Reform UK is on the march. Having won 14.3% of the popular vote and five MPs in the July General Election, it is now polling as high as 21% in Britain-wide polling. If a General Election were held tomorrow, it could quadruple its MP tally or better. The next General Election will almost certainly not be held until 2028 or later, but it is set to make significant gains at local and devolved elections in the meantime.

That includes Scotland. Reform UK won 7% of the vote north of the Border in July’s General Election, and despite failing to win any seats had a substantial impact. It won 14.6% in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, where the SNP defeated then-Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross by a wafer-thin margin of 2.5 points. However, it also won a higher proportion of the vote than the winning party’s majority in an additional 11 seats, four of which were very narrow SNP holds against strong Labour challengers.

There is no sign that this was a one-off. Reform UK’s current vote in Scotland may be the most transferable from election to election of any party north of the Border. 71% of Scottish Reform UK voters interviewed by the British Election Study said they voted for them because they saw them as “the best party”; no major party managed above 50%, and the Scottish Greens recorded 66%.

Read more by Mark McGeoghegan

Indeed, since the election, its support has grown even further in Scotland, with one recent poll putting it at 14% at Westminster and no poll putting it below 11%. It is also set to be highly competitive at the 2026 Scottish Parliament elections. Current polling suggests that it would win around 11.2% of the constituency vote and 11.3% of the regional list vote.

If historic trends hold, that would see Reform win around 13 or 14 seats, overtaking both the Liberal Democrats and Scottish Greens to become Holyrood’s fourth-largest party. It would also be within touching distance of the Scottish Conservatives, who on current polling would lose almost half of their 31 seats. It would not take a massive swing between now and May 2026 for Reform UK to come from nowhere to become Scotland’s third-largest – and largest right-wing – party.

If Reform UK’s rise appears sudden and unpredictable to you, that’s understandable. UKIP, the spiritual predecessor to the Brexit Party and now Reform UK as vehicles for Nigel Farage’s brand of right populism, never broke 1.1% of the regional list vote at Holyrood, and Reform UK managed just 0.2% in 2021. Received wisdom has it that Scotland is a left-wing, progressive, pro-immigration and pro-European country, borne out by the fact that 74% of our MSPs belong to parties that position themselves on the left or centre-left, and as socially liberal.

But as I wrote in these pages last month, the actual political values and attitudes of Scottish and English voters do not differ enormously. This year’s British Election Study found that 12% of English voters and 8% of Scottish voters are economically right-wing (the vast majority of both are centrist or left-leaning on economic issues), and that 69% of English voters and 63% of Scottish voters fall on the more socially conservative side of the political spectrum.

Drilling down to specific issues can highlight some bigger differences, but does not change the overall picture much. Scots are more likely than their English peers to support increasing immigration, but the British Election Study found that 44% of Scots support cutting immigration: indeed, 25% put themselves on the most anti-immigration end of an 11-point scale.

There are plenty of voters up for grabs on the Scottish right, and backlash against the Conservative Government at Westminster drove many of them into the arms of Reform UK; two-thirds of their voters in July had voted Conservative in 2019.

But it’s crucial to understand that Reform UK’s surge in Scotland is not just, or even primarily, a product of ideological alignment and upset with the Conservatives at Westminster. It is tapping into a deep vein of unrest and anti-establishment sentiment that goes back much further. Reform UK’s voters at the General Election were by far the most economically pessimistic of any Scottish voting group, with half expecting their household finances to worsen over the next year and two-thirds expecting the general condition of the economy to worsen.

Its voters were the most likely to be dissatisfied with both UK and Scottish democracy:  in both cases, around three-quarters told the British Election Study that they were dissatisfied with either. And they are the Scottish voter group least likely to trust MPs, with just shy of half saying they have no trust in MPs at all.

Nigel Farage with supportersNigel Farage with supporters (Image: Getty)

Nor are they a monolithic bloc on the constitution. According to Survation’s latest poll, a fifth of voters who would vote for Reform UK on the regional list vote at Holyrood would also vote for independence.

Reform UK represents the Scottish emergence of the right-wing popular backlash against mainstream politics that truly began in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and in growing waves has swept Western liberal democracies. In Scotland, the independence movement had offered a more immediately viable vehicle for anti-establishment backlash, but as trust in the Scottish Government has collapsed and independence becomes a far-off prospect, the populist right is now better positioned to capture that energy.

If trends elsewhere in Europe are anything to go by, support for Reform UK in Scotland will only continue to grow. It will face challenges, of course, in trying to differentiate itself from the Conservatives, further broaden its coalition beyond the unionist right, and overcome the inevitable challenges that will stem from the English nationalism of the party south of the Border. But as long as demand in Scotland for a vehicle for populist backlash persists, so will the party best placed to take advantage, and today that party is Reform UK.

Whether that demand persists is another question, and has more to do with Westminster than Holyrood. Labour has bet the UK’s political future on being able to get the economy growing again and have voters feeling some kind of benefit before the next general election. Success would diminish the space available to populists, but failure would fuel further backlash, in Scotland just as in the rest of the UK.

Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social