Reform beyond borders

The challenges and opportunities in Wales and Scotland

Nigel Farage's visit to Scotland on Monday wasn't the smoothest. He was met with protests and jeers, as well as criticism around his remarks about Anas Sanwar. The Reform leader's presence in Aberdeen does, however, point to something important – the growing presence of Reform in both Scotland and Wales. In both places, the insurgent party is eyeing success in next year's elections. If they achieve it, it will be a significant extension of their presence and a real advancement of Reform's agenda to become a nationwide force in politics. This presents both challenges and opportunities for the party.

In both Wales and Scotland, there are things for Reform to exploit. The voting systems in the devolved parties offer a helping hand to upstart parties. So, too, do the politics. Like in England, Reform is well-placed to seize on a sense of dissatisfaction with the major parties. Yet success across all three nations is something that has so far eluded Farage. His previous outfits have failed to make the same dent as they did in England – and his politics is not necessarily well suited to the other areas, especially Scotland.

For Reform to capitalise on this, it will take deft political management. Their agenda has often been rooted in forms of English nationalism. That will have to soften. They will have to find ways to navigate the conflicting interests and politics of all three nations, as well as how these interests intersect with one another. The party will also need to understand how its populism can be shaped to local contexts. Among the mainstream parties, there is the opposite issue: thinking about how attacks on Reform can dislodge them not just in Westminster but also in Cardiff and Edinburgh.

Really, Reform is already on its way to becoming a major force in all three nations of Great Britain. Its success in May cemented its place in English local government. Polling suggests a similar outcome in Wales and Scotland next year. Recent polling for the Senedd election indicates a startling rise in support for Reform – currently in second place behind Plaid Cymru, garnering around a quarter of the votes. This is primarily predicated on a collapse of the Labour and Tory votes.

In Scotland, the party is eyeing up this week's Hamilton by-election, the reason for Farage's journey north. They also seem to be polling well ahead of next year's Scottish Parliament elections. A recent survey put them in second behind the SNP on overall voting intention and tied for second on the constituency votes. Here, again, they are sucking up votes from both Tory and Labour. Should this success be maintained, by this time next year, Reform could be a major political force in both of the devolved nations (as well as holding another chunk of English councils).

This would be unprecedented for a Faragist outlet. UKIP never really evolved beyond being an English party. In Wales, it had some success, but even at its highest, it only managed fourth place and 7 Assembly seats. In Scotland, it barely made a dent. In 2011, UKIP managed fewer votes than the Scottish Senior Citizens Party. Five years later, they only managed to contest the regional ballot and came in sixth, barely picking up 2% of the vote. In 2019, the Brexit Party performed well in Wales but still failed to make a significant impact north of the border.

On a superficial level, this makes sense. Both Wales and Scotland have long been perceived as leaning left. The Tories have struggled in the former, except in 2019, and have been almost vanquished from the latter, at least in Westminster elections. They are not instinctively places where a party coming even further from the right should flourish. However, the rise of Reform is about more than the right, as they move towards becoming something of a post-ideological party.

Many parts of Wales resemble the Labour heartlands of England, where Reform is also looking to challenge. Deindustrialised areas which have never quite recovered – areas with high benefit dependency, shuttered town centres and a sense of neglect. These places swung behind Brexit. Some of them defected to the Tories in 2019, but others have remained Labour despite growing disillusionment with the party and politics in general. These are places where you'd expect to find receptivity to the Reform message that something is broken and that only radical change can fix it.

The surge in Scotland is more surprising at first glance. But if you think of the mood of much of Scottish politics, it leans into many of the ideas that Reform can also leverage. The SNP is, in many ways, a left-wing populist party. It shows a narrative of grievance – of pain inflicted by Westminster and of disillusionment. That narrative echoes Reform's indignation of out-of-touch elites and neglected heartlands. Indeed, Reform's position might start to resemble a Unionist mirror of the SNP's case to leave – that Westminster has let Scotland down in the same way that left-behind parts of England and Wales have. Furthermore, for all the talk of Scotland’s progressive politics and majority, there remains a sizeable chunk of the population that don’t share those values and want to vote against them.

Capitalising on this for Reform still presents a challenge. It intensifies the difficulty between appealing to both left-behind areas and ex-Tory voters who want to slash spending and cut the state. These are areas which tend to be net recipients and where public spending is seen as a positive. It also adds another challenge, balancing the interests of a broadly English nationalist base with an appeal across the nations.

Historically, Farage has been a voice of this interest. Brexit was essentially an English project, pursued with little interest in the rest of the nation – especially Scotland. Farage has previously backed an English Parliament and has railed against the Barnett Formula. Even this week, he was campaigning in Scotland by saying less money should go there. That is, in political terms, bold – though perhaps tempered by his anti-Net Zero support for Scotland's oil and gas sectors. To stand a serious chance as a national party, Reform has to start thinking nationally rather than acting as an English party that happens to have a foothold elsewhere.

There are real challenges here for the party. The first comes from the risk of straining their message. The limiting issue of posing as the heirs to Thatcherism is even more significant in Wales and Scotland. If Reform starts to look simply like repackaged Conservativism, it will lose traction in those areas that have historically rejected it. Entwined with this is the challenge between their ideology and their political positioning. If Reform wants to be a low-spending, low-tax, anti-devolution party, it should limit its appeal in areas where even the disillusioned, anti-establishment don't see things this way.

For the mainstream parties, there's a bigger issue. In each of the devolved nations, there is a chance for Reform to squeeze the pro-Union vote. In both Wales and Scotland, pro-independence parties are set to top the polls next year. If this happens with Reform in the second, there will be a real push to consolidate the pro-UK vote. For those on the right, the temptation to move will probably be greater – but we are already seeing Labour votes go to Reform, too. Should they dominate pro-Union politics, the pressure to consolidate will become even greater.

It is, of course, early days, and there is a year of change until these elections take place. If these results are maintained, however, it will be a major boon for Reform. Forming the opposition in two devolved nations will make them look like a significant political force. It will also damage the reputation of both Labour and the Conservatives. For the latter, it will squeeze the idea that they are a truly national party, with Reform taking their place on the right. For the former, it will disrupt their claim to be the leading anti-independence bloc in each devolved nation.

What happens next will hinge on Reform’s ability to adapt. Farage’s party cannot simply project English grievances onto Welsh and Scottish landscapes and expect them to resonate the same way. If Reform is to evolve into a genuine nationwide force, it must learn to speak in the languages of local discontent, plural and often contradictory. That means not just tapping into frustration but listening to its many dialects. It also means the major parties will need to decide whether to confront Reform’s rise with clarity and conviction or allow the populist tide to wash further inland. For now, the momentum is with Farage. Yet he has never managed it before. Whether it becomes something more lasting depends on how deftly he can navigate the fractured, fractious politics of Britain’s nations. If the Reform works well, this time next year, they could put themselves in an exceptionally strong position.