SOMETHING is rotten in the state of Scotland – so why does it feel like Reform are the only political party willing to say so?

That isn’t to say that Nigel Farage’s pet project has any answers for the actual problems facing Scotland today – they absolutely do not.

But while the SNP, Labour and Conservatives are content to trade power back and forth in service to the status quo, Reform have positioned themselves as a challenger to the establishment at a time when it is clear that establishment thinking has failed us.

Of course, Farage has no answers. Like with all right-wing parties promising solutions the world over, they offer nothing but misery.

But it would be a mistake to think that everyone drawn to Reform is simply right-wing. Many want change, and unlike the mainstream parties who are too afraid to lay the blame where it is deserved, Reform have offered up a target – even if it is the wrong one.

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Migrants are no more responsible for stagnating wages than trans people are for the dire state of funding for women’s sports. But while the main parties at Holyrood continue to act like the systems that govern our lives should be gently tweaked at most, Reform have listened to Scotland’s concerns and said “yes, you’re right, this isn’t working”.

And therein lies the challenge facing Scotland’s political left.

Where Reform is organised, the left is in disarray – in part through being relentlessly shredded by Britain’s right-wing press and the establishment politicians ready to eschew any sense of principle for that precious endorsement from The Sun. But also, if we’re being honest, by falling into the stereotypes that have defined the left forever: too insular, too academic, too ready to speak down to voters instead of on their level.

Fuck knows I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. But the clock is now ticking in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. The ascent of Reform to a position of influence in future Scottish elections feels inevitable – but an organised left that speaks to the issues affecting people’s lives today, and which lays the blame where it is deserved, will be not only a barrier to far-right candidates taking power, but a transformative movement in and of itself.

After all, to fix a leak, first you need to know where the water is coming from. You don’t set up a bucket in the downstairs neighbour’s flat and tell them that’s as good as it can get. You fix the damn leak.

The SNP, with the unfortunate assistance of the Greens, have cut local councils to the bone. That has had a greater impact on the day-to-day of everyone in Scotland than recognising the humanity of asylum seekers and refugees who have been forced to flee their homes.

As a millennial, I have never experienced a Scotland that wasn’t, in one sense or another, in economic turmoil: the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008; the brutal austerity of the Conservative Party’s decade of incompetence; an entire generation that has only ever known declining standards of living. What does Labour think saving a penny on the pint will do to address that? Thirty pints of Tennent’s later and I’ll have enough to finally buy a single Freddo bar. Truly, transformative change under “son of a toolmaker” Keir Starmer.

This is not a problem that exists only within Labour. Regardless of where the membership sits, the SNP and Conservative leadership seem equally disinterested in upsetting the system, barring perhaps the radical idea of Scottish independence – though even that would be functionally useless should the first party to take control of Holyrood post-independence sign the country up wholesale for the same failing neoliberal politics of the past decades.

For all their differences, the mainstream political parties have still chosen to pull up a pew to the same worn table, and though they may sit at opposite ends, all are backing cuts to local services and chasing after a perceived right-wing vote that I do not believe exists – instead mistaking Reform’s popularity as support for far-right thinking over support for the promise of real, tangible change.

Change, real change, must be the message of the left. For years, the right-wing press and politicians have framed even the mildest left-leaning policies as far-left communism, so much so that I suspect many voters have no concept of what a real left-wing stance looks like.

That is on us to change, to speak unequivocally about who is really responsible for draining resources from our communities and stripping welfare from those who need it: Not migrants on small boats, but billionaires on superyachts.

It isn’t refugees who pump up the cost of food and electricity every year while whining about hard decisions (right before boasting of record profits) nor is it asylum seekers who throttle tax bands for the benefit of the super rich. That would be the 1%, and the politicians in their pockets.

Labour’s election was not, as some bootlickers referred to it, an example of “adults being back in the room”. They never left the room. They never left the table. Reform is not in the room. It’s hammering at the door. That’s what people want. No more cosy, consensus politicians decrying the “other side” before joining them for a subsidised pint in Parliament.

Someone needs to be kicking the door in. And if it isn’t the left, it will be Farage – and Scotland deserves better than the empty promises of the right.