BatMath and the problem with John Swinney's approach to Reform threat

How urgent is the threat of surging right-wing predilections in Scottish politics?

First Minister John Swinney | PA

There's a fantastic bit of math in the 2016 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: "If there's even a 1 per cent chance Superman's our enemy, we have to take it as an absolute certainty."

BatMath, as it happens, is what John Swinney uses to calculate Reform UK's risk to Scotland. At the end of February, First Minister John Swinney called for a "pivotal gathering of Scottish society to work together and unite Scotland against the 'increasingly extreme far-right'."

The conference will be an opportunity to renew public trust in politics and unite Scotland in a common cause - "for democracy and respect."

But how urgent is the threat of surging right-wing predilections in Scottish politics? A poll conducted by Survation for the Holyrood Sources podcast, the first of 2025, put the SNP on 35 per cent of the constituency vote – 13 points ahead of Labour on 22 per cent. On the regional list, the SNP were on 31 per cent, Labour 21 per cent, the Tories 14 per cent, Reform UK 13 per cent, the Liberal Democrats 10 per cent, the Greens 9 per cent, and Alba 2 per cent.

It was predicted that Labour would emerge as the largest party with 24 seats. The Tories and Reform UK would have 15 MSPs and the Liberal Democrats 12.

Richard Tice, the Reform deputy leader, is no Lex Luthor of Scottish politics. Last week, journalists sensationally harangued him for arriving in Glasgow to celebrate the defection of two local councillors, but he forgot their names and constituencies beyond "John and Ross." Famous last words, but if you cannot remember the names of your defectees, an army you have not.

Europe and the world are undoubtedly experiencing a cultural shift toward populism. It is unclear what a gathering of Scottish civic organisations, churches, trade unions, charities, and political leaders will achieve to reverse the plethoric and chronic issues pushing disillusioned voters to populist ideals. Housing, health, education, the vast cost-of-living crisis, and a massive tax burden with a modest rate of return in creaking public services happened on the SNP's watch.

If someone felt more cynical than usual, they would note two anomalies with Swinney's approach. The same Holyrood Sources poll seat projection from Professor John Curtice put the SNP on 53 seats, 12 short of a majority in the 129-seat Scottish Parliament and a decrease on their present 62. This is not a base from which to unite people.

The second is a vulgarity that has largely slipped unnoticed: "At the start of the year, I warned that failure to pass the Budget would signal that Parliament and politics could not deliver. That failure would only serve the interests of an increasingly extreme far-right and leave devolution dangerously exposed."

Well, no. Not at all. The Scottish Budget is a complicated balance of checks and balances. You must achieve support at the initial debate stage, through committee scrutiny, and the final voting stage. Horse trading and concessions between the parties are part and parcel. Had the Budget Bill been voted down, the Scottish Government would have to present an alternative. In a worst-case scenario, two-thirds of the Scottish Parliament could have called for an early election as stipulated under the Scotland Act 1998.

None of this feels like the enemies are at the gates, particularly when the likes of Richard Tice cannot name their soldiers. In a parliament designed with cross-party collaboration at its core, it feels like business as usual - which is also part of the problem given the backdrop of national issues facing people.

To say, as the First Minister did, that the Budget failing to pass would be a victory for the far-right is a ludicrous exercise in Othering. It feels like a desperate political move for the SNP, whose fortunes are waning, whose light is slowing dimming, and whose policy solutions to problems of their creation are neither bold nor comprehensive.

The UK has finally ceased to be the daily evil for the SNP. They need something else, and a nebulous 'far-right' is it. Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon, and Humza Yousaf set "Westminster" up as such a faceless bogeyman figure in Scotland that any Unionist voter or politician was, by definition, working contrary to the interests of Scotland if they supported it. Constitutional upset by online trolls went further, and the damage of these years still plagues us all.

In more BatMath gymnastics, Swinney also said: "Over the past few months, I have been working on a very simple formula: hope plus delivery equals trust." Rhetorical indulgence nor another talking session feels like it will do anything: there is a sea of deficient policy areas in Scotland which are more of a daily threat than Nigel Farage's Reform UK party, the return of Donald Trump, or the far-right in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Finland and Croatia.

John Swinney is a conciliatory, decent, steady-hand-on-the-tiller leader. But he is shifting from restorative, stabilising, caretaker governance to an election war footing. Framing his election bid as 'Swinney versus extreme politics' opens the door to uncomfortable criticism about his party's record in government for 18 years. Given the miserable descent of Scottish political parties into screaming matches about Scottish independence, it would be a sensational own-goal. Civic nationalism has finally been proven to be anything but civil.

Alex Salmond once said the most precious thing about the 2014 independence referendum was that no drop of blood was shed for the kind of choice people worldwide have given their lives for. He was not wrong, but it ignores the zero-sum toxicity which still pervades our national life. Scotland is still a country that belittles people by curtain-peeping tsk tsks if they voted a certain way.

Swinney's ambition to tackle Reform, and Europe's slow descent into far-right politics, is not wrong, but it will require a more candid discussion about nationalism's destructiveness than he might be ready for.