Eyebrows were raised in the Scottish media pack yesterday when John Swinney appeared to declare an independent immigration policy. In his speech to the SNP’s conference, the First Minister announced that he would be sponsoring an unspecified number of foreign care workers left high and dry by the UK Government’s new visa restrictions to come to Scotland and work in social care.

Immigration is not a devolved power, and the Holyrood government is in no position to change UK policy on visas. In reality, Swinney will be assisting foreign care workers already in the UK to relocate to Scotland, taking advantage of a transition period before tighter UK visa restrictions bite in 2028.

Like so much at this SNP conference, the policy was an exercise in political theatre, designed to show that Scotland is more caring and welcoming of immigrants than the nasty English. “Scotland’s older people,” said Swinney, “must not pay the price for Westminster prejudice.”

Many Scottish nationalists think Scots are culturally immune to racism and nativism. “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns,” they like to say, meaning that we are all the same under the skin — not like the English, who go about raising provocative flags, complaining about not seeing white faces, and voting for parties that want mass deportation of illegal migrants. Swinney claimed Scotland would not join the “race to the Right” and that “refugees are welcome here.” The First Minister has long argued that the country needs more immigration to help pay for its ageing population, yet it’s not clear that voters share his enthusiasm. Indeed, recent opinion polls suggest that attitudes are changing fast north of the border.

A Norstat opinion poll in the Times just over two weeks ago suggested that a clear majority of Scots (56%) think immigration is already too high. Only 8%, fewer than one in ten, agree with Swinney that Scotland needs more immigration. Some 60% of Scots even agree with mass detention and deportation of illegal migrants.

As recently as 2018, Scottish voters were far less likely than their English counterparts to say that immigration was a key issue for them. Indeed, Scotland remains 94% white, largely unaffected by the significant waves of immigration into England since the Sixties. However, that doesn’t mean that Scots don’t have concerns.

Like the rest of the country, Scotland has experienced flag protests — albeit involving the Saltire — and demonstrations outside asylum hotels in towns including Falkirk and Perth. Glasgow City Council has threatened to halt new asylum seekers from coming to the city because of “increased levels of community tension”. Perhaps surprisingly, Swinney agrees, though he blames Westminster for not putting adequate funding in place to house the refugees dispersed to Scotland’s largest city.

The most obvious manifestation of the transformation in Scottish social attitudes is, however, the remarkable rise of Reform UK in the opinion polls. A decade ago, Nigel Farage, then Ukip leader, had to be rescued by police from an Edinburgh pub as he hid from anti-racist demonstrators. Now there is a real possibility that his new party could become the main opposition in Holyrood. At the very least, according to the polling guru Professor John Curtice, there is likely to be a sizeable bloc of 19 Reform MSPs sitting in Holyrood after next year’s elections.

However, none of this should be too surprising. Scotland is really no different from those Nordic countries so beloved of SNP propaganda, which have all had anti-immigrant parties either in power or close to it in recent times. Denmark may have a social democratic government, but it is deporting migrants and even demolishing ghettos — or “parallel societies” — to promote integration by bulldozer.

Many Scots like to think of themselves as morally superior to the English. But when push comes to shove, the differences are not that great. Had Scotland experienced the same amounts of mass immigration as England, one can imagine the politics being almost identical. Nor should the SNP, a nationalist party, be surprised if its promotion of Scottish culture and identity generates a nativism similar to that of nationalist parties on the continent. Scots, like all Britons, are welcoming people. But this doesn’t mean Scots care less about the impact of mass immigration than people south of the border.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.

iainmacwhirter

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