Holyrood 2026: an election of unknowns

The next Holyrood elections are now only nine months away and they look set to be the most unpredictable elections in the history of the Scottish Parliament. No one, not even the Scottish media’s polling guru John Curtice, can claim to know what the results of May 2026’s election is going to be. In this respect it will be a very different election from the last elections in Scotland, the Westminster general election of July 2024 when it was widely expected that Labour was going to win, the only uncertainty being the scale of its victory. Since that election there has been a political sea change, not just in Scotland, but in across the UK as a whole. People who voted for Keir Starmer’s party expecting nothing have still been disappointed, and now that disappointment has turned to anger, disgust, and a contempt mirroring the contempt which Starmer has for the traditional principles of the Labour party.

Meanwhile the Conservatives are facing an existential crisis. Russell Findlay and Kemi Badenoch are both disasters as leaders, with Findlay having lost three of his MSPs in his relatively short tenure as Scottish branch manager as he continues in his quixotic attempt to chase after the even more vile Reform UK. But it would be unfair to blame all the Tories’ woes on the arrogance of their hapless leaders. The Tories are increasingly giving the impression of a party which has lost it soul, quite an achievement for a party which sold its soul to Satan under Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and then sold its sanity to the howling English nationalist grievance mongers of Brexit following the 2016 EU referendum.

The Tories have been out-nastied by the grimacing ghouls of Reform UK, a party which has taken the lies and deceit which have characterised British politics for decades and turned it into an art form by sheer dint of refusing to engage with reality. Unlike the Tories, Reform is not politically handicapped by insanity, insanity is its brand. Reform offers simple and simplistic Anglo-British nationalist solutions to complex problems and has successfully weaponised the demonisation of minorities and marginalised communities about whom it lies shamelessly. Reform UK is the political wing of the mob of peasants with torches and pitchforks. Aided by tech bros and algorithms and a traditional media which has all but abandoned its role of holding power to account, the moral panic and conspiracy theories which are Reform’s stock in trade are highly effective in distracting public anger from the real causes of deteriorating public services, and a dysfunctional political system which is no longer responsive to the needs of the majority. That would be the ever widening gulf between rich and poor, the greed of the super-rich and the capture of democracy by the dark money and network of shady think tanks which the wealthy fund and nourish.

Despite its claims to represent the voices of ordinary people, Reform UK will do nothing to change this corrupt system because it is a creature of it, even more so than Labour or the Tories. Reform UK is a political con trick on an epic scale, a trick which like Starmer before it, can only be pulled off while in opposition. The public anger and fury which will ensue upon the realisation that Farage’s promises of meaningful change are even more deceitful than Starmer’s will be orders of magnitude greater than the anger currently being directed at Labour, but by that time Farage will have decimated what remains of the UK’s already fragile democratic safeguards and trashed the civic and human rights and rights of protest of the entire population under the guise of “tackling illegal immigration”. Those that a Reform UK government will deem enemies will include anti-racism protestors, the LGBT community, climate change activists, Pro-Palestinian protestors, and, make no mistake, supporters of Scottish and Welsh independence and Irish reunification.

In next year’s Holyrood elections, Reform looks set to return a small but significant cohort of MSPs, the exact number is impossible to guess, but most of their gains are likely to come at the expense of the Tories.

The potential nightmare of Farage as Prime Minister is still some years off. More immediately in next year’s Scottish elections, Labour is facing a twin challenge. On one side, Reform UK will hoover up socially conservative Labour voters who are dead set against independence, on the other Jeremy Corbyn’s as yet unnamed new party could pose a significant challenge on the left. Caught between left and right populism, Labour could be seriously damaged, and that might allow the SNP and the Scottish Greens enough of a breathing space to win a safe majority between them. Under its new leadership of Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay, the Scottish Greens look set to put more emphasis on independence and unlike their previous leader Lorna Slater, have ruled out any government deal with Labour.

For the SNP, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party represents both a potential threat and an opportunity. Corbyn has said that he supports the right of the people of Scotland to an independence referendum should they want one, although he has notably not said exactly how he’d determine whether the people of Scotland want one. Nevertheless, Corbyn’s new party could peel off left wing SNP voters who are unhappy with the SNP leadership’s recent moves to centrism. But Corbyn’s main source of votes is likely to be people who voted Labour who are angered and alienated by Starmer’s transformation of Labour into a centre-right party and who are not yet entirely sold on Scottish independence. This could potentially reduce Labour’s vote share to a significant extent and allow the SNP to retain seats that they otherwise might have lost. We can however be quite certain that Corbyn’s new party will not receive a fraction of the uncritical publicity and platforming which the British media so enthusiastically doles out to Reform.

For independence supporters however, Corbyn’s new party represents a promise that can’t be trusted. Scottish independence is not in the gift of any British politician. We’ve been here before with British politicians making vague and unspecified promises to the people of Scotland about their constitutional future.

With so many moving parts and so much that remains unknown, no one can realistically present a strategy for tactical voting in next year’s Scottish elections. Nevertheless there is still something we can be sure of. It remains a fact that the only two pro-independence parties which have a realistic chance of winning seats are the SNP and the Scottish Greens, neither Alba nor the pro-independence micro-parties are likely to win any seats. Voting for one of these parties will only result in an anti-independence candidate winning. Supporters of these parties will be angered to have this uncomfortable truth pointed out, but facts is chiels that winna ding. Only a vote for an independence party that’s going to win a seat will keep the cause of independence alive as the UK sees the storm clouds of English nationalist fascism gathering.

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