REFORM UK’s wins in England have been among the major stories of this election – but the party’s impact in Scotland has gone largely unrecognised.
The party secured four seats in England, with most of its biggest names – party leader Nigel Farage, chairman Richard Tice and former Tory MP Lee Anderson – all winning in their respective constituencies.
Despite gaining significantly less traction in Scotland – and failing to secure any parliamentary seats – Reform still won around a 7% share of the vote north of the Border, half the UK-wide total of 14%.
Dumfries and Galloway, one of the last constituencies to be announced, gave the anti-immigration party a late boost, securing their highest percentage of the vote share in Scotland at 9.4% (4313 votes).
Nigel Farage’s party saw the greatest success in areas traditionally dominated by Unionist voters such as those around Borders and the north-eastern Aberdeenshire region.
Aberdeen North, for example, was held by the SNP’s Kirsty Blackman after a split in the Unionist vote with Reform, Labour, the Conservatives and the LibDems securing a total of 60.2% of the vote share, to just 34.5% for the SNP. Nigel Farage’s party had one of their strongest Scottish results there, winning 9% of votes.
The party largely failed to replicate their results in England, where many constituencies saw the right-wing party take second place to Labour, far exceeding the Conservatives results.
The change reflects a stronger shift away from the Conservatives south of the Border, especially in constituencies which were already held by the Labour party, in which Reform effectively took the place of the now-governing party’s main opposition.
However the Scottish wing of the party did pick up a fairly consistent proportion of the vote across the country’s 57 constituencies, with its results varying between around 4% and 9% in most.
The success of the party in the UK as a whole may lead to increased demand for a change in the Westminster voting system, with the Green Party of England and Wales also securing four seats and the LibDems earning 71 – all three of which support proportional representation.
And while Labour have won 412 seats at Westminster, the party scooped up 34% of the popular vote, just a 1.6 percentage point increase from the party's share in 2019 and a six percentage point fall from the 40% won under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.
The lower overall turnout means that despite increasing Labour's vote share, the party secured just 9,686,329 overall votes in 2024, compared with a total of 10,295,912 under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 - a result deemed a catastrophic failure by many.
There is therefore a significantly greater disparity between the size of the victory for the governing party and their share of the popular vote than in previous elections.
