How Labour's disastrous start is setting up a 2029 Scottish independence showdown

Nobody likes a clever clogs, and although I neither own wooden footwear nor am imbued with unusual powers of foresight, as far as the resurgence of support for independence is concerned, I told you so.

On more than one occasion in this column, I have observed that too many nationalists were unrealistically impatient about the pace at which the road to independence was being travelled, and the next big opportunity was at the 2029 general election if a Labour government imploded.

But keeping my feet firmly in the ground, I hadn’t foreseen such a disastrous start for the Starmer administration, or indeed the consistent performance of the Reform party without anything resembling a presence in Scotland, never mind a coherent programme for government. To paraphrase J Robert Oppenheimer, now Nigel Farage has become death, the destroyer of political worlds.

Keir Starmer's plans to bulldoze through housing and infrastructure construction ─ including the relentless march of wind turbines ─ may not go down well with voters (Picture: Chris Radburn) | PA

Reform finding its Scottish constituency

Whether it’s in opinion polling or council by-elections in wards with hugely different voting patterns ─ with the possible exception of ultra middle-class Colinton/Fairmilehead ─ Reform is regularly picking up 12 per cent of first preferences with little more than the TV presence of Nigel Farage, and occasionally deputy leader Richard Tice (who I’m assured has a somewhat strained relationship with his leader) to remind voters what the party stands for.

They claim to have some 6,000 members in Scotland, not far behind the Scottish Conservatives, but even with an armchair army whose activism is largely limited to spleen-venting at the 10 o’clock news, it’s enough to peel voters away from both the Scottish Conservatives and small ‘c’ conservative Labour voters ─ a clue is in new polling information showing 34 per cent of Scottish Labour voters support the two-child benefit cap ─ who would never countenance voting Tory. Ibrox and Tynecastle are full of them every weekend.

Reform is the political equivalent of Millwall, the gritty London Docklands football club whose supporters revel in their “nobody likes us, and we don’t care” reputation. Sure enough, the Dockers have strong Scottish roots, with players originally drawn from Scots working in a canned meat factory owned by an Aberdeen company supplying Victorian sailing ships.

Tory fortunes not so bleak

But if Reform has its sights firmly set on sinking the Conservative ship north and south of the Border, the latest poll showed signs of an upswing in Scottish Tory fortunes with the possibility of holding 19 seats at the 2026 Scottish elections. From the current 31 that would represent a disastrous collapse, but it’s not that long ago that the expectation was of a return to the rump of 15 inherited by Ruth Davidson in 2011, so new leader Russell Findlay can take some heart that maybe his “common sense” message is beginning to have some effect.

It presents the entirely new prospect of a right-of-centre bloc in Holyrood, with Reform seemingly on an undeviating track to secure 12 MSPs. It would at the very least preserve the strength of the alternative to the Liberal-Left consensus for which the Scottish Conservatives have been the sole standard bearers for so long, despite wide recognition that the impression of a genetically socialist Scotland given by repeated election returns over the past 50 years has not been a true reflection of social reality.

For the first time, Reform has given instinctively conservative working-class Scots an alternative without the baggage of the two big UK parties, the Lib Dems’ fey middle-class pretentions or the risk of independence with the SNP. Because there isn’t an establishment he’s not disrupting, it makes no difference that Nigel Farage is a central casting Home Counties Tory fresh from the golf club bar.

‘Westminster’s folly’

While confirming Reform’s position, last weekend’s Norstat poll puts independence support at 54 per cent, which feels very like the buyer’s remorse reaction which followed the 2014 independence referendum, but this time spurred on by Sir Keir Starmer’s miserable five months in charge, now compounded by scandals engulfing senior Labour figures in both Glasgow and Edinburgh councils.

Writing in the Herald this week, left-wing independence supporter Neil Mackay argued that unionists needed to grasp that the SNP’s lifeline was “Westminster’s folly and failure”, despite most unionists I know understanding that very well. This was precisely why I argued that the real test of the rejection of independence would follow Labour failure and the promise of a return to Conservative rule. What I hadn’t factored was the rise of Reform could mean Labour survival in England while contributing to the reversal of its revival in Scotland.

But independence supporters fail to accept that, when the chips are down, the hard arguments about cash and borders will always be deal breakers, and Farage the Destroyer also gives an alternative to those who vote SNP just to stick it up the UK establishment, but who would not vote against their own vested interests.

SNP’s abject failure on NHS

The more the SNP government falls further behind the UK in its areas of responsibility, the less likely it is that enough of the 54 per cent will go for broke, and it’s not without reason that SNP support in the same poll was 17 points behind support for independence.

It is, for example, beyond disgraceful that nearly 11,000 people have been waiting more than two years for NHS treatment in Scotland compared to just 113 in the whole of England, and it is indeed hard to fathom why a party responsible for that level of failure can still be endorsed by 37 per cent of the electorate, or should be considered in any way capable of running an entire independent country.

Labour supporters will hope the storm can be weathered and the worst is over, but with the ‘no more taxes’ pledge reliant on the economic growth which was supposed to be its priority, unions resistant to change, and policies like bulldozing through housing and infrastructure construction ─ including the relentless march of wind turbines while paying millions in constraint fees to already wealthy landowners and power giants ─ I wouldn’t bank on it.