for Reform.”

Swinney pointed to successful budget negotiations with the Greens and Lib Dems earlier this year, and said the party had worked constructively with other parties on specific issues. However, the SNP leader said Reform’s leader in Scotland, Malcolm Offord, would not be invited for talks.

Cue a barrage of outrage and condemnation about how the First Minister could possibly do this and how terrible it was to exclude Mr Offord and his MSPs.

I think he’s 100% right to do this.

The campaign was characterised by the media treating Reform UK as just another political party, fawning over Malcolm Offord’s ostentatious display of wealth, his car, his hair, even. Offord was soft-balled questions and asked to go and play golf with The Scotsman. The party’s far-right polices were ignored, or sane-washed.

Setting aside the dark-money flooding into Reform, and the personal grift and corruption [Reform deputy fails to guarantee Farage did not use any of undeclared £5m gift on campaigning | The Independent] for a moment, let’s look at why Reform needs a cordon sanitaire around them.

Only yesterday Richard Tice refused to condemn the comments from a councillor in Sunderland who said that Nigerians should be used to “fill in the pot holes”.

Glenn Gibbins, who was elected as a Reform councillor in Sunderland in this week’s local elections, in 2024 complained on social media about the “amount of Nigerians in town”.

“We should melt them all down and fill in the pot holes!!” he wrote in a later-deleted post, according to campaign group Hope Not Hate.

Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, refused to directly criticise Mr Gibbins and instead accused the media of “smearing” Nigel Farage’s party.

In a statement to the media, director of campaigns for Hope Not Hate, Georgie Laming, said: “Glenn Gibbins’s comments were so racist and misogynistic that suspending him was the only credible response.

“But he is just the latest in a long line of Reform candidates we have exposed for extreme views. Reform boasts about having the best vetting in Britain. Farage now needs to explain how it keeps letting people like this through.”

While the arrival at Holyrood of two trans MSPs has caused an outpouring of hysteria and bigotry, it’s telling that less attention has been given to the arrival of Senga Beresford on the South of Scotland regional list for Reform.

The Herald tells us: “A businesswoman and mother of four from Dumfries and Galloway, Beresford became a central figure during the Holyrood campaign after scrutiny of social media posts in which she appeared to support the deportation of Muslims and endorse far-right activist Tommy Robinson. “In August 2024, she replied: ‘Me,’ to a post on the social media site X from Ashlea Simon, the deputy leader of the far-right party Britain First, which said: ‘In the UK Muslims are demanding that sharia law is implemented. I demand that we deport the lot of them. Who’s with me?’ During this year’s Holyrood campaign, she told ITV Border people should be ‘grateful’ to Robinson for highlighting grooming gangs. Facing criticism, Beresford insisted she had ‘nothing against Muslims’ and apologised ‘if people have misunderstood’.”

In England, a candidate in West Sussex called for “every Muslim” to be deported from Britain because the public cannot tell them apart from terrorists… [Reform candidate calls for mass deportation of Muslims]

Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s ‘home affairs spokesperson’ has announced that the party, when in power, who have an upfront spending of £10bn on a network of new ‘detention centres’ in order to deport 2 million people. They have acknowledged that the already-stretched police could not execute such a task and therefore a special force would have to be created. Sound familiar?

There can be no ‘common ground’ with such people and such policies. You don’t sit down and have a conversation with people who are advocating rounding up your friends and ordinary members of the community. It’s called having a threshold. The relationship with Reform UK has been characterised as endless compromise, endless normalisation. This would be a good time to stop that, and John Swinney has made the right call.

The Liberal response to the arrival of fascists [The F Bomb] – particularly the liberal media, has just been endless appeasement. Our inability to recognise what’s going on, to recognise real change and to respond to it, our endless capacity for complacency is utterly disastrous.

“Beyond the pale” describes behavior or actions that are utterly unacceptable, unreasonable, or outside the boundaries of polite society and civilized conduct. The idiom originates from the concept of a “pale” (a fence or boundary, from Latin pālus), representing areas under specific authority, where anything outside was considered lawless.