Rhetoric versus reality
Reform Scotland has recently been positioning itself as the anti-establishment party, the voice for people who are ‘scunnered’ with the SNP, Labour and the Conservatives. It presents itself as something new, something disruptive, something that finally represents and stands up for the working class.
But every political party in Scotland claims to speak for ‘ordinary people’. What makes Reform different is not the claim itself, but the insistence that it represents a genuine break from the status quo. That it is not like the rest. That it offers something fundamentally different.
Since it is the new kid on the block, so to speak, it’s worth scrutinising this claim in detail.
Anti-establishment?
A good place to start is with its funding. Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based businessman heavily invested in cryptocurrency, recently made the largest individual political donation in UK history to Reform: £9mn. Are we supposed to believe that this is an act of political generosity, that this money is somehow motivated by a desire to improve the conditions of the working class? Or is it far more plausible that this donation is an investment, one that comes with expectations? Expectations that the system which enabled such wealth accumulation remains intact, and that policies favourable to those interests, particularly in areas like cryptocurrency, are protected.
There is nothing anti-establishment about being bankrolled by global capital.
And yet, Reform has found an audience. Part of that is because it is effective at identifying real frustrations. Like Donald Trump in the United States, it has have a knack for articulating what people already feel is going wrong. The NHS is under strain. Young people are leaving university into an economy that offers them little, while apprenticeships and trade pathways remain underfunded. Housing is unaffordable. Energy security is weak. There is no credible just transition for oil and gas workers. Hundreds of thousands of people remain out of work and reliant on benefits.
None of this is controversial. These are real, material problems. The issue is not that Reform is wrong to point them out. The issue is that, beyond identifying them, it offers very little that resembles a serious solution.
Instead, everything seems to come back to one central idea: tax cuts.
Tax reform
Reform’s flagship economic policy is to collapse Scotland’s six tax bands into three, align them with the rest of the UK, and then reduce each band by one percentage point. This, we are told, will drive economic growth, improve public services, and even solve staffing shortages in essential professions like healthcare, education and policing, by incentivising these professions with higher take-home pay.
But this is not a new idea. It is simply a repackaging of trickle-down economics, the belief that reducing taxes, particularly for higher earners, will somehow stimulate enough growth to benefit everyone. This approach has been tried repeatedly, and it has consistently failed to deliver the outcomes promised.
The claim that tax cuts will solve staffing shortages is also particularly weak. Doctors, teachers and police officers (examples Reform Scotland uses) already earn above the median salary in Scotland. These are stable, relatively well-paid professions, and they are already attractive career paths for many. The issue is not that people are insufficiently incentivised. It is that there is not enough investment in training, infrastructure and staffing capacity. Tax cuts do nothing to address that.
Reform Scotland’s proposals on property taxation follow a similar logic. By phasing out the land and buildings transaction tax (LBTT) and replacing it with a flat annual property tax, it moves away from a system where higher-value property transactions are taxed more heavily. Depending on how such a tax is structured, this risks flattening the burden across vastly different property values, reducing the relative contribution of high-value property owners while asking proportionally more from everyone else. Framed as “fair and predictable”, this represents a clear shift away from taxing wealth and towards a less progressive model.
So far, the pattern is clear: policies that are presented as bold and anti-establishment, but which in practice disproportionately benefit those who are already better off.
Net zero abandonment
This contradiction becomes even more stark when we turn to energy and net zero. Reform argues that Scotland’s climate policies are ideological and economically damaging, and that abandoning net zero would be in the country’s interests. But this is a complete inversion of reality. The economic and scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the transition to renewable energy. Continuing to tie Scotland’s future to oil and gas extraction is not pragmatic, it is ideological.
Scotland has significant renewable potential. There are challenges, of course. Many projects are foreign-owned, meaning profits flow out of the country. Pricing mechanisms designed to incentivise development can lock in higher costs for consumers. And renewable energy is inherently intermittent, requiring investment in storage solutions. But these are engineering and policy challenges, not fundamental barriers. Battery technology is improving. Green hydrogen offers additional storage possibilities. With sufficient investment and political will, these issues can be addressed.
What cannot be addressed is the reality of a declining North Sea. According to Uplift UK, the basin is mature and in terminal decline. Even with new drilling, the UK’s reliance on imported gas is set to increase significantly in the coming decades. Most of what remains is oil, much of which is exported, offering little in terms of domestic energy security. New licences and exploration may slightly reduce import dependence, but only marginally.
The economic case is just as weak. Oil and gas extraction in the North Sea is becoming increasingly uneconomic without substantial tax breaks. Even Lord Browne, former CEO of BP, admits that it is “hard to believe that finding and developing the very limited oil and gas resources that remain will be economic”. Consequently, major energy companies continue to benefit from generous tax treatment. As Uplift UK highlighted, “In 2024 Shell reported a negative UK tax figure of £12.5 million while posting global post-tax profits of £18 billion”.
The argument that continued drilling is necessary for jobs also does not hold up. Employment in the sector has already fallen dramatically over the past decade, as much as half, whereby 441,000 jobs in 2013 shrank to 213,000 in 2023. This isn’t expected to improve with new production. Featured in the news recently is the debate over whether Rosebank oil field should be approved, but the project’s own developers Equinor have themselves admitted that the project would only create approximately 255 new direct jobs.
The choice then, is not between preserving a thriving industry or abandoning it. That industry is already shrinking. The real choice is whether to manage that decline through a just transition, or to ignore it.
Reform chooses to ignore it
By this point, the claim that Reform represents a meaningful alternative begins to unravel. Its policies do not challenge the underlying economic model. They do not redistribute power or resources in any meaningful way. They do not offer a structural solution to the problems it so effectively describes.
I have long argued, alongside others, that Scotland’s mainstream political parties, despite their slightly distinct opinions on tax and spending, all exist within the same neoliberal economic paradigm, whereby the government is constrained and reactive, international capital is pandered to, and ultimately the interests of capital prevail.
Reform also operates firmly within this same paradigm, despite its lambasting of other parties. Therefore, Reform’s distinction is not one of substance, but rather presentation.
More in Politics
Bylines Network Gazette is out!
The latest Bylines Network Gazette is out now. Become a Friend of Bylines Network or upgrade to a paid Substack subscription, and you will get access to a vital collection of citizen articles and stories.
Journalism by the people, for the people.
