Welcome back to what will hopefully be normal service after we’ve been spending the last few days battling off a determined and temporarily successful attempt at hacking the site. Apologies to those who had clicks intercepted and redirected to a malware site which tried to get people to download dodgy .EXE files, but our readers are far too alert to ever fall for such things so no harm should have been done.
So back to business, which for us often means pointing out things that have been said in newspapers that aren’t true, which brings us to last Friday’s issue of The National.
Because the above simply isn’t what happened.
The story is based entirely on a single tweet, not from “Reform UK” but from the party’s Scottish sub-office. And it doesn’t even mention the word “referendum” (or even the concept of one), far less rule anything out.
We don’t doubt for a second that Reform UK is “a Pro-UK party”. But nor do we doubt that the Conservative And Unionist Party is also one of those, yet David Cameron still granted the first indyref. And it was also a pro-EU party, yet he still granted the 2015 Brexit referendum. So being “pro-UK” does not in any way necessarily imply that you’re anti-referendums.
The Scottish branch of Reform has previously said that it would “countenance” another vote, but not until 2039 – basically the same stance as all the other Unionist parties:
But despite some recent changes to its structure, Reform remains essentially Nigel Farage’s personal property, and the barrier to deposing him is extremely high.
So the Scottish branch would in reality have no more say over that policy than Ruth Davidson did when Cameron signed the Edinburgh Agreement in 2012, or any more control than Anas Sarwar has over Keir Starmer. If Farage were to decide that it was a good idea, it would happen, and as yet any comment from him on the subject has been conspicuously absent.
And that’s odd, because there is no downside to Reform saying “no indyref 2 under any circumstances” if that is indeed their policy. It would only strengthen them with the voters they’re ostensibly chiefly concerned with, ie hardcore Unionist ones. And since nobody currently thinks they WOULD grant a second referendum, they’re not gaining anything from being equivocal or ambiguous or silent about it. If their position is a flat No, there is not a single coherent reason for them not to say so.
None of the above makes it likely that they’d adopt a pro-indyref 2 stance, of course, and our original post last week never said it was. We just said it would be politically smart and make Scottish politics a lot more interesting, which certainly proved to be the case. The piece was the second-most read on Wings this year so far and generated a substantial response, with a wide range of views which overall leaned mostly positive.
(The majority of objections were pretty irrational and based on either an intense dislike of the party in general, a complete mistrust of all politicians, or a wildly inflated view of how important Scotland is to the UK economy. And, y’know, like Nigel Farage cares about a little bit of economic damage here or there anyway. This is the guy who made BREXIT happen, folks.)
If it doesn’t, the most relieved people in the country will be the SNP. With nothing else to offer and a mostly-disgraceful record in government for the last decade, they’ve recently been pitching their 2026 election campaign mainly as an anti-Reform one, even to the extent of openly discussing a coalition deal with Scottish Labour to shut Reform out.
And that would get extremely awkward if they were forced to adopt a platform of “You know we’re not going to deliver a second referendum – we’ve tried half-arsed begging for 10 years and we’re all out of ideas – but vote for us to keep Reform out, even though they ARE offering you a referendum!”, and trying to flog that to indy supporters.
(Especially the 36% of them who voted Leave, as well as the large numbers opposed to the SNP’s woke social policies and its determination to kill the oil and gas industry.)
Still, there’s zero in the way of concrete evidence that Farage is that smart, and at present he’s balancing on a knife-edge: Reform are now consistently ahead in UK polling, but not at levels high enough to give him a majority, so as well as capturing lots of Tory voters he’d still need the support of the Parliamentary party to give him a chance at a viable administration, and putting Scotland on the table might jeopardise both of those things.
The question is how many Tory/Reform voters would be willing, in the final analysis, to sacrifice Scotland to achieve their other goals. And we have at least some sort of an indicator on that, because in 2018 Wings commissioned an opinion poll asking English voters if they’d give up Scotland to ensure Brexit went ahead.
Overall only a narrow majority said yes, but among Tory voters the margin was 2:1.
It seems reasonable to assume Reform voters would feel at least as strongly- the margin among Leave voters was more than 3:1. Interestingly, though, younger voters in the rest of the UK are far less bothered about Scotland leaving than their older counterparts – only 1 in 3 saying it would upset them – which creates some interesting opportunities for a party whose current base is pretty elderly. (And even the old aren’t all that fussed, with a bare majority saying they’d care.)
So it’s a gamble Farage could probably afford to – and may yet have to – take, although whether there’d be any benefit to him in doing it before the Holyrood election is another question entirely. He can afford to bide his time and see how the next couple of years pan out.
So for now there isn’t much more to be said about the idea, and the future of Scottish politics continues to look grimly dull, save for the limited but undeniable comedy value of watching poor Anas Sarwar still trying to pretend he’s going to be First Minister.
We hope that’s enough to sustain everyone until 2031, because the way things stand at present, that’s the earliest independence is going to be any sort of live topic again.
