Farage throws a wildcard into Scotland’s elections

SCOTLAND — Deep in the polling doldrums, Scottish Labour has a plot to sneak into power regardless. 

Once the favorite to topple a tired Scottish National Party that’s run Scotland’s devolved government for almost two decades, Scottish Labour now polls in either a distant second or third place in most projections. A fifth-consecutive SNP victory seems inevitable at nationwide elections on May 7.

Yet officials across the parties now whisper in private that polls could be overstating the SNP’s heft. They say low turnout may produce unpredictable results. 

And they caution that it is not yet clear who exactly the once-unthinkable rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in Scotland will benefit.

“All it takes is a couple of points swing towards us and [a Scottish Labour government] is within reach,” a senior Scottish Labour official, granted anonymity to discuss strategy, said. “But on the other hand a few points toward the SNP, and they win a majority.”

Urban warfare

At the center of Labour’s hopes is a clutch of constituencies across Scotland’s central belt — the mostly urban bit of Scotland where the majority of its population lives.

In these seats — which are typically either in the two biggest cities, Glasgow or Edinburgh, or in the commuter towns outside them — Scottish Labour believes an extremely narrow path to victory exists by convincing Scots to hold their noses and vote for the party most likely to oust the SNP.

“Frankly, we’re spending a lot of money on it,” the official quoted above said of the central belt push. “It’s about convincing anyone who doesn’t like the SNP — most of the country — that we are still the best way of getting them out.”

If Labour can rally anti-SNP voters behind them in a set of key constituencies, the theory goes, then the SNP is in danger of being well off the critical 65-seat mark it needs for a majority in the Scottish parliament. 

At this point a second vote — of members of the Scottish parliament to elect a first minister — becomes crucial. The SNP has tended to rely on the votes of the pro-independence Scottish Greens to elect its first ministers. But in a situation where the number of Green and SNP lawmakers does not equal 65, there is then a route to Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar becoming first minister.

That would rely on the votes of other parties opposed to the SNP’s long-promised push to break up the United Kingdom and make Scotland an independent nation.

And this has put Scottish Labour, a center-left outfit, in the extraordinary position of having to deny they would court votes from newly-elected members of the Scottish Parliament representing Farage’s right-wing Reform UK to get Sarwar into office. There are vanishingly few realistic scenarios where Sarwar could end up as first minister without the votes of Reform MSPs.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who might benefit from the electoral unpredictability caused by Reform, gestures towards SNP leader John Swinney during the Scottish party leaders Channel 4 debate in Glasgow on April 14. | Robert Perry/PA Images via Getty Images

Interlopers

The SNP remain firm favorites in this race. 

Numerous polls point to them not just being on course to win, but headed for an overall majority on their own.

Leader John Swinney has stemmed the bleeding of its support that occurred during the chaotic and short-lived reign of previous SNP Leader Humza Yousaf.

Yet there is little evidence he has added much support for a near two-decade old government which is viewed unfavorably by a majority of Scots. 

This gives opposition figures hope, as did another poll Thursday afternoon placing the SNP on a vote share which would represent its lowest at a Holyrood election since 2007.

“The SNP are not markedly more popular today than they were in July 2024,” pollster John Curtice noted this week, referring to the 2024 general election in which the SNP was comfortably defeated by Labour. “But the vote for Labour in Scotland has collapsed in much the same way as it has done across Britain as a whole.” 

Labour’s dire fortunes at Westminster — with Prime Minister Keir Starmer tanking in the polls two years after winning a landslide — weigh heavy on Sarwar, who called on Starmer to quit in February.

The Scottish Labour leader insisted in an interview with POLITICO after launching his manifesto that the decision had been “politically liberating” for him despite being “difficult” on a personal level. 

Sarwar says he reached a “tipping point” where “week after week” he was trying to make inroads on bread-and-butter issues like a scandal-hit Glasgow hospital, but was instead “getting asked questions about the judgements made somewhere else.”

Yet Sarwar — who once campaigned on his close relationship with Starmer — has seen no uptick in his own favorability ratings since he called on his old ally to quit.

And now Farage’s outfit is messing with the calculus, potentially splitting the vote among parties like Labour who oppose the SNP’s drive for Scottish independence. “Reform has fragmented the unionist vote,” Curtice said. “The rise of Reform has created a pathway for John Swinney’s party to continue to dominate the Holyrood parliament.” 

Interlopers 

A half-hour TV debate on Channel 4 Tuesday between the leaders of Scotland’s six parties wasn’t expected to create major news. It did. 

Reform UK Scotland leader Malcolm Offord, whose claims about Sarwar highlighted the Channel 4 debate, and Scottish Greens co-leader Gilliam Mackay during the April 14 event in Glasgow. | Robert Perry/PA Images via Getty Images

Amid questioning from Sarwar about Reform’s migration policies, Malcom Offord — Reform’s man in Scotland — claimed that Sarwar came “bouncing up” to him at the start of the campaign and said that the parties should work together to defeat the SNP.

Sarwar denied the claim. But already the SNP spin team had leapt into action to amplify the row. 

As well as amplifying the possibility of Labour relying on Reform votes to end up in Bute House, the seat of Scotland’s government, the intervention was also a boon to Swinney — who has long tried to use the difference in Farage’s popularity north and south of the border as a driver for his goal of independence.

“The best way to deal with that particular issue is to elect a majority of SNP MSPs because that will lock Reform out of our politics,” Swinney told POLITICO Thursday, when asked at his manifesto launch if he was concerned by the potential for Reform votes to elect Sarwar as first minister and deprive him of power.

Reform’s rise, with the party set to pick up at least a dozen MSPs via the proportional list vote on current polling, looks set to hurt Labour and the Scottish Conservatives the most, according to Curtice. 

Those on the other side of the debate meanwhile believe Farage could motivate their voters to fight harder. “Certainly some of the new members in my branch have said to me: I’ve voted Green for a for a long time … but actually I really feel the motivation to actually do something at the moment,” Greens co-leader Gillian Mackay said in an interview with POLITICO. 

“It’s fair to say that the rise of the far-right,” — a label Reform rejects — “will motivate people in the opposite direction,” Mackay added. She predicted her party will win 13 seats on May 7. 

“We’ll either do much better than expected and come close to power or have a shocker as the Nats win a majority,” a Scottish Labour candidate said. “I can’t see much of a middle ground.”