It’s not a good time to be in Scottish Labour. With nine months to go until the 2026 Holyrood election, the party is still trailing behind the SNP and, at times, Reform UK. And things aren’t going well at a local level either: in recent months the party has suspended five councillors over inappropriate conduct and today one of these, Fife council’s David Graham, has been jailed for 27 months after the 43-year-old was found guilty for sexually abusing a vulnerable teenager. Good heavens…
A by-election will be held in Fife’s Buckhaven, Methil and Wemyss Villages ward in due course – with opposition parties keeping tabs on a number of council seats after the suspension of more Labour councillors in Scotland. North Lanarkshire Labour councillor Andrew Duffy-Lawson was suspended last month over sexually inappropriate messaging. The former leader of Glasgow City council, Labour’s Frank McAveety, was arrested and charged in April this year over fraud offences. Labour’s Philip Braat has also been suspended from Glasgow City council, pleading guilty to a charge of stalking in May this year.
While senior Tories have suggested they could form an electoral pact with Reform next year, Farage’s crowd say they are ‘not interested in shackling ourselves to a Tory corpse’.
And one of Scottish Labour’s most prominent local authority leaders, Edinburgh City council’s Cammy Day, was suspended – and resigned as council leader – in December 2024 amid allegations he had sent sexually explicit messages to Ukrainian refugees. (A subsequent police investigation cleared him of criminal wrongdoing and Day has since blasted the allegations as ‘an orchestrated political campaign against me’.)
Reform UK is keeping a close eye on these cases in the event of by-election being called. The party has fared well in Scottish council polls before – taking a quarter of the vote in both the Glasgow North East (23.6 per cent) and Clydebank Waterfront (26.2 per cent) elections this year. It hopes to translate this success to Holyrood: while both the SNP and the Scottish Tories are projected to lose seats at next year’s Scottish parliament election, Reform is rather excited about its prospects. Some polls have predicted Nigel Farage’s party could gain around 15 MSPs from a standing start at the expense of Scotland’s unionist groups.
‘The Tories are frightened,’ a senior Reform source confided to Mr S, adding that Farage’s group expected the Scottish Conservatives to fall from being the largest opposition party to ‘single figures’ next year. ‘To put it mildly: they are s****ing themselves.’ While senior Tories have suggested they could form an electoral pact with Reform next year, Farage’s crowd say they are ‘not interested in shackling ourselves to a Tory corpse’. Crikey. It’s certainly quite the image…
Labour’s recent woes have instilled confidence in Farage’s Scottish group – ‘they are in a doom loop’ – while current polling suggests the SNP won’t win enough support to form a majority government. ‘It’ll prompt talks of a Labour-SNP coalition,’ the Reform insider added, ‘with some grand title, to have the purpose of effectively keeping Reform out.’ Indeed, as Lucy Dunn wrote earlier this month, the bravado of some politicians is already starting to wear off. More pragmatic proposals to retain power are being floated, with some Nats are in favour of a ‘grand coalition’ with Scottish Labour in a bid to keep the party in government. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures…
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