THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION

English and Scottish respondents both, on balance, share concerns
about UKIP’s impact on debates about immigration, but there is much
broader agreement about this among Scots. A slim majority of Scots say
that ‘racist’ is a fair description of UKIP, though 30% of Scots say that this
is unfair, while English respondents would acquit the party on this, by 43%
to 40%.
The negative Scottish reaction to the 2015 UKIP election campaign
presents some important challenges to campaigners for Britain to leave the
European Union in a referendum. Strikingly, 44% of Scots who are negative
about the EU and 61% of those who are on the fence feel that UKIP talked
too much about immigration in the campaign, as do 78% of pro-EU Scots.
So a “better off out” campaign that wants to win Scottish votes –
which may be indispensable to winning a majority for a British exit, or
indeed to maintaining the UK while doing so – almost certainly needs to
strike a rather different tone from that which Scots felt David Coburn and
Nigel Farage offered them in UKIP’s 2015 general election campaign.
Eurosceptics need to broaden their arguments beyond immigration
to get a hearing in Scotland– but Scots would also like to hear other
parties engage more confidently with the challenges of managing rising
immigration effectively.
35 British Future / The Politics of Immigration