Starmer has made Scotland hospitable territory for Reform
The old orthodoxy, that Reform was too culturally English to make progress elsewhere in the UK, has been blown out of the water.
“It’s Labour down, Reform up, and everybody else pretty much, at the moment, treading water.” Those words, uttered by Sir John Curtice, universally acknowledged guru of British electoral tea-leaf reading, might have held a fatal resonance for Keir Starmer as they reported Labour’s prospects UK-wide. Yet, like many Labour leaders before him, he would have reassured himself with the thought: but there is Scotland.