Russell Findlay’s warning to Scottish voters that backing Reform UK “can only help the SNP” highlights great paradox at the heart of the Scottish Conservative revival over the past decade: that it was largely down to a symbiotic relationship with their great enemy.
After the Nationalists first overtook Labour in the Scottish Parliament in 2007, the Tories were perfectly happy to midwife Alex Salmond’s executive (swiftly rebranded to government), and played an essential role in the SNP’s journey from an (admittedly expansive) fringe of Scottish politics into the mainstream.
But that was no barrier, once the referendum was secured, to Ruth Davidson deftly positioning her party as the staunchest enemies of separatism, wooing a substantial number of voters prepared to prioritise the strongest unionist candidate over other considerations.
Polarisation was good for business. It allowed the Tories to become Holyrood’s second party in 2016 – unthinkable only a few years earlier – and retain the position in 2021, when Douglas Ross overperformed expectations (including mine) in the face of Nicola Sturgeon’s increasingly desperate attempt to unlock a second referendum by securing a Holyrood majority.
But as we noted at the time, this was a double-edged sword. The short-term dividends of polarisation meant that Conservatives got a greater share of the spoils of devolution, which in turn created an obvious temptation to lean into that dynamic, which risked going down the Northern Irish road of prioritising headline unionism over (and eventually, to the exclusion of) everything else – and thoroughly denormalising Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom in the process.
It also risked undercutting the justification for maintaining the Conservative presence in Scotland rather than folding it into some sort of independent unionist party:
“[If] Scotland does ever move on, it remains an open question whether this would allow the Tories to expand their coalition by reaching out to centre-right SNP voters, or start shedding voters who lent them their support to protect the Union back to Labour and the Liberal Democrats (or, indeed, the SNP).
“To date, the revival of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party has hinged on the Unionist part. But if he ever wants to be First Minister, or thrive in a Scotland with more ‘British’ politics, Ross needs to take the longer, harder step of selling Scots on Conservativism too.”
Which brings us back to Findlay. On a tactical level, his intervention makes sense; Tory support is strongest amongst the most committed unionist voters, so appeal to them on those grounds.
But strategically, from a non-party unionist perspective, the case is backwards. If Reform UK is set to become an established part of British politics – and it is on track to be a major presence at Westminster after the next election, if current polls are any indication – then it is obviously much, much better for the long-term future of the Union that it be strongly represented outside England.
Most obviously, it gives Reform an active link to the other parts of the British state. Whilst Nigel Farage has never been an ‘English nationalist’ (see his party having a furious falling out over which Northern Irish MPs to back), a Scottish membership headed up by MSPs, or perhaps one day MPs, is a good structural inoculation for the wider party against that temptation.
But it also simply means that Scottish politics is that bit more British; what unionists used to call ‘normal politics’. The ideal, certainly in terms of the long-term future of the state, is for Scottish and Welsh voters to decide elections on economic and cultural issues in broadly, if not identically, the same manner as English ones.
In the medium term, the rise of Reform UK might well prove a boon for the Scottish Right if it proves capable of reaching and mobilising voters whom the Conservatives cannot, not least by allowing the two parties to offer different centre-right and right-wing pitches to maximise the combined Right electorate, as for example do the Liberal Party and National Party in Australia.
Findlay’s problem is largely one of timing. He has become leader of the Scottish Conservatives at a point where the hard rain of events has increasingly pulped the SNP’s paper tiger. The old dynamic of existential constitutional peril which helped to unlock such spectacular electoral returns for his predecessors no longer applies – and they did not manage to use that golden decade to build a positive case for voting Conservative, rather than against the Nationalists.
He should not, therefore, be judged too harshly if the Scottish Tories underperform their previous performance at the next Scottish election. But he should also put country before party and resist trying to breathe some life back into the separatist threat.