Scotland has no future in Farage’s English nationalist UK
Given the way in which support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Ltd was rising in opinion polling, and gaining uncritical publicity in the media, particularly from a Scottish media which sees the hard right as a bulwark against independence and ‘proof’ that Scotland is not politically so different from England, there was bound to be an opinion poll eventually which put the Faragiste fan club in first place. That’s what has happened now.
The unpalatable truth for those in Scotland who still defend this so-called Union is that England wants to see far right English nationalists take power, whether that’s the hard right as represented by Elon Musk’s pals in Reform UK, or a Conservative party which moves ever further to the right with every passing news cycle. A Britain wide opinion poll by Find Out Now published on 22nd January gave Reform UK 26% (+1), the Conservatives 23% (-2), Labour 22% (-2), Liberal Democrats 12% (-), Greens 10% (-), the SNP 3%(-), and Plaid Cymru 1% (-) – figures in brackets represent changes from the company’s previous poll.
Most focus has been on the tendency of Reform UK and its supporters to blame all the problems which beset the UK on brown people and wokeness, and much is made of the party’s apparent success in courting working class communities which have been battered and bruised by 14 years of Tory austerity and which don’t see much hope from a Keir Starmer Labour government which last week announced that it had been “listening to the concerns of the non-dom community” as it watered down its pre-election promise to abolish the legal fiction of non-dom status, which permits the very wealthy to avoid paying UK tax on income they receive from abroad.
That development sums up this Labour in name only government perfectly. It listens to “concerns” from the extremely rich that they might not keep getting even richer as quickly as they might have liked, but it doesn’t listen to the very real concerns of pensioners, the families on low incomes with more than two kids, the disabled, or the Waspi women that the Labour party has betrayed.
The public loss of faith in Labour once Starmer got into power was always predictable given his track record of breaking promises and pandering to the right. The only surprising thing has been the extent and rapidity of Labour’s fall from public grace.
Into the political vacuum created by the collapse of Labour’s credibility steps Reform UK with its simplistic nostrums. Can’t get a house or a decent job? It’s all the fault of brown people.
Reform UK, like Trump’s MAGA movement in America, of which it is the English nationalist incarnation, is the political wing of toxic masculinity. Reform’s algorithm hogging messaging, blaming immigrants and the woke for all society’s ills grabs the attention of people for whom ‘doing their own research’ entails scrolling through their social media feed on their mobile phone while sitting on the toilet. It appeals to the patriarchal insecurity and vanity of young men, letting them believe that they are knights in shining armour standing up for women and girls against “gender ideology” or “Asian grooming gangs” even as it’s silent on the reality that the overwhelming majority of violence and abuse suffered by women in Britain is perpetrated by white heterosexual men who are often their husbands, partners, or bosses. It’s a party which on the one hand claims to be standing up for women by opposing trans people but at the same time it not so covertly supports the gross misogyny of Andrew Tate.
Reform UK has the backing of billionaires for a good reason. Billionaires don’t fund political parties because they are altruistic and generous, they fund political parties because they are greedy. Reform UK’s main problem with the economic vandalism of Lis Truss was that she didn’t go far enough. It’s a party which wants to slash taxes which will disproportionately put more money in the bank accounts of millionaires like Farage and his wealthy donors while taking an axe to public spending on a scale hitherto unseen. Reform’s 2024 manifesto claims it would save £50 billion a year by telling every government department to “slash wasteful spending, cut bureaucracy, improve efficiency and negotiate better value procurement”. The manifesto repeatedly issued blunt threats about slashing spending on social security and attacking long-established rights.
These messages need to be hammered home in working class communities. If you vote Reform UK you are voting for the introduction of an insurance based healthcare system in which access to healthcare will be means tested. You are voting for increased privatisation in the NHS. The party wants 20% tax relief for private healthcare and insurance companies which the independent health think-tank the Nuffield Trust says could take money out of the public purse to give to profitable businesses, encourage NHS staff to move to the private sector and leave the NHS worse off. Vote Reform UK and you’re voting to pay to see your GP, you’re voting to end free prescriptions, you’re voting for the dismantling of the NHS as we know it and its replacement by a two tier system in which paying becomes the norm. Do you really want to entrust your granny’s healthcare to the same people who told you that Brexit was going to bring Britain a bonanza of jobs and opportunities.
Vote Reform and you are voting for swingeing austerity cuts and consigning many thousands more to destitution. Reform’s claim that it could introduce massive tax cuts without damaging front line services has been widely discredited. Carl Emmerson, deputy director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “Reform UK proposes tax cuts that it estimates would cost nearly £90 billion per year, and spending increases of £50 billion per year. It claims that it would pay for these through £150 billion per year of reductions in other spending, covering public services, debt interest and working-age benefits.
This would represent a big cut to the size of the state. Regardless of the pros and cons of shrinking the state, or of any of their specific measures, the package as a whole is problematic. Spending reductions would save less than stated, and the tax cuts would cost more than stated, by a margin of tens of billions of pounds per year. Meanwhile the spending increases would cost more than stated if they are to achieve their objectives.”
According to the IFS, Reform also proposes to reduce “wasteful” spending by £50 billion per year across all government departments, quangos and commissions. But saving this sum would require much more than a crackdown on waste; it would almost certainly require substantial cuts to the quantity or quality of public services.
Reform represents an existential threat to Scottish self-government. As befits an Anglo-centric English nationalist party, Scotland wasn’t even mentioned in its 2024 manifesto, but senior party figures have spoken about the need to roll back devolution and return to the pre-devolution situation.
Vote Reform and you are voting for leaving Scotland unprotected and exposed to Thatcherism on steroids. But Scotland’s problem as long as we remain a part of the UK is that Scotland gets what England votes for, and about half of England’s voters are now falling under the spell of the hard English nationalist right, whether that’s Reform or a Tory party which is moving ever further to the right. There is no place for Scotland in a hard right English nationalist UK.
The 2026 Scottish elections could be our last chance to escape this increasingly toxic so-called Union. The next Scottish elections must focus on providing the Scottish Parliament with a mandate for independence itself, not a mandate to ask for another referendum which will surely be rebuffed. The stakes have never been higher.
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