Why true Scottish Conservatives should avoid Nigel Farage like the plague

Whatever people think about Nigel Farage, most would agree he’s a patriot. His photocalls are usually against a backdrop of a large Union flag, and page one of Reform UK’s manifesto – they call it a “contract” – talks about Britain’s future as a “free, proud and independent sovereign nation”.

What follows is 28 pages of simplistic assertions expected of a party with no chance of honouring any of them, just appealing to a niche of angry voters fed up with the big two parties being unable to give them what they want on a plate. Top of the Reform wish-list is, of course, immigration and the promise to stop the boats crossing the English Channel, by just telling the Royal Marines to round them up and dump them on the French coast. We’ll fight them on the beaches, etc. It’s really very simple if you just have determination.

But it takes a special kind of pro-business party which claims to support wealth creation to deny commercial banks the interest they are paid by the Bank of England for quantitative easing reserves. Effectively a tax on banks it hopes would raise £35 billion a year, it would inevitably result in higher banking costs for businesses, and poorer returns for savers.

Nigel Farage dresses himself in the Union Jack but could end up being a godsend to the nationalists (Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Only Labour manifesto really matters

Reform is hardly alone in producing a prospectus of the unachievable and undeliverable in the context of a general election. Yes, some might have been in the position to wield influence, like the Democratic Unionists after Theresa May lost her majority in 2017, but by the time of Rishi Sunak’s snap call to go to the country, the hung parliament ship had sailed and only the Labour manifesto really mattered as the framework for the next parliament.

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In Scotland, talk of the SNP holding a Labour government’s feet to the fire has been replaced by an appeal to core SNP supporters to stay with the project and a manifesto which is just a depressing list of anti-Westminster grievances. The SNP’s paper might be clad in the usual black and yellow, but it is little more than a white flag of surrender.

Yet recent polls show John Swinney appears at the very least to have stopped the rot and stabilised support to around 32 per cent, but backing in principle for independence remains virtually as strong as at most points in the decade since the referendum, at around 48 per cent. It is the independence supporter’s nightmare; Scotland can only be separated from the UK when both independence and the party proposing it can demonstrate a majority, which is why the SNP has resorted to slicing and dicing how that majority should be defined. Is it a majority of voters, a majority of seats in either parliament or, the latest fudge, the most seats? The dissenting voices of independence supporters who no longer believe in the SNP are only growing louder and the swishing sound you hear is Mr Swinney flailing for the nearest straw.

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As the election campaign reaches its final phase, the commentary has been dominated by the importance of tactical voting, of noses being held across the country and it has all been in one direction. No one is talking about canny pro-independence voters sizing up which candidate has the best chance of defeating the greatest unionist threat, but of unionist voters sensing an opportunity to finish the job after 17 years of exhausting nationalist exceptionalism and their track record or failure and responsibility deflection.

Massive opportunity

Under the first past-the-post system, the SNP could go from 43 MPs (down from 48 elected in 2019) to a rump close to single figures if tactical voting is maximised, plunging the SNP into an even deeper crisis. It might even persuade Mr Swinney his initial instinct to step back when Nicola Sturgeon stepped down last year was correct, and the responsibility of rebuilding the SNP as an electoral force should fall to someone less hidebound by association with the past. Not because of a promise of any Gordon Brown-inspired constitutional tinkering from the Labour Party, most unionists realise the SNP has run out of gas and the opportunity to take independence off the Scottish political agenda for decades is massive. Except for one small bunch, which brings me back to Mr Farage.

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There are at least half a dozen seats which are straight SNP-Conservative fights and although some voters have returned to Labour, many had previously been soft SNP voters who backed them as a party to stand up for Scotland against the Conservatives, as opposed to any heart-and-soul belief in separation. But around one-in-eight Conservative voters have become so disillusioned with the party that they have drifted to Reform to the extent that there is a real possibility of a repeat of the 1997 Tory wipeout. In seats which should stay blue, Reform could take enough votes to return an SNP MP and give the nationalists a more respectable result.

It means that a Nigel Farage wrapped in a Union flag could be responsible for breathing life into a party which at key moments in the last ten years has come close to breaking up the country he claims to hold so dear. Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross may have made a catastrophic blunder in this campaign, but with Scottish Labour at its lowest ebb it was the Tories under Ruth Davidson who held the line against the tide of nationalism. But this doesn’t matter to Mr Farage, and a true British patriot would recognise his party is giving oxygen to Scottish nationalism and step back from splitting the right-of-centre vote where unity is crucial.

But for Mr Farage, the enemy is the Conservative party. He can find common cause with its foes and it turns out his rag-tag reactionary rabble includes candidates who have openly supported Scottish independence. Maybe fellow nationalists recognise kindred spirits, and as Alex Salmond happily took Russia Today’s shilling, no wonder Mr Farage admires Vladimir Putin.