A New Clash of Nationalisms: Reform UK and the erosion of Scottish exceptionalism
As election results roll in, pundits will be asking whether Reform UK has broken through in the 2026 Scottish Parliament elections. Most European countries have long seen the rise and breakthrough of such populist radical right parties, yet successive radical right parties in Scotland (UKIP, the Brexit Party, Reform UK) barely made a mark. Reform UK peaked at just 7% vote share in Scotland in the 2024 General Election, half their UK-wide vote share.
In this context, Scotland has been portrayed as exceptional in terms of its approach to migration and the international community (see work on this by Davidson et al.; McCollum et al.; Nicolson and Korkut). Scottish political discourse has regularly pushed back against anti-migration attitudes and policies in the UK and further abroad. At times, this has led to a narrative of Scottish exceptionalism, which promotes the idea that Scotland is less marked by racism than the rest of the UK and Europe. This narrative functions as a myth: it is not “necessarily false” but its “power and effect are independent of their veracity.” The power of this myth has meant that, as Hunter and Meer find in their work:
“Though an ostensibly inclusive civic belonging is celebrated by political, academic and public elites, the complexities and messiness both of racialisation, and of its relationship to belonging in Scotland remains under-articulated and under-acknowledged.”
This blog seeks to articulate how the rise of Reform UK has eroded the power of the exceptionalist narrative in Scotland and altered nationalist contestation in Scotland.
It isn’t the electoral results alone, then, which measure the breakthrough of the populist radical right. The 2026 Scottish Parliament campaign and the ideas debated have already eroded the exceptionalist myth. Reform UK have used this campaign to promote a new narrative of Scottishness – one that pushes back against the progressive consensus – and mobilised grassroots structures to spread it.
Reform UK easily translates the populist radical right playbook—characterised by anti-migrant, anti-elite rhetoric—to the Scottish context. On Reform UK’s Scottish social media, "Britain is broken" becomes "Scotland is scunnered.” Supposed corrupt Westminster elite are replaced by the SNP who are dubbed "the same old faces," "the same old failed politicians," "democracy deniers," and "chancers." Migrants are seen as a threat to Scotland’s urban communities. For example, in December 2025, Farage said that 1 in 3 pupils in Glasgow didn’t speak English as a first language and characterised this as “the cultural smashing of Glasgow.”
Symbolic adaptations rely heavily on the saltire and Scotland’s industrial infrastructure, characterising Scotland through references to its historical inventions, natural resources, and famous entrepreneurs. However, at times Reform’s rhetoric is poorly adapted: adverts featuring images of migrant boats while no such boats land in Scotland have recently caused controversy.
Reform’s Scotland messaging required a grassroots campaign to carry it. Since the July 2024 General Election, the party has built up local campaign teams, driven in large part by defectors with existing political networks such as Thomas Kerr in Glasgow and Ross Thompson in the North East. Key by-elections, notably Hamilton, served as testing grounds for this emerging grassroots operation and featured days with more than 100 campaigners on the ground. While tracing the growth of the radical right network, I identified 108 Reform UK-organised activities in Scotland between July 2024 and December 2025. These were largely focused on electoral moments such as by-elections.
However, while its formal organisational structures focus on electoral approaches, Reform has, less publicly, aligned itself with a wider far right movement in Scotland including more extreme right-wing groups. Councillors have regularly attended and supported protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers across the country. More recently both Scottish leader Malcolm Offord and a Glasgow city councillor have supported vigilante groups in Glasgow including North2South and Scot’s Active who conduct ‘night patrols’ around the city, including in the latter group’s case with an explicit focus on “any ‘hotels’ holding illegal men that have been spotted and reported creeping women out trying to pickpocket people or trying to commit sexual crimes.” As such, the adaptation of Reform’s structures to Scotland takes advantage of the porousness of the populist radical right electoral structures and the wider growth of far-right social movements.
The rise of Reform UK, its grassroots structures and its fluid social movements do not mean the end of the nationalist debate that has dominated Scottish politics since devolution. Instead, this debate is remade through the lens of a new kind of nationalism that is characterised by a more exclusive characterisation of what Scotland is and who belongs.
A three-point plan to tackle homelessness conflated Glasgow’s housing crisis with illegal migration, pointing the finger at asylum seekers. Net Zero has been portrayed as a betrayal of Scotland’s industrial identity, as Reform’s manifesto laments a Scotland which "once hummed to the sound of machinery, the once beating heart of the Industrial Revolution.” In a recent Telegraph piece, Richard Tice framed oil and gas drilling as a "patriotic duty", as in this proposed future, natural resources become a nationalist resource.
This reframing of Scotland’s predominant political debates, adaptation of the populist radical right playbook, and investment in a radical and far right grassroots structure indicates a turn towards a new clash of nationalisms. Whether or not Reform breaks through convincingly or finds disappointment on the 8th of May, Reform’s 2026 campaign has shifted the debate from unionism and nationalism to a conflict between a more exclusive, ethnic view of Scottish identity and the SNP’s at least nominally ‘civic’ nationalism.
Judith Sijstermans is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Aberdeen.