Scotland needs immigration to bolster the size of its working-age population, the country’s first minister has said, mounting a forceful defence of diversity in the face of rising support for Reform ahead of next May’s Holyrood elections.
John Swinney was speaking at the end of a year marked by a significant shift in Scottish public sentiment, with Nigel Farage’s party securing 26% of the vote in its first Holyrood byelection test.
Farage now polls higher in popularity than Keir Starmer and Scotland has been forced to confront its prevailing self-image – heavily promoted by the Scottish National party government – as a welcoming country in the face of protests outside asylum hotels and flag raising across the country.
“Of course I am concerned about it because I believe with every fibre of my body in the importance of inclusion within our society,” Swinney said. “During my lifetime Scotland has become a much more diverse country. I’m very proud of that, and I want to make sure that remains our fundamental outlook.”
As 750 of Reform UK’s Scottish supporters gather this weekend for an event with Farage, Swinney said he accepted that some “will be attracted by the absolutely core prejudicial message”.
But he argued that far-right views of the type expressed at some asylum accommodation protests – which have taken place in East Kilbride, Falkirk, Perth, Aberdeen and most recently in Inverness, where the UK government is converting a barracks to house asylum seekers – represent “a very, very small minority in Scotland” and suggested there was “quite a lot of travelling support” for Reform.
“What the far right do is to apportion the blame for those concerns to asylum seekers or migrants and I think that is the root of the poison that Farage and his cohorts are spreading within Scotland,” he said.
Swinney also made a clear distinction, however, between those who hold far-right views and people with “legitimate points” about pressure on local services or community safety, which he noted were not unique to areas where migrants were housed.
Recent polling suggests immigration has become a voter priority for the first time in Scotland, and focus groups reference views previously more apparent in England and Wales that politicians fail to take such concerns seriously enough.
Swinney said he was prepared to listen, but also wanted to engage in rational argument about the economic benefits of migration, particularly in the context of many people being “angry and frustrated” about living standards.
He said he often spoke to businesses that were struggling to recruit staff. “We have a problem with the size of our working-age population, which I think needs to be addressed by migration,” he said. “It’s in all of our interests to have a welcoming economy that brings people in, can generate wealth and makes us all much wealthier as a consequence.”
He said he had of course spoken to voters with “strong views”. “My approach is not to dismiss people’s legitimate concerns, but I would engage with them and give them an alternative point of view,” he said. “My job as first minister is to do as much as I can to overcome those attitudes, to persuade them not to vote for Reform.
“Let’s not think that the only pressure on public services is because of migration. We’ve been swimming against the tide of austerity since 2010, where public services have been consistently undermined through reductions in funding by the UK government.”
So people concerned about public services should blame the UK government rather than asylum seekers? Not the Scottish government? “We’ve taken decisions to break out the mould of austerity, like asking higher earners to pay more taxations so we can begin to invest in public services.,” he said.
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Scots of colour, including the former first minister Humza Yousaf, have previously cautioned against “Scottish exceptionalism”, particularly when the country avoided the far-right-led riots that swept England in the summer of 2024.
Swinney denied complacency, pointing to a plethora of government programmes that promote community integration. “I don’t think at any stage were we immune from these sentiments,” he said.
He argued that the Brexit referendum, in which the majority of Scots voted to remain in the EU, proved that “at the beginning of all of this, very different attitudes prevailed in Scotland and the rest of the UK”.
He also denied that a strategy of attacking Reform risked inadvertently boosting its vote, as some of his own MSPs suggested had happened in the Hamilton byelection, where the SNP lost the seat to Labour with Reform coming in a strong third from a standing start. “The visibility of their support is clear and if I don’t acknowledge that, you could quite easily say to me that I’ve missed something very significant in front of my eyes,” he said.
Ahead of the SNP’s first Holyrood election campaign event, Swinney said he regrettably believed Reform would win seats in the Scottish parliament in May. Polling suggests the party will win a clutch of seats in the high teens through Holyrood’s proportional system.
The same polling has the SNP back in the lead after a disastrous general election result, with Labour pulled back to second place by the unpopularity of the UK government.
Swinney would not be drawn on whether the SNP would work with Scottish Labour to lock Reform out of any kingmaker role, but offered the unsurprising “absolute guarantee” that he would not work with Reform and intended to win an outright majority.
He said that after May there could well be a Plaid first minister in Wales, a Sinn Féin first minister in Northern Ireland and an SNP first minister in Scotland. “The UK government would have an altogether more challenging set of circumstances on its hands,” he said.
