Don’t Vote Reform. We Are One People And We Depend On Each Other.

Tomorrow, Scotland votes. Reform UK is polling at around 18% — level with Labour, and a genuine force at Holyrood for the first time. Their central pitch is immigration control. A focus on immigration control is not just cover for a nasty white colonial mindset, and out of step with our health as a species — in the most concrete practical terms, it’s also the wrong answer for Scotland.

We are one species. The borders that divide us are recent inventions, drawn mostly by violence and driven by primitive survivalism and greed. The person who crossed a sea or boarded a flight to build a life somewhere new is not our enemy. They are, in the most literal sense, our kin. A politics that treats human beings as a problem to be repelled is a diminished politics, and voting for it diminishes us.

“The scale of migration to Scotland has consistently been lower than to England, in terms of the number of people coming in relative to the existing population. The result is that Scotland has a smaller migrant population in relation to its size than England and Wales: 10% foreign born compared with 17% in England, at the time of the latest censuses.

But migration has been more instrumental to population growth in Scotland than in England because natural change (births minus deaths) has been negative in Scotland each year since 2015.

Since 2020, internal migration from the rest of the UK has not been high enough to offset this decline. Without international migration, the population would have shrunk, although the scale of immigration since then has been around seven times higher than would have been needed to reach population stability.

Net migration to Scotland peaked at 64,000 in the year ending June 2023 and is forecasted to be as low as 4,000 in 2026. The latest ONS projections foresee the Scottish population declining from 2035 onwards, even with net migration stabilising at around 12,000 per year, although given the high immigration of recent years, the population may only return to its pre-Brexit level in 2059.

Migrants accounted for around 12% of payrolled employments in Scotland in 2024, although some industries are more reliant on migrant workers, including agriculture, forestry and fishing, and hospitality, where migrants accounted for more than 20% of employments. All sectors have seen a partial replacement of EU workers with non-EU workers since 2019.

Scottish universities attract high numbers of foreign higher education students, with official data showing that Scotland as a nation hosts more foreign students in numerical terms than some large European countries, including France and Italy, and more per capita than any country in Europe. The numbers enrolling at Scottish universities have declined slightly from a peak of 84,000 in 2022/23. There is no Scotland-specific data on how many students remain in Scotland after studying, although UK-wide, around 85% are still in the UK one year after arrival.

As of December 2025, Scotland was hosting around 6,700 asylum seekers, which was fewer relative to the size of its population than across the UK as a whole. Nearly 60% of Scotland’s asylum seekers live in Glasgow, which hosts the largest number of asylum seekers per head out of any local authority in the UK and the second largest in absolute terms (after Hillingdon in London). Around a quarter were housed in hotels, with hotel use in Scotland having risen since 2023 despite falling overall across the UK.”

Reform don’t understand human interdependence. They and their equivalents hate anyone who has any needs at all, including people within our societies. I can imagine a nightmarish scenario — not unlike the Sanctuary Districts in the Star Trek: DS9 episode Past Tense — where unemployed or poor people, deemed inconvenient by society are simply removed from view. It’s science fiction, but it was always meant as a cautionary tale. If Reform had their way and could do whatever they want, I can imagine they would create camps for poor people to keep them out of sight.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Across the United States, cities are already forcibly clearing homeless encampments — ‘sweeping’ tent communities off streets and out of parks, with people losing their belongings, their documents, and their connections to services in the process. Small collections of tents have begun appearing in London too, and an asylum seeker encampment in Dublin — a warning of things to come, some observers suggest, for how this phenomenon could spread. In Australia they already have nasty camps for asylum seekers. In the US Trump’s ICE has created camps for those he deems ‘undesirable’ where some may languish for years and some have already died. As of March 2026, 46 people had died in ICE custody or detention since the start of Trump’s second administration in January 2025. The number of deaths in 2025 exceeded the highest seen in over two decades. One death in January 2026 was ruled a homicide by the El Paso County Medical Examiner, despite ICE reporting it as a suicide. And in Israel there are detention camps for Palestinians where torture is rife and people just disappear indefinitely. The logic of removing inconvenient people from sight is already well established. The idea that under a Reform-style regime this could be extended is not so far-fetched.

6,700 asylum seekers are hardly a national threat, and the hotel housing isn’t an inevitability. It is an abject failure of policy and imagination by politicians. Asylum seekers should be allowed to work and contribute while they’re here, whether they remain or end up leaving after their applications are assessed. These are human beings who are often traumatised and desperate for human kindness. They flee the unliveable as any one of us would do if life became untenable where we are for whatever reason. It is a recurring human error to think that what happens to someone else, somewhere else, will never happen to us where we are. When the shoe is on the other foot, we might learn our lesson, but we don’t need to wait until it happens. We can use our imagination and learn from history and experience. We don’t know what the future holds for any of us and we can’t assume that things will never change where we are. What if we had to flee and became dependent on the kindness of others?

Reform is guided by the same ancient primitive tribal instinct that told our ancestors to look after ‘their own’ and drive away (or exploit) the ‘other’. Immigration isn’t a modern phenomenon. Humans always migrated out of necessity, away from hardship and in search of better conditions. Reform are deceiving people because they don’t object to all forms of migration. Colonialism and settler-colonialism — theft, murder and the dispossession of people who already occupy a place — are also a form of migration and Reform love that. They love Israel. But they hate migrants like me who don’t want to take from anyone or replace anyone. They just want to join their fellow human beings in a new destination and live alongside them.

Migration has been the only thing holding the numbers up in Scotland’s declining population. The National Records of Scotland, publishing new projections just last week, revised their figures sharply downward: Scotland’s population is now projected to peak in 2033 and then fall, reaching 5.47 million by 2049 — 1.3% lower than today. Only a year ago, the projection was for growth to 5.78 million by 2047. That is a reversal of over 300,000 people in a single revised forecast, driven primarily, in NRS’s own words, by migration falling from unusually high levels. According to the Scottish Government Immigration White Paper 2025, Scotland’s working-age population will only continue to grow if migration is maintained at current rates. Without it, there is no workforce to sustain pensions, no staff for care homes, no economic base for the rural communities that are already emptying.

I am a migrant - twice over actually. I came here, I stayed, I became part of this place. I was welcomed here. I work and contribute like all migrants. Migrants did not create decades of underinvestment, stagnant wages, or failures in social housing supply. Migrants are often caught within those same crises, even if headlines rarely acknowledge this.

I heard a worrying story this week: someone told me that a few high school boys, old enough to vote at 16, were planning to vote Reform ‘just for laughs’. I hope they have mature parents who can discuss this with them.

I understand the impulse to treat a broken political system with contempt. But this is not a joke. The numbers are real, the consequences are long, and Scotland cannot afford to hand any power to a party whose central promise is to make our demographic crisis worse and to usher in an era of nastiness, social alienation, confusion, and economic chaos.

Don’t vote Reform.

Vote for common sense, cooperation, humanity, and courage to stand up against wrongs and for victims.

Vote for protection of our natural environment.

Vote for justice, for Palestinian human rights.

but most of all

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