Reform has launched its Scottish manifesto, but we should be talking about how we got here, says Mark Smith

I was interested to hear Malcolm Offord, leader of Reform in Scotland, saying the other day that he’d lost friends since joining the party. This does not surprise me. In a recent poll by the Scottish Election Study, people were asked which party they most disliked and 41% said Reform, more than for the Conservatives. So there is something worse than a Tory! At the same time of course, Reform has been polling second for Holyrood, so there’s going to be crossover, it’s going to affect friendships and relationships and maybe even end a few.

It also represents quite a big change in Scotland, because for 50 years the traditional baddie was the Tories, and yet anti-Tory Scots and Tory-voting Scots have generally been able to get along fine, making friendships and maybe even kissing each other now and again. Personally, I have friends on the left and the right and the worst I can say is it’s made for the odd ill-tempered conversation but no more than that. As for the idea of cutting someone off because of their political views, it wouldn’t even cross my mind, even in the most extreme cases such as a friend voting Liberal Democrat.

But Reform is different, or seems to be, which means either that the party is objectively worse, more right-wing and more racist than the Tories, or the way some of us see some right-wing views has changed and we’re more likely to label them extremist or even Nazi and cast out or distance friends who support them. Whatever the explanation – and it might be a bit of both – supporting Reform does attract a particular stigma or shame for some people in Scotland (especially among the middle class) even as hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland prepare to support Reform at the election.

You may think this isn’t a problem and supporting Reform deserves the stigma and that’s fine, but I’d also like to tell you about a conversation with Malcolm Offord I sat in on the other day ahead of their manifesto launch this week because I think it helps to show how we got here, with Reform in the ascendance. It might also provide a lesson or two for the other parties about some of the issues that worry many Scots and drive some of them into the arms of Reform.

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It doesn’t help Reform’s case that Lord Offord, like a lot of Unionist Brexiteers, apparently fails to see the contradictions at the heart of his arguments even as he points them out in other people’s. At one point in his conversation with the Institute for Government, he criticised the SNP for loving the EU single market and hating the UK single market, but Offord doesn’t appear to see the similar contradiction in the Brexit position of loving the UK single market and hating the EU single market. Both positions – the Brexiteers’ and the SNP’s – are economically incoherent; the only sound position is for Scotland to be part of both the UK and the EU.

On other issues, Offord and Reform are on more solid ground, which helps explain the splintered, fractious nature of Scottish politics as well as Reform’s relative success. Lord Offord pointed out, for example, that public spending in Scotland is 55% of GDP, 10% higher than the UK figure and 10% higher than it was when devolution got going in the late 90s. That is a massive expansion of the state, at great cost, and Lord Offord says part of his solution would be to cut quangos, of which there are 133 in Scotland costing upwards of £6.6billion a year.

I know what you’re going to say: you’ve heard it all before, all the ‘bonfire of the quangos’ stuff with no one ever able to find the matches. But cutting the size of the state, including quangos, is mainstream, and necessary, stuff. The Herald revealed this week that Scotland’s public bodies paid out more than £3.2m in golden-goodbye deals last year, mostly to government bodies and quangos, and the most concerning bit was that £2.13m of it was over and above what was contractually due. It shouldn’t be controversial to want to sort the problem and it isn’t: a big part of Anas Sarwar’s pitch for the election has been to cut the number of quangos and government bodies by a third.

It’s on immigration that things get trickier, and may risk a friendship or two, but the mood has undoubtedly shifted. It’s true that for a long time, Scottish public opinion was slightly (but only slightly) more positive towards immigration than England’s, but as Lord Offord pointed out to the Institute of Government, the Scottish public now rate immigration as a top-three issue of concern, driven largely by the unfolding situation in Glasgow. The council there has declared an emergency due to the pressure on its homelessness services, with refugees making up nearly four in ten homelessness applications and the bill expected to be around £66m in 2026, and rising. It’s a big reason council tax is increasing, and it’s a big reason public services are under strain, and people are talking about it and are worried about it, and for the avoidance of doubt, I am one of the people talking about it and worrying about it.

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Lord Offord’s take on the situation is that both the Tories and the SNP are to blame, the Tories because of the ‘Boris wave’ of immigration and the SNP because it abolished the ‘local connection’ rule which means Glasgow council has a legal responsibility to house homeless refugees, but who’s exactly to blame is not the main point. John Swinney said this week the rise of Reform was partly because of racism – he’s right, it is – but it’s also because Reform were acknowledging and discussing the concerns some people have about immigration and its effect on society, services, public spending and taxation when other parties weren’t. It’s one of the reasons Reform is where it is: potentially on the brink of being the main opposition at Holyrood.

Whatever the end result in the election, the squeamishness and dislike of Reform remains (as demonstrated by the figures from the Scottish Election Study) and it’s understandable. At the launch of the Scottish manifesto on Thursday, Reform’s chairman David Bull talked about the ‘invasion’ of Britain by refugees and there’s a lot of that kind of talk. So many of Reform’s senior people are profoundly unlikeable as well, such as the ghastly Suella Braverman and the ghastlier (although there’s not much in it) Robert Jenrick. At some point, you’ve got to ask what it is about a party that attracts people of that sort.

However, I think, despite all that – the ghastly people with nasty vocabularies – there’s still a conversation we need to have about Reform if we’re to avoid their continued ascendancy and it’s a conversation about how to make the discussion of immigration (and welfare) more normal, acceptable and mainstream. For a long time, it was difficult to have the discussion because of the risk of being called racist or stupid, or losing a friend or two, but the lack of discussion created an atmosphere Reform could exploit.

Which leaves only one way forward: more of us need to discuss our concerns openly and not rush to recrimination. And that includes the mainstream parties. Acknowledge the problem, explain what you’re going to do about it, then do it.

Mark Smith is a Herald columnist and feature writer

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