Almost 13 years ago, at a press briefing to launch Ukip’s first Scottish byelection campaign, Nigel Farage was run out of Edinburgh by jeering protesters. Back then, Ukip’s support was running at nearly 25% in the English local elections, and less than 1% in Scotland.
On Saturday, Farage will venture back across the border to host a sold-out Reform UK campaign event in Falkirk, a town which has recently seen angry demonstrations outside a hotel hosting asylum seekers.
While anti-racism protesters will no doubt turn out in force again, support for Farage’s new party has risen dramatically. Polls suggest the SNP will still win the most seats in May’s Scottish parliamentary election, but Reform UK, benefiting from the country’s hybrid PR system, could come second.
This turnaround is a hammer-blow to the self-image of a country that has sold itself as uniquely welcoming to migrants, but now finds sections of its population are as susceptible to anti-immigration rabble-rousing as anywhere else.
Back in 2013, when Farage was forced to escape in a police riot van, the pro-independence campaign was in full flow. Central to its vision was the idea that Scottish nationalism was a civic affair, of which anyone who committed to the country could consider themselves a part.
Not only would Scotland embrace its incomers, it would protect them from UK hostility. The “Glasgow Girls” who successfully campaigned against the deportation of their Kosovan classmate in 2005, and the locals who surrounded a Home Office enforcement van to demand the release of two Indian men in the multicultural Glasgow suburb of Pollokshields in 2021, became totems of the country’s moral superiority.
The Falkirk protests are a photo negative ofthis fightback. In Pollokshields East, locals chanted: “These are our neighbours, let them go”; in Falkirk, they have been shouting “Send them home” and talking about “ancestral homelands” – the definition of blood-and-soil nationalism. The town, mostly white, heavily working class, has also seen saltires put up on lamp posts as part of the Raise the Colours campaign. Unlike in England, where St George’s crosses have long been co-opted as an expression of xenophobia, the saltire was not previously associated with anti-immigration sentiment.
Other places have been affected, too. In Inverness, where asylum seekers may soon be housed in a former barracks, primary school teachers were harassed over plans to stage a Christmas play touching on the plight of Syrian refugees. Placards were brandished outside a Glasgow primary that holds English lessons for the asylum-seeker mothers of a handful of pupils.
It is difficult to discern how much of what is happening is driven by local communities and how much by hard-right infiltrators. That there has been a degree of orchestration is clear from the repetition of Reform UK tropes: the spurious claim that asylum seekers are “illegal”, or that Muslim men pose a disproportionate threat to women and children.
But to exploit resentment, there has to be resentment to exploit. Some bad things have happened, some unfortunate decisions have been made. Earlier this year, one of the men – and it is only men – at the Falkirk hotel was convicted of raping a teenage girl. Last week, another appeared in court charged with sexual assault. All ethnicities have their predators, but dropping foreign males en masse into a community with little history of diversity was bound to cause a disquiet easily traded on by bad-faith actors.
As the first minister John Swinney has pointed out, that decision was down to previous UK Tory governments. Ditto the backlog in asylum cases, which Labour is now trying to address by processing them in batches. Labour’s efforts are having a knock-on effect because, once asylum seekers have leave to remain, the responsibility for housing them transfers to Scotland’s local authorities, 13 of which have declared housing emergencies.
The SNP is less keen to take responsibility for the cuts in its affordable housing budget that fuelled this accommodation crisis, or for legislation which abolished the concept of “priority need”, obliging Scottish councils to house everyone who is unintentionally homeless. Scotland also, in effect, unilaterally scrapped the “local connection” test, which means those who are homeless can seek help in any local authority area. This has encouraged single male asylum seekers in England to head north. Such policies are progressive, but if you make changes that are designed to increase demand, you have to resource them properly – or something is going to blow.
Glasgow, Scotland’s primary dispersal city, is so overwhelmed that it has, repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, asked the Home Office to stop sending asylum seekers until it can bring the situation under control. This is no reflection on the asylum seekers themselves. But Farage knows how to turn such tensions to his advantage. In advance of his visit, he seized on a report suggesting almost a third of Glasgow schoolchildren speak English as an additional language as evidence of the “cultural smashing” of the city.
Such stunts leave Swinney in a tight spot. On the one hand, he wants to present himself as the anti-Farage candidate, a positioning that chimes with his party’s core supporters. On the other, every time he or Keir Starmer brands Farage “racist” or “toxic”, they amplify his message to voters who know exactly what Farage is and admire him for it.
The SNP has also tried to counter Reform UK’s narrative, explaining again and again that asylum seekers are not “illegal”, that the small boats are the only route into the UK, that multilingualism is an asset not a curse, that economic migrants are net contributors, and that Scotland, with its ageing population, relies on foreign workers.
Yet as Farage prepared for an event he has chosen to stage in Scotland’s most volatile town, at a venue so well-publicised it’s a lightning rod for trouble, news broke that Reform UK had received a record £9m donation from a cryptocurrency investor. You can’t help wondering what chance any mainstream party has in the face of all that opportunism, disinformation and filthy lucre.
Dani Garavelli is a freelance journalist and columnist for the Herald
