Reform in Scotland: A New Force or a False Dawn?

“I’m so scared.” Two students, watching overnight election results filter in from England on their phones, were visibly unsettled. The results showed Reform UK making significant gains south of the border, and the question hanging in the room was whether that wave might reach Scotland. Were it to do so, it would overturn one of the most durable assumptions in Scottish political life: that radical right politics is, in some fundamental sense, un-Scottish, and that the country possesses an inherent resistance to that toxic mode of politics.

That assumption was about to be tested.

Scotland has long been characterised as fundamentally social democratic in character, resistant to the hard right. This belief in Scottish exceptionalism is famously rooted in the idea that Thatcherism was an alien force imposed from without, never reflective of who Scotland actually was. The rise of the SNP under Salmond and Sturgeon is widely interpreted through this lens: its success lay in claiming the mantle of a genuinely social democratic party, positioned to the left of Labour’s recent iterations. As Tom Devine put it, “the Nationalists stole the left-wing clothes from Labour.” Whether the notion of an inherently left-of-centre majority in Scotland was always something of a myth is now being put to a serious test by Reform’s entry into Scottish politics.

The scale of Reform’s ascent had already been striking. As John Curtice noted, the situation was “remarkable”: a party running at 6 or 7% in British-wide polls in autumn 2023 had become a serious competitor for the role of principal opposition at Holyrood. Malcolm Offord was not wrong to describe this “insurgent party” as having experienced “a bit of a meteoric rise” north of the border. That rise is all the more striking given that commentators widely define Reform UK’s core identity as English nationalist, which in theory limits its potential to make headway in Wales and Scotland. How could a party led by Nigel Farage, widely regarded as an English nationalist, make headway in Scottish politics?

Reform’s Performance: Breaking Through

The actual electoral performance of Reform UK had been the big unknown going into polling day. The momentum was real, but how far it would translate into votes and seats remained unclear. For Farage, the results in England, combined with early indications from Wales and Scotland, amounted to “a truly historic shift” in British politics. Reform, he claimed, was “competitive right down from the southwest of England up to the northeast of Scotland.”

In Scotland, Reform averaged around 16% of the vote and secured seventeen seats, level with Labour and jointly tied in second place at Holyrood. For a party that had not contested a previous Scottish election, that is quite a jump. The outcome is doubly significant: it marks Reform’s arrival as a serious force in Scottish politics, and it lays bare the steady long-term decline of Labour in Scotland, a decline that recent Westminster results had tended to obscure. Reform took no constituency seats, their closest run coming in Banffshire and Buchan, where the SNP won by just 350 votes. The combined Conservative and Reform vote in that seat comfortably exceeded the SNP’s winning total, a detail that has fuelled calls to “unite the right.”

Offord was keen to contextualise the achievement. “Two years ago we had something like 5% of the vote,” he noted. “We’ve now got ourselves up to 15% plus. We’ve got a good block of MSPs going to Holyrood starting on Monday.” For a party that had assembled its full list of candidates in the previous six months alone, he was openly proud: “For us, for a young party, that’s been a challenge, but we’ve got there.” All of his MSPs are new to Holyrood, and he acknowledged they would need to “learn fast,” though he was confident that his “bright bunch” would “find where the levers are pretty quickly.”

For political scientist Ailsa Henderson, the vote arithmetic tells a clear story. Comparing the 2026 regional list votes with those from 2021, she finds that roughly half of Reform’s votes came directly from the Scottish Conservatives, a transfer that shaped outcomes in numerous constituencies and added a further dimension to the crisis facing Scottish unionism on the right.

Curtice was equally clear-eyed. The party did “staggeringly well” in parts of England, he noted, though it achieved nothing like that in Scotland. In the short term, its Scottish surge proved “a gift to the SNP”: Reform drew heavily from Conservative voters, took some from Labour, but made very little inroad into the SNP’s base.

The Conservative Dilemma

Andrew Bowie acknowledged it was likely to be a “difficult day” for his party, conceding that Reform was taking a substantial chunk of the traditional Conservative vote. He remained confident that Reform’s “simplistic solutions” would eventually be seen through, and that the Conservatives needed to focus on “winning the battle of ideas,” with electoral success following from that.

This is a weak hand, dressed up as strategic patience. Much of the intellectual energy and funding on the broader right is currently flowing not towards the mainstream but towards the radical right: cross-national networks such as National Conservatism, podcasts with rapidly growing audiences like Triggernometry, and media outlets including GB News, Talk TV, the Spectator and the Telegraph. The battle for dominance of the right, once settled, is now openly contested. There are echoes here of the way the SNP was able to displace Labour as the leading voice of social democratic politics in Scotland: the same ground being ceded, the same inability to respond, the same insistence that surely voters will come back.

The results were costly for individual Conservative figures. Jackson Carlaw lost in Eastwood, with Reform switchers playing a significant role in his defeat. Finlay Carson held on in Galloway and West Dumfries but shed around 6,000 Conservative votes in the process. Conrad Ritchie narrowly lost in Banffshire and Buchan, a majority Leave-voting area, a reminder that the leave/remain fault line has not simply dissolved from Scottish politics.

The Reform-Conservative Dynamic

One thing worth watching at local political events is how the contest between Reform and the Conservatives plays out at the grassroots level, and how it connects to wider narratives about the direction of the right. At a hustings in Edinburgh North and Leith, organised by the Broughton Spurtle, this relationship came into full view.

The ideological overlap and friction between the two parties was visible in the exchanges between Reform’s Gary Neill and Conservative candidate Jo Mowat. On several occasions Neill expressed straightforward agreement with Mowat. Both shared the broad view that Scotland is being held back by a sclerotic and over-dominant state, and that liberating market forces is what the Scottish economy requires. Neill was confident and sure-footed on this territory, drawing on his own experience in business across a number of different countries. New to politics, he nonetheless stood up to make his points with force, pushing the idea that Reform represents a genuinely new approach after decades of failure under the established parties.

This convergence in some areas and rivalry in others goes to the heart of Reform’s challenge. Having made its gains largely from former Conservative voters, the party must now define itself as something more than a repository for Conservative disillusionment. When Offord was pressed on whether Reform had effectively allowed the SNP back into power by splitting the unionist vote, he rejected the framing entirely. “The Conservative Party is no longer a national party and we are a national party,” he said. “We’ve won votes across the whole of Scotland in every region. I think that’s a bit rich of the Conservatives to say that.”

The internal tensions that come with rapid growth were already visible in the bitter public split with former MP Rupert Lowe, and party discipline, already tested at Westminster, may prove a significant obstacle as the new cohort of MSPs begins its work. Moulding a diverse and largely inexperienced group into a coherent parliamentary force is a task that insurgent parties routinely underestimate.

What Kind of Right?

Offord’s public pitch presents a recognisably Thatcherite prospectus, focused on economic liberalism rather than the culture war themes and immigration rhetoric that have characterised Reform’s appeal in parts of England. But this is partly an illusion.

Looking ahead from within Holyrood, he set out his priorities plainly: “We already know there’s a five billion black hole looming. This is going to be a real test of economics for Holyrood. Can it really understand that not everything is for free and that things do need to be paid for, and that we need to grow the economy?” Reform, he made clear, would be “very much our own voice,” focused on scrutinising the government rather than seeking alliances or accommodations with other parties.

That economic framing is not, however, the whole story. Offord had to deny fuelling racial tensions following comments he made after a stabbing in the Calders area of Edinburgh, in which he appeared to link the incident to a “massive insurge of immigrants.” The party’s own leaflets called to “Put the Scottish People First,” with Scots “given priority in their communities” over illegal immigrants. Some candidates attracted criticism during the campaign for remarks perceived as extreme. The economic register may be Offord’s preferred terrain, and it may represent a deliberate bid to position himself as the leading voice of economic liberalism in Scotland, drawing that ground away from the Conservatives. Whether that remains the party’s central thrust, or whether the ethno-nationalist elements that certainly exist within the hard right come to dominate Reform’s Scottish character, is now a genuinely open question.

Thomas Kerr captured the more abrasive side of the party’s appeal. Proclaiming Reform the champion of “forgotten communities” ignored by the Scottish Government, he was blunt about his former party. When pressed on whether Reform and the Conservatives had effectively cancelled each other out, handing seats to rivals through split votes, he was unequivocal. “I left the Tories for a reason,” he said. “I am not interested in speaking to that party. This is a party of crackpots and people who have let down these communities.” He drew on his own history to make the case: “I spent fourteen years in the Conservative Party. The reason I left was because they gave up on places like Shettleston and like Baillieston. I was told many a times not to go and campaign. I knew that we could get a result like that and I was told plenty of times not to do it because they focused on key seats and key areas.”

His ambitions for the years ahead were undimmed. “Reform is here to make sure the political establishment is shaken to the core,” he said, “and if that means that we need to deal with another five years of SNP government, we’re going to have to just deal with that because that’s what’s happened now. I want to make sure there’s a real alternative shown for the people of Scotland over the next few years. That means winning the councils here in Glasgow and right across the whole of Scotland. That means getting MPs elected and Nigel Farage down in the street and making sure that we go into the 2031 election replacing the SNP and the extremist Greens.”

This is a recognisable kind of politics: fusing economic grievance with cultural resentment, positioning Reform as the true representative of working people against a metropolitan political class. It is how such parties hope to erode the electoral base of the mainstream left as well as the mainstream right. Whether Reform can make that argument stick in Scotland, where it has largely so far absorbed Conservative rather than SNP or Labour votes, remains to be seen.

The Fragmented Landscape

One striking feature of the night was the continued fragmentation of the party system. Vote shares required to win seats have fallen, creating openings for multiple parties simultaneously. Low turnout and split-ticket voting added further complexity. The rise of Reform, paradoxically, assisted the SNP in several constituencies, a point Craig Hoy, who won for the Conservatives in Dumfriesshire, pressed sharply. A vote for Reform, he argued, deprived pro-UK voices of representation in Holyrood; Reform was “recklessly splitting” the unionist vote and indirectly lending support to Scottish independence.

Jamie McGuire, speaking for Reform, dismissed this as “nonsense.” The party, he insisted, was offering “a genuine alternative,” not merely to the Conservatives but to the mainstream as a whole. He was confident Reform would form the official opposition in the new Scottish Parliament, with political momentum firmly behind them.

As the final results came in, Offord was visibly deflated. Being, as he put it, “the ambitious sort of chap I am,” he had hoped to push Reform’s vote into the twenties. Landing in the mid-teens was, he acknowledged, still an achievement for a new party, and he had secured what he hoped would be “a really good group” of MSPs to “establish a base” within Holyrood. His own showing in Inverclyde had disappointed him personally. “I never like coming third in anything,” he said, though he was quick to add that “the objective was always, frankly, to get our good list of representation, and we’ve done that today,” and that he had always known it was “a tall order to come into this at very short notice because it’s an SNP heartland.” He suggested it may simply have come “a bit too early” for Reform to take constituency seats outright.

Is Scotland Still Different?

The night offered some support for the idea of Scottish exceptionalism, though perhaps less than its proponents would like. Reform made inroads without breaking through in the constituencies; the SNP held firm in seats it might have expected to lose; and the Greens recorded substantial gains. It was, broadly, a reasonable night for the progressive and pro-independence parties.

Yet the more interesting observation may run the other way. Scotland has long been characterised by multi-party politics, coalition thinking, and a more collectively oriented political culture. What is increasingly notable is how much the rest of the United Kingdom now resembles that picture: fragmented and volatile. Scotland has not so much diverged from Britain as Britain has, gradually, caught up with Scotland.

That fragmentation poses questions of its own. For Curtice, the mainstream parties now face “the biggest challenge to their dominance since 1945.” Reform gained about 26% in the various elections across the UK, while the Liberal Democrats sit at roughly 16%; between and around them, the other significant parties are tightly bunched. Under first-past-the-post, such fragmented politics, as Curtice has suggested, “may become something of a lottery,” hence the revival of serious discussion about electoral reform. The question is whether this provokes a genuine push to change the UK’s voting system, or whether one party breaks clear of the pack, secures power, and has little incentive to change the rules.

Both Swinney and Sarwar were clear about what Reform’s arrival represents. For Swinney, it sharpens the independence argument. Many Scots would feel “very unsettled,” he said, by a party that “holds such hostility to minority groups in our country,” and he pledged to keep Nigel Farage and his party “locked out of governance in Scotland.” Beyond Holyrood, he framed a future Reform-led UK government as a reason Scotland must be “fully Farage-proofed” against a leader who has called for the “abolition of the Scottish Parliament” and the “privatisation of the NHS.” For Sarwar, resisting Reform was a task for all mainstream parties against those exploiting “legitimate concerns” to “divide the country.”

Both were right to take it seriously. Reform has supplanted the Conservatives as the main vehicle of the right in Scotland. The question of whether its economic framing is a genuine distinction from the more nakedly nativist politics on offer elsewhere, or a tactical disguise worn lightly, will be answered in Holyrood over the next five years. So too will the larger question this election raised and did not resolve: whether the myth of Scottish exceptionalism is a myth after all.