THE Scottish TUC has given a steer to the whole British labour movement in identifying the rise of the far right as the biggest challenge we face.

As Trademark Belfast’s Stiofan O Nuaillain told the TUC’s anti-racism summit last December, we have a four-year window to defeat the far right. By the next general election, something needs to have shifted dramatically if we are to ensure that some combination of Reform UK and an increasingly hard-right Tory Party do not shape the political agenda: something they already do to an extent, given Labour’s pandering to anti-immigrant scaremongering at home and Donald Trump abroad. The combined Reform-Tory vote was higher than Labour’s last July and Keir Starmer’s nine months in office have only made his party more unpopular.

Scotland’s trade unionists indicate the way forward in two respects. One is the insistence on opposition to the far right being rooted in opposition to the status quo, rather than in defence of it. This dilemma was highlighted in Scotland by the summit called by First Minister John Swinney: inviting all sizeable parties bar Reform to a government-sponsored event allows Nigel Farage to continue to pose as “the one that’s different” and lump other parties together as representatives of a broken system.