These are tricky times to be a Scottish Conservative. To be fair, that’s not an unusual situation. But 2025 would seem to present a particularly thorny challenge.
There are a good few reasons for this. One can be seen in the relative invisibility of the party over recent months. This is not due to a lack of effort on the part of its new leader Russell Findlay. He is an able parliamentary performer, an energetic campaigner, and makes a robust and consistent argument for “common sense” conservatism, albeit with many of the details yet to be filled in. But that is not enough.
Findlay’s problem is that there is only room for so many narratives in politics at once. During the 2000s, the UK Tories struggled to get a look-in not just because of New Labour’s political dominance and tactical acuity, but because the TB-GBs were a much more compelling and significant contest than the one between government and opposition.
In Scotland today, the Conservatives, unfortunately for them, are one of the least interesting stories. As the parties gear up for the 2026 Holyrood election, focus is inevitably turning to the SNP-Labour head-to-head.
The return of the Nats to something like popularity under John Swinney and Kate Forbes is causing Anas Sarwar all sorts of tactical and strategic difficulties. Swinney is showing an unexpected degree of political nous, setting traps for Labour on welfare issues such as the two-child benefit cap and the winter fuel allowance. He has stopped banging on about independence, for now at least, and is concentrating his fire on Keir Starmer’s underwhelming administration, which has managed to present the First Minister with some gaping open goals.
Sarwar’s bet, which for much of last year appeared both a smart and winning one, was that pledging to tackle the issues the SNP had for so long avoided, such as boosting economic growth and forcing through public-service reforms, would attract an electorate that after nearly two decades of Nat rule would be firmly in the mood for change. But he has yet to set out what that would mean in practice, which means his “vision” for the future of Scotland can come across as little more than rhetoric. Labour risks appearing palely technocratic rather than an inspiring government-in-waiting. With Swinney now talking about economic growth and reform of the NHS, Labour is suddenly operating in a more crowded field.
If the SNP is currently winning the politics, there is plenty of time for that to change, and the polls remain intriguingly poised. This high-stakes cat and mouse game will continue, which leaves little space for the Tories to be heard.
The second formidable challenge facing Findlay is on his home turf – the right, rather than the left. Reform UK is providing a second narrative that means it is commanding the column inches and the airtime that might otherwise have belonged to the Conservatives. This is in part because Reform is a new story, in Scotland at least, and we are all fascinated by the new. High poll ratings, creditable performances in local by-elections, and a better-than-expected showing in Scotland at the general election has people like me scratching their chins – what does it mean? Why is it happening? How far can an insurgent, reactionary movement go in a Scotland that has for so long been dominated by the centre left? At the very least, the rise of Nigel Farage and co is teaching Scotland something about itself.
This takes us to another issue with which Findlay must wrestle: which way to jump? In a column in the Scotsman this week, the Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser pointedly praised the approach taken by his former leader Ruth Davidson, who led the Tories to something like popularity in the mid-2010s by seeking to appeal across mainstream Scotland. “It is by having a distinctive, moderate, centre-right agenda that the Scottish Conservatives will progress,” he wrote. Voters are “scunnered with the state of politics”, which is helping Reform, but the response should not be “leaning into the Reform agenda, with its simplistic, populist positions on issues such as immigration”.
I’m not partial to the internal conversations Findlay is having with Fraser, who he beat for the leadership, and with others. But it was hard not to read the article as something of a warning, whether to the boss or to insiders arguing that Reform should be bearded on its own territory. It’s certainly true that you can’t out-Farage Farage, and at least arguable that it is dangerous to try.
To all of this can be added the decline in salience of the independence issue. Aside from hardliners on both sides, the constitution simply isn’t being much talked about. Even Davidson will admit that a significant part of her success was built on providing a staunch defence of the Union at a time when its future was in real question. Without that keystone political debate, where the Tories had a clear, unambiguous position that appealed to Unionists across the spectrum, it becomes harder to gain traction.
After a bruising leadership contest, Findlay needs all this like a hole in the head. He has sought to unite the party behind him and, to be fair, there haven’t been many noises off. Whether Fraser’s article amounts to such will become clearer in the months ahead. But that’s only one problem amid many.
[See also: Why Farage is turning left]
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