The ‘fed up’ Scottish town that voted for Reform UK

Reform UK threw a Christmas party last weekend, and they had more to celebrate than just the festive season.

A few days earlier the party pulled off a surprise victory in a council by-election in the ward of Whitburn and Blackburn in West Lothian. This was their first ever win in Scotland.

So what has led a former mining town between Glasgow and Edinburgh to turn to the party of Nigel Farage?

In the words of multiple people we spoke to, it’s all quite simple – they’re “fed up”.

Our morning began in Andy’s Coffee House on Whitburn’s main street.

GB News – the favoured channel of Nigel Farage – was on the TV as the owner Andy Valentini made the coffees.

Andy told us that he allowed Labour, the SNP and Reform to leave leaflets out in his café during the by-election campaign.

He wasn’t hugely surprised by the result. After all, he explains “the bulk of the customers were actually taking Reform leaflets”.

And he’s glad to see this new-ish party start to have some electoral success in Scotland, insisting that the country needs “a huge, big change”.

Andy accuses Labour of “destroying the country” when it comes to their approach to small businesses.

He says his electricity bills have gone from £300 a month to £900 in the past few years.

And increases in the minimum wage and employer national insurance have resulted in him “taking a big hit”.

Longer term, current costs mean that he doesn’t think his business is sustainable.

Migration is also an area that the café owner thinks needs addressed.

He insists he backs legal migration, pointing out his grandfather moved from Italy to Scotland, but says “I’d like to see [Reform] stopping illegal migration full stop”.

“Nigel Farage is the man to do it”, he adds.

Andy isn’t alone. There are others we spoke to in Whitburn who like the approach that the Reform UK leader is taking.

Darren Ainslie, who popped in for a roll on his way to pick up waste in his van, complains that “everyone’s skint”.

He’s also concerned about people arriving in the UK via small boats, saying “you don’t know who you’re getting”.

Darren says he’ll be voting Reform UK at the next Holyrood election.

“Our governments now are not listening. And if this is what it takes to make them listen then Reform’s got to be the way to go.”

But Reform are by no means universally popular in this town.

Susan Snow – a retired nursey operator – told us she wasn’t pleased when the party won last week’s by-election.

She said she doesn’t like Nigel Farage and questioned how genuine he is.

Another woman we spoke to said that Reform wanted to “bring things back to the old days, the 1930s” and questioned how inclusive the party was.

Regardless of their view on Reform, no one we spoke to seemed particularly politically satisfied at the moment.

We spent around ninety minutes on the main street talking to passers-by. Some were happy to give their views on camera, others didn’t want to be recorded.

But the phrase that came up time and time again was “fed up”.

People were “fed up” with the main parties, “fed up” with what they regarded as poor-quality public services, and “fed up” with what they perceived as a lack of change.

And there were specifics. A number of people brought up migration and questioned why asylum seekers were being housed in hotels.

The UK government said it aimed to end this practice by the time of the next general election.

There were also complaints about the NHS, potholes, homelessness and the benefits bill.

We found no shortage of residents who were at least sympathetic to Reform UK’s approach.

And they weren’t all former Labour or Conservative voters.

One woman told us that she had been a “massive SNP supporter” until a few years ago, but was now “a wee bit homeless” and understood why local people were opting for Reform.

Though she questioned how much she personally trusted the new right-wing party.

In the aftermath of last week’s by-election, the SNP said they had run a campaign focused on “the real challenges faced by our communities”.

Scottish Labour acknowledged that voters were frustrated, with Deputy Leader Jackie Baillie saying that “politics must aspire to being more than Reform and the SNP talking up division for their own political gain.”

We’re only a few months away from a Scottish election, and we would have expected areas like Whitburn and Blackburn to be a tussle between the SNP and Labour.

We shouldn’t overplay the significance of one council by-election. This does not represent a complete shift in Scottish politics.

But it’s a moment nonetheless.

The polls do seem to suggest that Reform UK are now serious players in Scotland, on the verge of delivering a significant number of MSPs next May.

And the mounting evidence that some Scots seem willing to give them a shot injects a massive dose of unpredictability into the looming election campaign.