Much can change in a year, but the Larkhall, Hamilton and Stonehouse by-election has offered a glimpse of the political terrain leading into 2026. One story looks set to dominate the next phase of Scottish politics: the rise of Reform UK and its prospects in the Holyrood elections.
Scottish Labour’s campaign has been nothing short of shambolic. For most of the contest, their candidate was conspicuously absent—avoiding hustings and media interviews—while anger at Starmer’s government appeared to simmer across the constituency. Notably, just days after Angela Rayner abandoned a visit amid Palestine solidarity protests, Starmer himself opted not to show face, despite delivering a speech at a nearby Glasgow arms factory only days before the vote.
The Conservatives, though less chaotic, were no more compelling. Their campaign was weak, flat, and entirely forgettable—mirroring the party’s state of terminal decline at the UK level.
Despite this, it was the SNP who appeared to recover some ground. Though roundly punished at last year’s general election—including Labour’s capture of the overlapping Hamilton and Clyde Valley seat—buoyed no doubt by Labour’s national failures, the party has also eagerly seized on the emergence of Reform as a means to reframe the political stakes. Farage has handed them a campaign gift: a ready-made “Stop Reform” narrative. It now sits at the centre of their electoral pitch—and appears, at least in part, to be working.
Reform’s own campaign, meanwhile, was designed to project momentum. Farage’s visit to Scotland was accompanied by new defections: Duncan Massey, a former Conservative councillor, joined two other Scottish Tory defectors earlier this year, along with Jamie McGuire—a 25-year-old ex-Labour councillor, former chair of the Glasgow University Labour Club, and aspiring career politician. The campaign’s visibility, coupled with its growing media profile, has begun to stir real panic—not only within the political centre, but across sections of the left.
To meet the challenge Reform presents, it’s essential to have a clearer understanding of what the party actually represents. Undeniably, Reform’s political platform is a racist one—scapegoating migrants and falsely blaming immigration for the UK’s economic crisis. Yet while the party drags the political centre further to the right, Farage has consciously distanced it from the most openly extreme elements of the far right, particularly the thuggish entho-nationalist fringes. He’s signalled this by promoting ethnic minority candidates and elevating figures like party chairman Zia Yusuf, a second-generation migrant and British Muslim. Notably, Rupert Lowe—a Reform MP who tacitly backed Tommy Robinson and called for mass deportations—was expelled for precisely those positions.
This reflects a different strategy to that of the BNP, the electoral successor to the National Front, which once built street-fighting squads and harboured ideals of fascist insurrection. Reform is different. Economically, the party tells its own story. Despite some motions to working class interests—supporting steel nationalisation or scrapping the two-child benefit cap—these are outliers. Its central programme is Thatcherite to the bone: tax cuts, a shrunken state, deregulation, and turbocharged competition. In this sense, Starmer’s comparison of Farage to Liz Truss isn’t far off the mark. In truth, Reform is a sharper expression of a growing current within the establishment, whose response to Britain’s long stagnation is to double down on neoliberalism. It’s no coincidence that Farage’s recruits come largely from the Tory party—not the English Defence League.
Still, Reform has made inroads among sections of the working class, including among some former Labour voters in “Red Wall” areas. It gains traction not only through its anti-migrant rhetoric, but by offering a narrative that explains economic decline—however falsely—as the result of immigration. Yet polling consistently shows that Reform’s support is driven less by ideology than by anger at the political mainstream: the Tories, Labour and, in Scotland, the SNP—all complicit in decades of social and economic decay.
These contradictions matter—and the left should expose them. For all its talk of working-class representation and anti-establishment defiance, Reform offers neither. That argument can and should be advanced by the left.
At the same time, it’s important to be clear: Reform UK is not a fascist, or even neo-fascist, organisation. Acknowledging this does not reduce the threat posed by the racism it is helping to mainstream. But it does carry strategic implications—both for immediate tactics and for long-term strategy.
One key mistake would be to simply transpose anti-fascist strategies developed in a different era onto today’s challenge. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Anti-Nazi League successfully confronted the National Front by exposing its fascist core through street opposition—isolating hardliners and deterring soft supporters. But this method doesn’t translate to the Reform moment. Its core is qualitatively different and requires a different strategic approach.
Swapping the charge of “fascism” for “racism” isn’t a fix either. The world cannot be neatly divided into racists and non-racists. Racism is systemic—propagated from above and driven downwards into society by the operations of the state. While anti-migrant rhetoric is central to Reform’s message, many of its supporters are motivated by the very issues that concern the left: collapsing public services, rampant job insecurity, and the long-term erosion of living standards. The task is to engage with these contradictions—to win arguments, not write people off. There is real scope to build solidarity grounded in shared material interests.
The electoral context matters here, too. As parties launch campaigns against Reform, it becomes harder for the left to maintain a distinct, independent stance. We risk becoming indistinguishable from the establishment forces—those same forces whose failures are fuelling Reform’s rise. Worse still, opposition to Farage from the liberal centre offers little more than a restatement of the status quo. Even if this manages to siphon off some Reform voters, who benefits? Likely the SNP—or other mainstream parties—especially in the absence of a credible left alternative.
Scotland presents particular challenges in this respect. In England, both Labour and the Tories have lurched rightward, creating space for a radical alternative. In Scotland, the SNP has sought to occupy the centre-left, offering a more obviously progressive front compared to its Westminster rivals.
This poses a dilemma. If opposition to Reform becomes the left’s dominant message, Swinney’s line during the Hamilton by-election—that voters worried about Reform would be “safest” backing the SNP—holds weight. Why would left-leaning voters gamble on an outsider campaign when an established party seems better placed to stop Farage’s advance? While any SNP recovery in 2026 is likely to be short-lived, we must think beyond the next election.
More fundamentally, opposition to Reform alone is not a sufficient basis for building a radical left alternative—whether in Scotland, England, or as a UK-wide project. Here, the recent wave of independent victories in England offers instructive lessons. Neither the councillors elected in Preston, nor the five independent MPs who broke through at the general election, ran primarily on fear of the far right—or even solely on socialist manifestos. Though socialist policies featured prominently in many campaigns, they gained traction by drawing strength from something larger.
That something was the Palestine solidarity movement. It was this movement that gave political momentum to these campaigns. Not ends in themselves—they were expressions of a deeper insurgency. The breadth and depth of Palestine solidarity in Britain has been extraordinary, drawing hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—onto the streets, into campuses, workplaces, and exploding into the cultural sphere. It has reshaped public attitudes toward British foreign policy, particularly on Israel and the wider Middle East. Most importantly, it has repeatedly confronted the British state: resisting censorship, defying protest bans, enduring mass arrests, and still breaking through—at one point even forcing the resignation of a Home Secretary.
This is what gave the independent MPs credibility: their visible connection to a movement capable of challenging the establishment. This should be an important lesson central to any challenge from the left.
Reform may be rising in the polls—but it is also deeply vulnerable. As it seeks to replace the Conservative Party, it offers no solutions to the crisis of British capital—only a harder, meaner version of the same. Its working-class support is real, but volatile—fuelled more by disillusionment than deep ideological loyalty. That volatility is a weakness. On both counts, Reform is susceptible to genuinely insurgent forces. In fact, the rise of Reform reflects a wider political vacuum. To rise to the challenge of filling it, the left must go beyond opposing Reform. It must begin the process of offering a serious anti-establishment alternative. Nothing else will do.
