2 June 2025, 07:14 | Updated: 2 June 2025, 07:19

By Gina Davidson

In three days time, the voters of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse will go to the polling stations, and if the anxiety of those in the SNP and Labour, and indeed the opinion polls are to be believed, this by-election could signal a Scottish breakthrough for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.

You may raise an eyebrow. Reform, after all, are seen as a quintessentially English party, with a focus on immigration, a problem which has not plagued Scottish politics in the same way as it has south of the border. But that would be to underestimate the scunnered factor.

Folk in Scotland, as much as they are elsewhere in the UK, are disaffected with politics and politicians. Time I’ve spent in Hamilton speaking to potential voters has seen the vast majority sending all politicians to hell in a handcart because “nothing ever changes” while others were indeed looking to Reform as a last gasp before they give up on democracy completely.

Scotland’s politicians are not unaware of the growing anger in them and the desperate casting around by voters for a way to send a two-finger salute through the ballot box. What better than to vote for the party that everyone in the political class says you should hate?

It’s not for nothing then that John Swinney held a civic summit to discuss how to tackle the far right - a classification he gives to Nigel Farage’s party - in the last month.

That was attended by all parties bar the Tories and, of course, Reform themselves. And it’s not for nothing that a Reform advert, which targeted Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s Pakistani heritage, was complained about in the most vociferous terms not just by his party, but also the Greens and indeed the SNP who described it as “race-baiting”.

Yet it’s also not for nothing that Scots have been telling pollsters that they........

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