My Enemy’s Enemy is My Friend

Reform’s (seeming) inexorable rise isn’t inevitable, and we should do well to remember the advice of those such as Timothy Snyder whose first chapter in ‘On Tyranny’ was  “Do not obey in advance”. Reform’s (seeming) inexorable rise isn’t, and never was, inevitable; it has required vast amounts of dark money and friends in high places.

The media love-in has up until now been largely centred around the oligarch-owned press in England and some extraordinary exposure through the public broadcaster over the years. But now that largesse has slipped over the border. Here Kevin McKenna writes a puff-piece for the Herald ahead of next weeks by-election, tramping the streets of Larkhall with Ross Lambie the Reform candidate and Thomas Kerr, the former head of the Conservative group on Glasgow City Council.

What follows is softball questions and chumminess with his new-found gang: “As the afternoon progresses and a few more people stop to chat, I realise I am witnessing in real-time the worst nightmare of the Scottish Tories and the Scottish mainstream Left.” For McKenna, the Labour party are the ‘Scottish mainstream left’.

McKenna shares the candidate’s loathing of Net Zero and “middle class elites” as they walk the streets and soak in the atmosphere. He writes: “Labour, in turn, were comfortable in the knowledge that many in places like these could never vote for the Tories. But what if another party would came along with candidates raised in this community who weren’t posh? A party like Reform would be the ethical alternative to voting Tory. Working-class people needn’t apologise for choosing them.”

The ‘Reform-Adjacent Right’

Last week I’d asked the question ‘who would be the first mainstream journalist to support Reform’, and here we have a winner: “Today, in these streets, there’s a growing sense of voting Reform to stop the SNP.” McKenna is one of a small group of influential columnists who are going down this path, convinced that Reform is the authentic voice of the working class, that the War on Woke is the political challenge of the day and that anybody who would destroy the detested SNP should be supported. Their logic is: My Enemy’s Enemy is My Friend. They are massively challenged with change to their established order and remain resolutely fixated on capitalist economics and terrified of any response to climate catastrophe. Iain Macwhirter this week called stories about appalling working conditions and abysmally low pay in Leicester’s clothes factories leading them to relocate “anti-capitalist blowback”, and has taken to quoting GK Chesterton.

All of this comes with some earth-shuddering nonsense. Alex Massie, writing in The Times notes that: “You did not need to be a paid-up Faragiste to spot that in the summer of 2020 public gatherings were frowned upon unless, that is, such assemblies were supporting fashionable causes such as Black Lives Matter.”

Massie goes on to write that: “Hence the growing sense on the Reform-adjacent right that white Britons are themselves victims of oppression.”

The “Reform-adjacent right” – well at least he has a name for it.

This sense of victimhood is an essential trope of far-right populism, it runs through the mythology of White Genocide, it’s there in the Great Replacement Theory, and it manifests itself with the idea that white South Africans are being persecuted. It’s there in the idea that there is Two-Tier Policing, or the notion that our education system, culture, and schools are being ‘over-run’. It’s the politics of paranoia and hate, hugely powerful but completely toxic.

It conjures a mythical past and focuses on an existential threat (foreigners, the Greens, urban design, cyclists). At one point McKenna writes: “I also sense a dawning realisation amongst some of these voters that Scotland’s governing party has been hijacked by a cohort who loathe the people who live in places like Larkhall and North Ayrshire and some of Glasgow’s edgier neighbourhoods where family, faith and tradition have always maintained social cohesion and community.”

Faith, Family and Tradition

This notion of ‘tradition’ seems to have melted some people’s minds, conjuring a reactionary streak of politics that has blurred their critical faculties. There is much groupthink going on and lazy (and hazy) consensus-forming. The assumptions are something as follows: everyone knows immigration is a terrible thing; Reform aren’t really right wing (there’s no such thing as Left-Right anymore); Woke ideology is rampant and destroying society; the Scottish Green Party are some wild radical force; racism doesn’t really exist … and on an on. This hysteria has been building for a while. Back in 2021 Chris Deerin wrote that (Rage, the Overton Window and the Faultlines of the Future): “The Greens, are by far the most left-wing party ever to have held power in the UK”. Much of this is put out there with a sort of blithe ‘common sense’ chumminess, covering some pretty dark realities.

A useful corrective comes from Darren McGarvey’s book The Social Distance Between Us (2022). In his chapter on attitudes to, and drivers of immigration, McGarvey writes:

“Despite the perception among some that Britain is inherently anti-immigration, immigration concern among white British people has declined overall since 1964, when attitude surveys on the issue were first introduced. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as many as 80 per cent of people responded ‘Yes’ when asked if they believed too many people were being ‘let in’ to Britain. From this peak in immigration concern, attitudes softened somewhat until the turn of the millennium, when Freedom of Movement led to increased numbers arriving from newly admitted EU countries. In the year or so before the EU referendum, between June 2015 and June 2016, immigration was consistently regarded as the most urgent issue facing Britain, peaking at 56 per cent in September 2015. Political parties rose and fell in the polls based almost entirely on either their immigration policies or the perceived strength or weakness of their statements on the issue. But since the EU Referendum in June 2016, the Migration Observatory analysis of immigration attitudes notes that ‘immigration has been mentioned by far fewer people, falling from 48 per cent in June 2016 to 13 per cent in November 2019’, when concern about immigration was supplanted by concerns around Brexit which in November 2019, 62 per cent mentioned as a primary concern. Given immigration numbers had not shifted tremendously by 2019, the argument that immigration concerns correlate with migrant numbers makes little sense. Indeed, fears and anxieties around immigration appear to correlate more closely with the level of polarisation in discourse, and the substance and tone of news and media coverage, both of which are always preceded by growing levels of inequality.”

He is essentially right, that the immigration topic is so ripe for exploitation because people have a lived-experience of failed public services and the accusation of a failed political class lands on fertile ground. It does not matter that Farage and his wealthy backers are absolutely part of that failed system.

Constitutional Collission Course

And yet, despite the support across the media, and despite the undeniable failures of the incumbent government in Scotland, Reform have limitations. They are on a collision course for next year at Holyrood and a backlash that we have long predicted: Scottish independence moves into an EIGHT PERCENT lead: 54 : 46 with Norstat. This doubled to become a SIXTEEN PERCENT lead: 58 : 42 if Nigel Farage becomes UK PM.

This doesn’t go away despite the campaign to support them from Scotland’s media class, gatekeepers and opinion-formers. Members of Reform have been on record saying they would abolish Holyrood and deny another referendum, but this becomes untenable with these figures and a constitutional crisis will ensue. New Norstat poll for @timesscotland pre-Hamilton by-election shows Reform’s Scottish surge continues, but it also shows that the rise is due to the collapse in belief in the Conservatives and Labour with their twin calamitous leaderships of Badenoch and Starmer. This has not been helped by Labour’s disastrous candidate and campaign.

As Daniel Sanderson, the Times Scottish Political Editor reports (Spectre of Nigel Farage at No 10 fuels support for independence): “The rise of Reform UK and disillusionment with Sir Keir Starmer’s government has pushed support for Scottish independence to a record high.”

“A Norstat survey for The Sunday Times put support for independence at 54 per cent, the joint-highest level recorded by the polling firm in the series. The Yes side has opened up an eight-point lead when undecided voters are excluded.”

“Meanwhile, fewer than one in five Scots plan to back Labour at next year’s Holyrood elections, in a devastating reversal of fortunes since it won a landslide at Westminster last July.”

“Enthusiasm for independence has surged” writes Sanderson and “a fracturing of the Unionist vote means the SNP remains on course to be comfortably returned as the largest party after next May’s elections with 54 of the devolved parliament’s 129 seats, according to projections by the polling expert Sir John Curtice.”

Mark Diffley, the pollster from Diffley Partnership, said: “The SNP and wider nationalist movement will be encouraged by the poll’s findings of 54 per cent support for independence. But what will concern the pro-union parties the most is the finding that the prospect of Nigel Farage as PM would push support for independence close to the symbolically important 60 per cent. The rise of Reform is not only hitting Labour and the Tories at the ballot box but represents an increasing threat to the union.”

All of the usual caveats and qualifiers apply: what is the point of a Yes majority of there isn’t a strategy for gaining independence; the so called Unionist-majority only applies if Labour go into alliance with Reform UK; and to what extent will Reform’s appeal fall apart under the scrutiny of a campaign? The wider question for Reform is what do they run on? Do they try and coalesce all of the anti-Holyrood rage and say “Vote for us to abolish devolution?” Do they try and garner all of the Unionist / British nationalist vote and say “Vote for us and we will make sure there is never granted a referendum?” Both are incredibly negative campaign messages, but they are an incredibly negative party.

None of this reflects well on the plurality of news media and commentary, but it does speak to the need to challenge the lazy consensus about Reform’s rise and appeal and scrutinise and expose them. The coming year will provide a crisis that beckons a project or persons from within the independence movement to provide leadership, and an alternative to being ruled by Prime Minister Nigel Farage.