If the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is sincere in wishing to deprive Nigel Farage of the ‘oxygen of publicity’, he’s got a funny way of going about it. In a vituperative interview on the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland today, he gave the Reform leader another blast of oxygen by offering a public debate on the eve of his visit to next week’s Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election. This is publicity Reform couldn’t buy with any of the money it has so far devoted to a blitz on social media.
Sarwar is incensed at a mischievous attack ad last week in which Reform doctored a quote to suggest that the Scottish Labour leader intended to ‘prioritise’ the Pakistani community. What Sarwar actually said in a 2022 speech was that ‘the days where the South Asian community gets to lead political parties and gets to lead countries is now upon us’. The former SNP leader Humza Yousaf was the first Muslim to lead a government in Western Europe. The ad amounted to ‘blatant racism’, according to Sarwar.
Like Ukip’s infamous ‘Breaking Point’ billboard in 2016, this was transparently designed to provoke controversy – and it certainly has. Reform’s video is a week old, yet Labour is still flogging it for all it is worth, confident that Scots are immune to the politics of race because they are inherently progressive and left-wing. This Hamilton by-election may test this theory of what is called ‘Scottish exceptionalism’ to destruction.
Recent opinion polls have shown Reform neck-and-neck with Labour and significantly ahead of the Scottish Conservatives. Focus groups suggest that Reform is gaining traction in Hamilton, and while Farage is not seen in a favourable light, voters are so ‘scunnered’, to use a Scots word, with the establishment parties that many might actually vote Reform to express discontent at the SNP and Labour. Reform is also pitching leftish policies like the full restoration of winter fuel payment and abolition of the two-child benefit cap which might well appeal to those disillusioned Hamilton folk.
The pollster Mark Diffley, of the Diffley Partnership polling group, has said Reform will ‘probably not win’ – but he’s clearly not ruling it out. More importantly, neither is the SNP leader, John Swinney, who says it is a ‘three-horse race’ and too close to call. It seems that everyone, for their own reasons, is invested in giving Nigel Farage the oxygen of publicity he so desperately needs as he prepares for his visit to Hamilton before polling day on 5 June. Left-wing groups are promising to give him a hot welcome, as they famously did in 2014 when the then Ukip leader had to be rescued by police from an Edinburgh pub. But milk shake assaults may only fuel Farage’s mystique.
Sarwar laid into Farage as ‘a pathetic, poisonous little man who wants to spread fear and division… and couldn’t place Hamilton on a map’. Scottish politicians invariably become heightist when they are rattled – and Labour clearly is. Reform knows exactly where their vote is in Hamilton, Stonehouse and Larkhall. While the area is a traditional Labour territory in Lanarkshire, Scottish Labour are no longer confident of returning this constituency to the fold.
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