Reform is a party on the rise in Scotland.
Last week, Graham Simpson MSP defected from the Tories just before the end of the Holyrood recess.
All you have to do is look at election results and opinion polls. At the General Election last year Reform got 7% of the vote in Scotland.
STV NewsThe pollster, More in Common suggests Nigel Farage’s party could now be on 16%, just 1% behind Labour.
Last year, Reform got 7.8% of the vote in the Westminster Hamilton seat. Just a few months ago, it got 26% in the Holyrood Hamilton by-election.
For weeks now, we have been trying to get into a Reform party meeting in Scotland, to find out who is joining, to see who they are.
STV NewsWe haven’t been able to get into a local meeting but we did get into their annual dinner in Glasgow.
It was in the Corinthian Club, it was quite fancy and it was much bigger than last year.
Reform deputy leader Richard Tice told me they had moved from the smaller room, next door, to the big room holding about 200 people.
STV NewsI spoke to a number of people who had moved from the Scottish Conservatives to Reform, a couple who had switched from Labour, and some from no previous party. I’m told there were even a couple of former SNP members and an ex-Alba member there, although I didn’t actually get to meet them.
One young former Tory told me he didn’t recognise his old party and that “Reform were the Conservatives now”.
A former Conservative councillor who said that when she went canvassing for the Tories, people were reluctant to tell her who they were voting for, but now she was in Reform, voters were to tell her.
She said she felt the Tories hadn’t just moved too far to the centre, but “they had moved too far to the left”.
The Labour switcher said their old party had given up on the working class and that Reform was the new party of the working class.
That is quite a feat to pull off for public school-educated millionaires like Nigel Farage and Richard Tice.
When I asked Reform MSP Graham Simpson about his new party’s policies on the day of his defection, he said they would be working on them over the next few weeks.
We know they want to scrap what Richard Tice calls “net stupid zero” targets, and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has already followed that call. Their big plan is to cut immigration figures.
It is a wholly reserved issue but it is already clear it will become one at play in the Scottish Parliament election. So there are just two areas where Reform is setting the political agenda despite having very little in the way of policies.
It might not all be plain sailing though. They could have some internal party problems to come in Scotland.
They are still pretty new, coming from a variety of backgrounds so there could be a few disagreements. Crucially, they have yet to draw up their list rankings for the election.
That is where most if not all of their MSPs will come from, so there could be fierce competition. And last week Nigel Farage told me the party would have a Scottish leader before the election next May.
Richard Tice then told me that leader would be elected democratically by members. A leadership election and list rankings in the run-up to the election could prove explosive.
As we get closer to the election, the scrutiny will step up, not just from the media but from other parties and from voters, but what meeting Reform members showed me was that they are not that different from members of other political parties.
I met some who I had met at other political parties’ conferences and events in the past. They could be in your family, in your street, in your workplace, they could be anywhere – Reform members are among us and people are voting for them.
Colin Mackay’s full report and coverage from the Reform conference will be live on tonight’s STV News at Six
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