The far-right could come to Scotland too

W ith the decisive victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections and his MAGA Republicans taking the Senate and edging towards a majority in the lower chamber, the House of Representatives, far-right post-truth populist nationalism has scored its greatest achievement ever.

The American Government is now in the hands of climate change-denying anti-vaxxers who will strip millions of Americans of health coverage by abolishing Obamacare. Attacks on the rights and civil protections of women and minorities will only intensify, and a federal abortion ban is very possible. Remember, something bad doesn’t get better when it gets popular, it gets worse.

As dreadful as all this is for women in the USA, it’s going to get even worse. Legal protections from discrimination for women and minorities will be overturned. Women and minorities are facing a bonfire of their legal rights and protections.

Minorities will also be targeted, the Republicans cynically weaponised the trans issue as a means of furthering their attacks on the rights of women and minorities. The Republicans do not care about women’s rights, and those so-called gender-critical advocates who celebrate Trump’s victory on the grounds that his administration will attack trans people are merely showing us that they never cared about women’s rights at all. The wider LGBT community is also in the Republicans’ crosshairs. LGB people who reject the T will be targeted too.

There is the very real prospect that the Supreme Court ruling legalising equal marriage could be overturned, meaning millions of Americans in same-sex marriages will find that their marriages have been annulled. Gay men and lesbians will be stripped of their rights to protection from employment discrimination and from discrimination in the delivery of services, just as women and black and Hispanic communities will.

However the most immediate threat is that faced by migrant communities. Trump promises a campaign of mass deportations. People who are legally in the USA will be caught up in the dragnet too. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has announced a “turbocharged” campaign of denaturalisation, stripping citizenship from those who obtained it legally. Families will be torn apart, and entire communities of peaceful, law-abiding working people face being destroyed. Trump’s denaturalisation campaign will only encourage Farage and his followers to extend their attacks on migrants to include those settled here legally.

Trump’s victory has emboldened and energised the forces of the far-right all around the globe. We cannot kid ourselves that what is happening in America cannot happen here. It can happen here although it is likely to manifest itself differently from how it does in the USA. The cultural and political landscape in Scotland is very different from that in the USA. The Christian nationalist right is far smaller and less influential here; modern Scotland is one of the least religious countries in the world. In the United States, 65% of people report that religion is important in their daily lives; in the UK, it’s just 27%. In Scotland, 51.1% say that they have no religion; in England, 36.7% report having no religion; in the United States, it’s just 22%. It’s a brave politician in America who says in public that they don’t believe in god; in Scotland, no one bats an eyelid.

This widespread lack of interest in religion means that some of the tropes of the American populist right are unlikely to gain the same traction in Scotland, and American-style Christian nationalism will gain little traction. Attacks on abortion or gay marriage do not have the same resonance in Scotland, although trans people are demonised here just as they are in the USA.

But that doesn’t mean that we have little to worry about. The performance of Reform UK in the recent council by-elections in North East Scotland means that it is highly likely that the hard-right Anglo-British nationalist populist party, which is characterised by climate change denial and the hatred of immigrants, will make a breakthrough at the next Holyrood elections.

The Tory vote is traditionally large in North East Scotland, and there is a high proportion of residents who have come to live in Scotland from elsewhere in the UK, bringing their political preferences with them. Reform UK took 25.9% of the first preference votes in the Fraserburgh and District by-election. Reform UK performed well in the other council by-elections in the North East.

On this showing, it is highly likely that Scotland will see its first Reform UK MSPs following the next Holyrood election, and hard-right-wing populist nationalist anti-immigration climate change-denying politics will officially have gained its first toehold in Scottish politics. That is a deeply unedifying prospect. Reform UK has not yet articulated a clear policy on devolution. Reform’s manifesto for this year’s Westminster general election contained no mention of devolution. It mentions England and Northern Ireland three times, Wales twice, and Scotland not at all. However, at the Reform UK party conference in September, the party’s MP for Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe, called for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd, demanding that devolution be reversed and the act of Union be restored, by which he meant Westminster being Scotland’s only Parliament.

Although the right-wing English nationalist populist party was able to ignore Scotland in its Westminster manifesto this year, it will not be able to repeat the same trick in a Holyrood manifesto and will have to come up with a set of Scottish-specific policies. Those policies will, at the very least, call for a halt to further devolution and will welcome Westminster intervention in supposedly devolved matters. Knowing that the abolition of Holyrood is not popular in Scotland with a small minority of spittle-flecked Anglo-British nationalists, Reform UK’s Scottish manifesto will most likely not call for the abolition of devolution, but make no mistake, that is their long-term aim.

Lowe is a senior and influential figure within the party, his comments together with the absence of a single mention of devolution or Scotland in the manifesto reveal that Reform’s leadership has no interest in Scotland and no understanding of the country. Reform is Nigel Farage’s creature, and while his brand of English nationalist pub bore politics might appeal to many in England, like Boris Johnson before him, he fails to resonate in Scotland and indeed actively repels most. But don’t underestimate his ability to lie and to rabble rouse like Trump with his anti-immigration rhetoric. He will be platformed by the BBC and the media as he does so.

Voting Reform UK in Scotland is a vote for the effective political abolition of Scotland, reducing this country to the same status as Wessex, Northumbria or East Anglia, a historical region of a centralising unitary British state which is functionally identical to Greater England.

We cannot assume that the inevitable dissatisfaction with the Labour Party will necessarily translate into a surge of support for the SNP or other pro-independence parties. Here, as in America, we are up against a populist right which will shamelessly lie and fear-monger, amplified by a very well-funded media ecosystem, successfully persuading people to vote against their own interests. People are being gaslit into voting to protect the interests of billionaires like Elon Musk while destroying their own civil liberties, employment rights, and environmental protections.

The world’s richest men are funding a burgeoning right-wing media which rails against ‘elites’, elites which, funnily enough, don’t appear to include the world’s richest men. ‘Elites’ don’t include the likes of far-right broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson, who, like Elon Musk, was a repo baby before the term was even invented. Carlson’s father is Dick Carlson, who was appointed as director of Voice of America by Ronald Reagan in 1986. In order to counter this tsunami of right-wing misinformation and lies, the pro-independence parties must provide a genuine and attractive alternative which energises and enthuses a broad section of the population. Time is running out to articulate one. It’s not just the future of Scotland which is at stake.

GOING FURTHER

• Stephen Miller Snags Big Trump White House Job | THE HUFFPOST

• Reform will gain its first toehold in Scotland in Holyrood 2026 | THE NATIONAL

• Reform MP Rupert Lowe gives conspiracy theory filled speech to party conference | POLITICS JOE

• U.S. Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk. A Trump Presidency Could Give Him Power Over Them. | THE NEW YORK TIMES

• Elon Musk worries free speech advocates with his calls to prosecute researchers and critics | NBC NEWS

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Wee Ginger Dug and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 13 November 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Dreamstime/VVShots.