Why rise of Farage’s Reform Party will be making of the Yes movement

Are you ready for the ‘new normal’? The impossible has become distinctly possible, it seems. The Conservative Party has been overtaken in the polls by Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK.

The Conservative Party is on 18% and Reform on 19%. Who ever thought we’d get here? Brexit was a poison apple for the Tories. They ate the fruit, and now it seems the party may die.

We’re at a similar moment to a century ago when the Liberal Party was eclipsed and replaced by the new Labour Party, sliding into relative and sustained obscurity as the third power block in parliament. That’s what the Tories now face: sitting third, under Labour and Reform.

It’s hard to over-exaggerate how significant this moment is: the flagship of the British right has passed from One Nation Conservatism to the populism, some would say extremism, of Reform.

So what does the future now hold for British and Scottish politics? At a UK-level, if Reform does pull off coming second behind Labour, we can surely expect an implosion of the Tory Party.

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There will likely be a flood of Tories defecting to Reform. Indeed, the Tory Party could find itself completely subsumed into Reform. Farage has explicitly said he wants to take the Tory Party over.

We could even see the Tories and Reform combine into some MAGA-style outfit modelled on Donald Trump’s metamorphoses of the Republican Party.

It’s karma really. The Tories were too feeble to stick to their own centre-right position and allowed Farage to pull them further and further to the extremes. Once they embraced his Brexit agenda, they ceded the biggest ideological battlefield to their nemesis.

If you ape the extreme, the extreme will eventually swallow you whole. That is one of the cardinal rules of politics. After all, what’s the point of going for some watered down version of Faragism when the real full-fat offering is available.

So the Tories have brought this on themselves. Hell mend them, many would say. They might morph back into some One Nation style party, where the likes of Anna Soubry could feel comfortable again. But that’s unlikely.

The Labour Party under Keir Starmer and the LibDems now provide that centrist ground. What would be different or new about a remodelled One Nation Tory Party?

The drift towards the hard-right, and possible absorption by Reform, seems much more likely. Whether Reform becomes the Tory Party or the Tory Party becomes Reform is most probably a decision for Farage. 

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Could Boris Johnson return in some form, vying for power with Farage? Perhaps, but he’s damaged goods post-Partygate. Either way, the British right is going to the extremes.

The extremes are all the right has left after 14 years of Tory self-destructive mayhem carpet-bombed the centre ground of Conservatism.

Whatever the final shape of the British right, at least the BBC finally has a reason for its endless platforming of Farage – a man the broadcaster thrust to prominence, despite him never holding a seat in the House of Commons. That could change shortly if the people of Clacton buy his end-of-the-pier populist schtick.

What's the point in voting for watered down Faragism when the real thing is on offer? (Image: PA)
For Labour, the rise of Reform could be the first step towards a ten year hold on power. The right will be in such disarray it’s unlikely to get its act together even come the next election. So Labour is sitting pretty… for the time being.

No party stays in power forever, and eventually the right will shape up and it will be time for Labour to once more ship out. That’s how the political cycle always turns.

What then? A hard-right government with Nigel Farage at its head is a distinct possibility, whether that’s a coalition with some limping version of the Tories, or under his own steam as leader of Reform or leader of a Conservative Party that’s been taken over by Reform.

It’s at that point matters will start playing very strongly into Scottish politics. Under the inevitable incoming Labour government, the SNP will decline and with it the hopes of independence. But only the hopes. As we can see from polls, support for independence remains both strong and unchanged.

The independence cause will go into hibernation for some time but it will not die. Indeed, it will be the return of a more rabidly right-wing – perhaps extreme right-wing – government to Westminster that will restart the engine.

With a hard-right government in Westminster at some point in the relatively near future – perhaps the mid-2030s – the independence campaign is likely to not just revive but to thrive.

If many Labour voters defected to the SNP in 2014, imagine how many more would embrace independence in the event of Farage entering Number 10.

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Right now, the cause of independence seems bereft, but nothing fades in politics. Just look at the career of Farage as an exemplar. The future seems to imply that the hopes of the Yes movement lie fairly and squarely with England one day being fool enough to allow the most dangerous man in British politics to govern.

However, if that future does unfold, if Farage did come to power in the mid-2030s, and the Yes movement saw support shoot into the 50s and 60s percentage points, we will not get a replay of 2014.

There will be no easy route to a referendum with someone like Farage. Constitutional politics could get very brutal indeed, and the fight for independence and the union more ugly that any of us ever imagined.