THE Holyrood elections are a year away, and more than one of Scotland’s political parties took the chance on Wednesday to launch their campaigns.
But though politicians may talk about the NHS, education, or a renewed conversation about independence, one man dominated their central message to the voting public: Nigel Farage.
At the SNP’s campaign launch in Edinburgh, First Minister John Swinney painted the Reform UK leader as a bogeyman.
“An ill wind of change is blowing through UK politics,” Swinney warned party activists and candidates.
“After last week, it’s no longer fanciful to suggest that Nigel Farage could be prime minister in a few years.”
Accusing Labour of “dancing to Farage’s tune”, Swinney added: “At Westminster, Nigel Farage may not be in office – but he is very much in power.”
The message was clear. The SNP will do what Labour have not: stand up to Farage and present a positive vision of issues such as immigration and LGBT+ rights while Reform UK denigrate them.
At his own campaign launch in Glasgow, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar also focused on the Reform UK leader, confusingly claiming Farage was the SNP’s “new power to replace the Tories”.
The Scottish Labour leader added: “The truth is, I don’t care about Nigel Farage, and Nigel Farage doesn’t care about Scotland.”
For someone he doesn’t care about, the Scottish Labour leader mentioned Farage enough. Perhaps he does in fact care deeply about the man taking his party’s votes.
A predictably smaller affair, the media questions were dominated by a new poll, published just moments before Findlay started speaking, showing his party are set for their worst result since devolution while Reform UK leapfrog into second place in the Scottish parliament.
While Findlay was keen to dismiss polls as just polls, he was clearly shaken by the prospect of Reform UK decimating his party’s support. But the overlap in voters presents the Tory MSP with a bind: he can hardly present Farage as a bogeyman given that he is likely more popular among Tory voters than Findlay is.
Instead, the Conservative chief leant on a familiar warning: of the SNP.
Farage, Findlay claimed, would open the door to another five years of Swinney as first minister – something the Scottish Tory leader said actually keeps him from sleeping at night.
Farage, Findlay claimed, is simply not as worried about the SNP as he is. That appears to be the pitch the Tories have landed on for their 2026 election campaign.
“He's said so himself,” the Scottish Tory leader said of Farage. “He said, and this is a direct quote, he's ‘not that worried about the SNP’.”
Expect to hear the Tories bring that up again.
Ultimately, Findlay’s message was also clear, if desperate. Anyone who opposes independence should back the Tories and not Reform.
The Scottish Tory leader claimed that Swinney is not worried about the rise of Farage’s party. In fact, the SNP leader is “thrilled” that Reform will split the Unionist vote, Findlay said.
Asked if this was the case during the SNP campaign launch, Swinney insisted he did not see “anything attractive or beneficial about the prospect of Farage-style politics coming into the Scottish Parliament”.
Unfortunately for Swinney, it is not simply a “prospect”. Farage-style politics has well and truly arrived at Holyrood.
Take, for example, Findlay’s campaign launch, which saw him ape the Reform UK leader with dog-whistle claims of “asylum seekers, some who are here illegally” and warnings of unspecified “dangerous influences in our schools”.
If politicians insist on focusing on Farage, which it very much looks like they will for the 2026 election campaign, his influence on Scottish politics will only deepen.
