Even as Reform threaten to overtake Scots Tories, we must always be pro-devolution party

There is a scene at the end of Steven Spielberg’s movie masterpiece Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the archaeologist Rene Belloq, Indiana Jones’ great enemy, after years of searching and multiple adventures, finally gets his hands on the treasured prize. He opens the Ark of the Covenant expecting to find the Ten Commandments, handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, but all it contains is sand.

An MSP friend from a rival party rather unfairly suggested to me last week that this would be the fate that awaited the eventual winner of the contest to be leader of the Scottish Conservatives. We will find out which of Russell Findlay, Meghan Gallacher or myself will be the victor on Friday. Whichever of us wins will have a massive challenge on our hands.

I entered the contest late without much real expectation of winning, it being clear from the outset that the party establishment had already decided that Russell should be the man to succeed Douglas Ross. However, I had so many MSP colleagues and party members asking me to stand that I felt that I had to put my name forward, to at least have a platform to set out my and their concerns about how the party has been organised, and the need for real change to face what lies ahead.

Nigel Farage, seen after winning the Clacton and Harwich constituency in July's general election, could lead his Reform UK party into third place in Scottish politics (Picture: Dan Kitwood) | Getty Images

Increasingly crowded political market

The fact that party membership in Scotland has dropped below 7,000 should be a wake-up call to whoever takes over as a leader. We cannot expect to attract new members if they don’t feel that their views count, which is why internal reform is essential if we are to have the new generation of activists and candidates for local and national elections that we desperately need.

The contest has allowed us to have that debate, and has shone a light into some dark places which needed the antiseptic of exposure, not least the treatment of women in the party. There is much that our new leader will need to put right.

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But those are just the internal issues. The greater challenge will be the political one – how to revive the fortunes of the Scottish Conservatives in what is an increasingly congested Scottish political marketplace.

We have now seen across a series of opinion polls that our vote share in Scotland stands at around the 12 per cent mark, which means we have lost roughly half the voters who supported us at the last Holyrood election in 2021. Translated into seats, that would mean of our current 31 MSPs, we could see as many as half not be returned in 2026.

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Some of the voters we had switched to Labour, perhaps as an anti-SNP tactical move although, given the dismal start Keir Starmer and his team have made in government, they may be reconsidering that move. More worryingly for us, some will have gone to Reform, who are now polling in double figures in Scotland in some surveys. One poll last week even suggested that they would end up with more Holyrood seats than the Conservatives in 2026, pushing us into fourth place.

There was a certain inevitability that what is essentially a protest party would make a breakthrough eventually under the proportional voting system we have for Holyrood, just as we saw with the Scottish Socialist Party in 2007. Today we have widespread disillusionment with mainstream parties seemingly out of touch with public. Even Labour’s general election landslide was delivered with just 34 per cent of the vote, indicating a lack of public enthusiasm for the Starmer project.

There has always been a small but significant section of the voting public sceptical about devolution. If these people have voted at all in Holyrood elections, it has probably been for the Scottish Conservatives. But if Reform run on an ‘abolish Holyrood’ ticket, they may find that there are enough sympathetic voters to grant them a clutch of seats in the very institution that they despise.

Mainstream Scottish opinion

This a real challenge for the new Scottish Conservative leader. There have been attempts in the past in the form of parties such as the Scottish People’s Alliance and George Galloway’s All for Unity to create a pro-Union alternative on the political right, but these have come to nothing. Reform, with a national profile and a credible base to build on, may prove a tougher opponent.

Tempting as it may be to some, it would be counter-productive and potentially disastrous for us to chase Reform votes by leaning in to anti-devolution sentiment, alienating us from mainstream Scottish opinion. Our approach instead should be to talk about the better use of Holyrood powers, for example lowering the tax burden to drive economic growth.

It is not just the Conservatives who should be nervous about Reform. Having drawn off large numbers of disillusioned former Conservative supporters, Nigel Farage is now training his sights on Labour. His message on net zero and the loss of jobs as a result of the green transition is likely to attract the interest of union members sceptical about rapid deindustrialisation in the name of saving the planet.

Of course, the whole thing could implode very quickly in a series of scandals, much like UKIP, which is why Farage was so keen at the Reform party conference at the weekend to talk about the need to ‘professionalise’ the party organisation and drive out extremists. But, at least so far, it appears that the UK is not uniquely immune to the rise of the populist right we have seen right across the Western world.

Responding to all this is one of the many burdens facing new Conservative leaders in Scotland and across the UK. The search for the Holy Grail of electoral success will be our next adventure, and one which will have to deliver success.

Murdo Fraser is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife