FALKIRK, UK: Populist leader Nigel Farage will rally supporters in Scotland on Saturday, bidding to build on unexpectedly strong backing for his anti-immigration Reform UK party five months before elections to its devolved parliament.
The Brexit champion, whose party has been leading in UK-wide polls throughout the year, will host a “Scotland Needs Reform” event in Falkirk, northwest of the capital Edinburgh.
The town has seen rival pro- and anti-immigration protests outside a hotel housing asylum seekers, mirroring similar scenes in English towns and cities.
On the eve of Farage’s visit, some Falkirk voters voiced unease at the migrants being housed in its Cladhan Hotel since 2021.
“I don’t feel safe, I don’t feel comfortable,” retiree Karen, who declined to give her surname, told AFP.
“And that’s changed in the past few years, I would say, a lot.”
Farage’s planned two-hour rally at another Falkirk hotel follows Reform’s surprising rise in popularity among Scottish voters.
It has leapfrogged Labour — which governs in the UK parliament in London — to take second place behind the Scottish National Party (SNP) in several surveys focused on next May’s elections to the parliament in Edinburgh.
Reform UK, which has no leader and minimal political infrastructure in Scotland, won just seven percent of Scottish votes at the 2024 UK general election but is now regularly polling in the high teens.
- ‘Laying the ground’ -
It has been luring voters from the Conservatives and to, a lesser extent, Labour, according to political analysts.
They expect Reform to win its first Scottish Parliament seats on May 7, when a proportional voting system is used.
“They’ll be happy to have what could be more than a dozen Reform MSPs (Member of the Scottish Parliament) in Holyrood arguing the party’s case,” pollster John Curtice, politics professor at Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde, told AFP.
He added they would be “laying the ground for maybe going further in 2029” when the next UK-wide election is due and crucial Scottish constituencies will be up for grabs.
The party — formed in 2021 from the ashes of Farage’s Brexit Party — this week grabbed a massive financial boost after Thailand-based cryptocurrency investor and aviation entrepreneur Christopher Harborne gave it £9 million ($12 million).
Saturday is a rare visit north of the English border for Farage, 61, the veteran Euroskeptic who has long struggled for popularity among Scots.
In 2013, when leading his UK Independence Party (UKIP), police had to escort him from an Edinburgh pub after angry confrontations with opponents he later dubbed anti-English.
- ‘Niche market’ -
Scots overwhelmingly backed staying in the EU in the divisive 2016 Brexit referendum, making Farage an unpopular figure to many.
Dubbed an English nationalist by his critics, he has also long repelled supporters of Scottish independence from the UK.
His personal popularity remains low with 69 percent of Scots viewing him unfavorably, according to a November YouGov poll.
But Reform’s messaging appears to resonate with growing numbers in Scotland.
University of Edinburgh electoral politics lecturer Fraser McMillan said, like in England, it has established itself as a “protest vote against the mainstream parties” and “the most credible vehicle for socially conservative immigration attitudes.”
“There’s a relatively strong contingent of that in Scotland,” he told AFP.
However, it struggles to woo voters away from the SNP, who are typically pro-EU and back Scottish independence.
The SNP has governed in Edinburgh for nearly two decades and is expected to top the May 7 contest, but with a diminished vote share.
Curtice said the SNP was losing “virtually nothing” to Reform, whose rise was instead fragmenting the anti-independence vote.
Ultimately, Farage’s unpopularity among Scotland’s many Brexit opponents means he is tapping into “a niche market” of voters, Curtice told AFP.
“The ability of the party to do well in Scotland has to be lower than elsewhere,” he said.
