2026: A fateful year

It seems that as each Hogmanay passes, I am more and more inclined to celebrate the death of the old year than to welcome the birth of the new one. Maybe it’s one of those things that comes with ageing, but the bitterness with which I regard the old year increases in proportion to the trepidation I feel looking forward. Successive Ne’erdays find me saying I’ve never been so glad to see the back of the year that has ended, and never so fearful for the year ahead. Today is certainly no exception.

We now count the days until polls open in the Scottish general election at 07:00 of Thursday, 7 May 2026. Professor John Curtice’s seat projection based on the most recent Find Out Now poll tells the tragic tale.

Source: Professor John Curtice seat projection based on a Find Out Now poll of 1000 Scots, run for The National from December 11-19, 2025...

There was a time when that image would have gladdened the heart of any Scottish nationalist. A decade ago, it might have been possible to see such domination of the Scottish Parliament by the SNP as an auspicious sign for Scotland’s cause. That is no longer the case. For those who understand Scotland’s predicament, the indication that the SNP will be once again the largest party and party of government is cause only for despair.

If things play out as the polls indicate, the SNP will win enough seats to hold on to power, but not enough to trigger the only ‘action’ John Swinney has committed to—a Section 30 order request. So, as far as the constitutional issue is concerned, nothing will happen.

At the UK level, Electoral Calculus estimates the probability that Reform UK will be the largest party at 84% and the likelihood of a Reform UK minority government at 41%. The next United Kingdom general election is scheduled to be held no later than 15 August 2029. Bear in mind, however, that given the precariousness of Starmer’s administration, the election could come earlier—perhaps as soon as 2027. At any rate, we face the prospect of going into the second half of the next Scottish Parliament with Nigel Farage as British Prime Minister and an embarrassingly supine SNP administration in Scotland. If that scenario doesn’t scare the skitters out of you, then please have your dealer contact me; I’m in the market for quantities of whatever mind-altering substance it is that you’re enjoying.

A year from now, everybody will know just how catastrophic John Swinney’s ‘strategy for independence’ has been. The party loyalists will continue to deny it, of course. But that’s a tribe slated to decline rapidly after the Scottish general election in May. The split between the ‘party of independence’ and the independence movement will be complete, dissatisfaction with the Scottish Government will increase, demand for action on the constitutional front will soar, and, with the Farage nightmare looming, Scotland will have its own internal constitutional crisis running alongside the UK’s constitutional crisis.

All in all, it’s a grim prospect. I shall be told that I shouldn’t be so negative. But those who say this will have no response when I ask for a reason to be anything other than negative regarding the constitutional issue. What is there to be positive about?

All this is taking place against a global background of increasing tension and uncertainty. That situation can be summed up in three words—Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu. Whether it is generally realised or not, this atmosphere of extreme precarity feeds into politics in every nation and at every level. It will influence voting in both the Scottish and UK general elections in ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to identify because the effects are subconscious and personal.

The keyword here is ‘insecurity’. We exist and strive to function within a local and global socio-economic system designed to create and exacerbate gross imbalances. The tension generated by these imbalances powers the system. But at a cost to the populations experiencing insecurity, which must constantly increase in line with the imperative for cancerous ‘growth’.

(It is worthnoting that while the economic system—accumulative capitalism—suffers frequent collapses, these are never acknowledged as systemic, but always represented as extraordinary one-off failures. Ironically—if that is the word—these failures of the system serve to amplify the insecurity that powers it. Get out of that!)

This insecurity makes people more manipulable. A fact readily and eagerly exploited by populist political actors such as Trump and Farage. Encouraged by these ‘leaders’, people tend to behave unpredictably and irrationally as they try to reduce their insecurity. Which again feeds into the generalised sense of uncertainty and precariousness. It’s a self-perpetuating and self-enhancing process, which is why it tends to run out of control, often with horrendous consequences.

Scotland is not immune to this madness feeding on itself, which is the only way to explain the fact that Reform UK is projected to become the largest of the British parties squatting in the Scottish Parliament with 25 MSPs.

But Scotland has its own particular forms of political madness. There is, of course, the derangement of hardline Unionists who insist that Scotland’s place is beneath bitch Britannia’s stinking, blood-stained skirts, regardless of how often or how copiously she shits on us. Those sadly demented souls will always be with us.

The form of madness which should concern us most, however, is the collective lunacy of the independence movement—beset as it is with delusion and magical thinking—crippled as it is with factionalism and tribalism—incapacitated as it is by want of leadership.

At the time when the independence movement is in most urgent need of calculating, pragmatic, rational, strategic thinking, it has discovered what appears to be the very opposite of all this.

It is because of this that I despair for Scotland’s cause. And it is because I despair for Scotland’s cause that I despair for Scotland. Some time ago, I observed that we are engaged in an existential battle. I describe 2026 as a fateful year because, unless something dramatic and presently unforeseeable happens, Scotland stands to lose this battle in the course of the year that has just begun. If the independence movement fails to cast off its madness and find the knowledge of how to combine, our nation is lost.

Without the Union, the pretence of the British state as a major player on the world stage becomes unsustainable. Without the Union, the reality of ‘Great Britain’ as nothing more than the structures of power, privilege and patronage which serve the few at the expense of the many becomes undeniably evident.

It is also important to understand that it is not just the Union that matters to British Nationalists, it is the nature of the Union. Not just any political union will suffice for the purposes of British Nationalist conceit. A modern form of political union such as the EU is, as we have seen, anathema to British Nationalists. It must be a massively asymmetrical political union. The British don’t want partners. They want possessions. They don’t want mutuality. They want dominance. They don’t want equality. They want affirmation of the superiority they believe to be innate.

We cannot… we must not accept the meagre proposals and half-baked schemes offered by Scotland’s cowardly, self-serving political elite and those whose driving purpose is to become part of that elite. We must demand more. We must demand better. But our voice will not be heard, nor our strength made manifest, if we fail to combine around a common purpose. On this first day of 2026, I look at the independence movement and see no possibility of this happening.

We have entered a fateful year, and collectively we are woefully unprepared.