After Holyrood: Reform’s Seventeen and the Limits of Electoral Refuge

2029 prognosis: Reform will rule Britain, even if outside government

TL;DR. Reform’s seventeen seats mark the first parliamentary expression in Scotland of an authoritarian British-nationalist current consolidating across the rest of the island, fed by reaction to a weakening UK state. Their seats came at the Conservatives’ expense; Labour’s separate collapse is structural. The Greens advanced significantly, though their parliamentary success risks substituting for the community and workplace defence the moment requires. Your Party Scotland was prevented from contesting by London-office obstruction. The cordon sanitaire walls Reform off from Holyrood government but not from its platform. The next concrete electoral test is the May 2027 council elections, 361 days away. The work of confronting Reform belongs to the streets and to a class politics on housing, wages and prices, not to MSPs.

The count finished on Friday. By Saturday morning the shape of the seventh Scottish Parliament was settled: the SNP returned as the largest party with fifty-eight seats, seven short of a majority; Labour and Reform tied on seventeen seats each, with Reform entering Holyrood for the first time as the Conservatives collapsed nineteen seats to twelve; the Greens gained six seats to fifteen, with co-leader Lorna Slater taking Edinburgh Central off Angus Robertson and Maggie Chapman returned in the North East ahead of Labour; the Liberal Democrats also gained six, to ten; sixty-four new MSPs walking into a building most of them have never worked in. Turnout fell from 63.5 per cent to 53.2 per cent. Nearly half the Scottish electorate did not vote.

Reform’s seventeen seats mark the first parliamentary expression in Scotland of an authoritarian British-nationalist current that has been consolidating across the rest of the island. The qualifier matters in the Scottish context: Reform is a unionist formation, oriented to UK sovereignty and against Scottish self-government, distinct from the civic-nationalism the term more usually denotes here. Reform’s British nationalism here reads as a reactive defence of UK statehood as it weakens, not the confident assertion of a hegemonic British identity. That weakening is concrete: Wales, Scotland and the north of Ireland are now governed or substantially shaped by parties opposed to Westminster centralism, and the British state increasingly faces an internal coalition of independentist leaderships across its constituent nations.

Every one of the seventeen came from the regional list, the proportional half of Holyrood’s hybrid Additional Member System, where Reform’s vote was distributed widely enough across the country to convert into seats it could not have won in any single first-past-the-post constituency. None of this was predicted in 2021. The Conservative vote collapsed nineteen seats to make room for them, with the realignment running mainly on the right; Labour’s own collapse is a structural failure to convert anti-SNP sentiment into gains, distinct from any direct Reform poaching. A party that did not exist as an electoral force in Scotland five years ago now is His Majesty’s Opposition, sharing the designation because its number of MSPs is equal to Labour’s. This gives the far right access to the committee structures, the speaking time, and the platform that Holyrood’s procedural conventions guarantee the official opposition. That platform will be used. The question is not whether Reform consolidates its presence in Scotland; the question is who organises the response, on what terrain, and through what political forms.

The temptation will be to read Labour’s collapse as the main story. It is not. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s capitulation to Reform’s framing on migration over the past eighteen months produced exactly the result it deserved. Labour’s authority on the unionist axis was already structurally compromised by 2021, when the Conservatives consolidated as the ‘real’ unionist party at Holyrood and Labour was left to occupy the position of secondary, unconvinced unionists. A key enabler of Reform’s hegemonic project has been opponents’ adaptation to its language. Sarwar said almost nothing about what the SNP government has actually done on social security or housing, focused his campaign on the SNP rather than on the right, and ended up tied with the very force he refused to name as the threat. The lesson is straightforward and has been demonstrated throughout Europe; Die Linke’s recent recovery is the clearest example. Capitulation produces collapse. The bankruptcy of the Scottish Labour leadership is not that they failed to triangulate well enough; it is that triangulation as such was the wrong response to a fascisating right.

The Greens’ advance is the other major story. Fifteen seats gives Scotland’s parliament a substantial Green presence; the party won its first ever first-past-the-post constituency seats in Edinburgh and Glasgow, including Holly Bruce’s high-profile victory in Glasgow Southside, alongside its regional-list gains. They were elected in every electoral region for the first time, and topped the regional list vote in several constituencies where they did not even stand. The new intake includes Scotland’s first non-binary and trans MSPs. The risk for the wider left is that the Greens settle into a persistent hegemonic position as the electoral pole for left voters across this island, while doing little of the community-defence or workplace-defence work that confronting Reform actually requires. Whether the Green group at Holyrood will hold the position the wider movement needs from it, against the SNP’s habitual betrayal of just-transition rhetoric and against the pull of governmental respectability, is now a live question for the whole parliamentary term.

What Reform’s seventeen MSPs change is not abstract. They change the conditions under which anti-fascist work in Scotland now has to be done. The mobilisations of August 2024 in Glasgow, Paisley, Erskine, Falkirk and Elgin; the broad united front Stand Up to Racism built with the STUC and the trade unions; the patient counter-organising that turned a thousand fascists at the Cladhan Hotel into a few hundred: that work was always being done against a far-right that lacked electoral expression in Scotland. It now has electoral expression. The same forces that organised the hotel mobilisations have a parliamentary echo chamber. The same propaganda about migrants and refugees that Falkirk For All has spent two years contesting on the streets will now be tabled as parliamentary questions, briefed to the Scottish press, normalised by procedural convention.

This is where the connected-fronts argument starts to look urgent. A decade ago, Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda warned about creeping fascism advancing on the edges of Western politics. Scotland and Cymru have arrived at the subsequent conjuncture: a British-nationalist authoritarian pole is becoming hegemonic across this island. The far right is the official Opposition in the Scottish Parliament and Senedd Cymru, and the largest party in the English local elections (either first or second in a very large majority of English seats).

What changed between the Faulkner warning and its arrival is not the analysis. It is the urgency. The connected-fronts argument the Socialist Outlook tradition advanced in its November-December 1987 editorial ‘Tory hurricane of change’, a tradition Phil Hearse helped to shape three decades before he co-authored Creeping Fascism, is the inheritance worth reclaiming: that the various offensives of an authoritarian state are not separate policy choices but elements of a single project, and that fragmenting the response lets each front be defeated in turn. The same logic applies now. Reform’s seventeen seats, the Cladhan Hotel mobilisations, the council finance crisis Audit Scotland flagged, the housing emergency Living Rent has been organising around, the just-transition fights the SNP government routinely betrays: not separate questions, fronts in one war.

Falkirk For All is the Scottish formation that exemplifies what fusing the fronts looks like in practice. Founded in 2024 in response to the anti-migrant mobilisations around the Cladhan Hotel, it has organised counter-demonstrations, contested the redirection of working-class grievances onto refugees, escorted worshippers from the local mosque during Ramadan, and absorbed serious harassment in the process. The numbers, documented in this year’s SWP pre-conference bulletin, are these: a far-right turnout reduced from around a thousand to around two hundred through patient, persistent organising. That is what grassroots defence looks like when it works. It does not look like a parliamentary statement. It looks like comrades in Falkirk standing outside a hotel for the fortieth Saturday in a row.

The parliamentary arithmetic carries good news. John Swinney said he would ‘have nothing to do with Reform whatsoever’ and excluded the party from cross-party talks; Gillian Mackay said the Greens would ‘never do any kind of deal with Reform’; Anas Sarwar rejected any Labour cooperation. The cordon sanitaire familiar from European parliaments where far-right parties establish themselves without becoming acceptable governing partners now applies in Holyrood: Reform’s seventeen MSPs will sit in opposition and extract no formal concessions. The cordon’s reach is real and bounded. It walls off the chamber, while leaving Reform free to use committee speaking time, parliamentary questions and the Scottish press lobby to normalise its arguments.

The strategic implication for the Scottish left is that the parliamentary terrain Reform now occupies is not the terrain on which it will be defeated. It is one of several terrains on which it will be confronted, and not the most important. The far-right’s parliamentary base now spans Holyrood, Senedd Cymru and the English councils; the response has to coordinate across the same island, while being built locally on each front. Holyrood matters here: the fifteen Green MSPs, Slater and Chapman among them, will need to be pushed and supported in equal measure; the SNP will need to be held to the just-transition rhetoric it routinely betrays; the Labour group will need to be confronted on every triangulation. None of that will defeat Reform. Reform will be defeated by the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding a class politics that addresses what fascisation feeds on: housing, wages, the cost of living, the destruction of public services, the £5 billion budget gap Audit Scotland has flagged, the Scottish councils heading toward financial unsustainability. On cost of living specifically, the SNP’s manifesto commitment to price controls is a concrete demand the left can hold the new government to: a continuation of the line of organising that ran from Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay through Power to the People, and a tangible test of whether the parliament can be made to deliver on what fascisation feeds on. That work cannot be subcontracted to MSPs.

The next concrete electoral test sits 361 days away. The May 2027 Scottish local council elections will fill roughly 1,200 seats across 250 wards under single transferable vote: a system in which the left can credibly campaign for vote-left, transfer-left across competing formations, and the system in which Reform’s reach into Scottish councils will either be blocked or normalised. That terrain demands organisation now, not parliamentary commentary later.

There is also the absence to think about, and it is worth naming correctly. Your Party Scotland voted to stand. Branches and regions were left to decide how. The London office then refused to share member lists, contact details or electoral funding. When the proto-branches saw that London would offer nothing and the Scottish Executive had almost no resources of its own, they concluded they could not contest. The centralising ‘branch office’ problem the Scottish left warned about from the start has now been confirmed in practice. The SSP is barely visible. RISE is a memory. The Greens absorbed some left votes, and Slater’s win in Edinburgh Central is real, though the Greens are not a socialist party and pretending otherwise will not fix what is missing. The Scottish left’s organisational fragmentation has been an analytical problem for thirty years. It is not, no longer, just an analytical problem. Reform’s seventeen seats have made it a practical one.

What this piece cannot resolve is the question of what the next formation looks like, though attempts are already in motion. The Independent Alliance at Westminster offers one failed model; the Anticapitalistas warning about ceding programmatic content to broader formations remains the warning to keep in mind. The next twelve months will produce attempts. Whether they produce a settled answer, and whether the political space the YP-Scotland strangulation closed off can be reopened on different organisational terms, is the question that cannot yet be answered.

The work is the same as it was on Friday morning. It is just being done in a parliament that now contains seventeen people who would prefer Falkirk For All did not exist.

2029 prognosis: Reform will rule Britain, even if outside government

The argument here is not that Reform will inevitably form the next Westminster government, though that possibility is closer than it has ever been. The argument is sharper. The Greens cannot win back the deindustrialised working-class base Labour has lost; their growth is in the cities, among renters and students and disaffected liberals, and it does not extend into the post-industrial constituencies where Reform’s vote is rooted. That base is now contested entirely within the parties of capital. Reform is itself one of those parties: the Bonapartist option to which capital turns when liberal-democratic management of class relations frays, a populist-authoritarian formation that disciplines labour, manages migration and concentrates state coercion while retaining electoral legitimacy. The Trumpian Tea Party trajectory in the United States is the recent analogue. The fight over Reform’s base is internal to capital, not against it.

The European pattern of the past decade tells us how this scenario unfolds. The Sweden Democrats, the Dutch Party for Freedom and the Danish People’s Party were all initially walled off by mainstream parties; in each case electoral arithmetic eventually broke the firewall, first through informal arrangements and budget deals, then through normalisation. The Danish variant is the closest fit for a hung-parliament UK: policy influence without full institutional absorption, in which the centre-right governs while implementing the far right’s programme on migration, policing and welfare in exchange for parliamentary support. The Reform programme arrives without Reform in cabinet.

That is what Starmer’s positioning already concedes. Whether Reform leads the next administration, joins a Conservative-led arrangement, or merely sets the boundaries of Conservative recovery, the policy framework of the next government will be substantially Reform’s: stricter borders, harsher policing, deeper attacks on social security, the further destruction of what remains of the post-war welfare settlement. The fascisation we are naming is not a hypothetical danger awaiting an electoral result. It is the political grammar within which any government to the right of Labour will operate, and within which Labour itself increasingly operates. The threat is not exaggerated. It is the working assumption the wider left has to organise from. The deeper argument, that the terrain we now operate on is one of defeat and that organising must be calibrated to that reality rather than to imagined recoveries, will be developed in the ‘Terrain of Defeat’ series.

Notes and references

1. BBC News, ‘SNP wins Scottish election as Reform and Labour tie for second’, 9 May 2026: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgp5ryv4qno

2. On Holyrood’s hybrid Additional Member System (73 constituency MSPs and 56 regional-list MSPs allocated to balance the result), see the Scottish Parliament’s information service: https://www.parliament.scot/about/how-parliament-works

3. Mike Small, on the Scottish Labour campaign and its funding, Bella Caledonia, May 2026 [verify exact URL before publication].

4. BBC News, ‘Scottish election 2026: Results in maps and charts’, 9 May 2026: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e2v4n20xlo

5. Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda, Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (Public Reading Rooms, 2017).

6. ‘Tory hurricane of change’, Socialist Outlook no. 4, November-December 1987. The archive is held at the International Institute for Research and Education and partially digitised at the Marxists Internet Archive.

7. Socialist Workers Party, Pre-Conference Bulletin No. 1, 2025. The Falkirk numbers are independently corroborated by published reporting on the Cladhan Hotel mobilisations and counter-demonstrations of 2024-2026.

8. BBC News, ‘SNP leader John Swinney rules out Holyrood talks with Reform UK’: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cddpevvv97jo

9. ITV News reporting, May 2026, on Gillian Mackay (Scottish Greens) ruling out cooperation with Reform and on Anas Sarwar’s rejection of any Labour deal.

10. Audit Scotland, financial sustainability reports for Scottish local government and the Scottish Government’s budget: https://audit.scot

11. SNP, 2026 Holyrood manifesto, including the commitment to introduce price controls. Manifesto available via the SNP website.