Rise of Reform means Scots are now so scunnered they want to set the world on fire

I UNDERSTAND the impulse to vote Reform. If your job is paying you peanuts and your town is full of ghost shops and your football team has been destroyed and your prospects are nil and not a single establishment party seems to have a plan or give a damn, then why wouldn’t you feel the urge to lash out at yourself and others? It’s the same impulse that prompts people to take to the streets with Molotov cocktails or creep out of their beds in the dead of the night and fell a centuries-old sycamore. They are acts born of frustration and battered self-esteem, and they provide a temporary release. But then you wake up and see that nothing has changed. Except now the last community centre on your estate has all its windows panned in, and there’s a vast emptiness where once there stood a tree. If the panic of SNP and Labour canvassers is anything to go by, the constituency of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse is teetering on the brink of just such self-immolation. In the by-election prompted by the death of Christina McKelvie, it now seems likely Reform will come second, and no longer inconceivable it could win, giving Holyrood its first Reform MSP. In a dilapidated street next to a shuttered off-licence, Nigel Farage’s gurning face leers down from a billboard that reads “Hamilton Needs Reform”. If the party does well, it won’t be down to his personality; polls and vox pops suggest most Scottish voters still consider him “an a***hole”. It will be because some people are so scunnered with the calcification of Scottish politics, they want to set the world on fire, while others are too scunnered to head to the polling booths and extinguish the blaze. This didn’t happen with Ukip. In 2016, Scotland seemed largely immune to the allure of British nationalism, rejecting its manifesto of xenophobia and backing Remain by a ratio of 3:2. For a significant number of people back then, the answer to Farage’s question: “Who is really running [your] country?” wasn’t Europe, but Westminster, while the anti-establishment party promising to cut them loose was the SNP.

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