In the end, the spring didn’t stop and the days didn’t darken.
You get the feeling that the 2026 Holyrood election results passed most people by in the same way the ghostly campaign did – barely noticed, a brief movement in the mirror. This is not because people don’t care about politics – it’s because for the large part (there were exceptions) this was a campaign devoid of anything meaningful, as one commentator put it: an air war with no ground campaign.
It felt like an election in stasis – but one framed by contradictions: a shadow play but on a stage set by the most profound events: war, spiking costs, collapsing living standards, the rise of the far right.
Since 2014, Scottish politics has been like one of those stubborn geopolitical knots where time has stood still – an enclave where events play out under the blanket of the unresolved national question.
This is not to say that the dial didn’t move. The big story since the post-2008 economic collapse has been the disintegration of the political centre, the end of the post-war settlement and the entente between wings of capital and social democracy, the emergence of new and disruptive modes of production, exchange and categories of exploitation – and the left’s historic defeat and inability to respond.
Internationally, this has prompted a crisis of the centre which has seen many old political institutions disappear or start to wobble (even NATO is now threatened), as new, mutating, often monstrous, forms bubble up, reflecting the molten reality.
In Scotland – on the surface, contradictorily – things have been a bit different, in that a quintessentially ‘centre’ party has now been in power for decades.
And these election results show that meaningful challenge to it looks as distant as ever.
This partly reflects the deadlock caused by the unresolved national question here, with the SNP still in part surviving on the energy emitted by the decomposition of country’s last mass movement – the indyref.
It’s also because the rise of the SNP to power was in part due to the new disruptions set in play by the 2008 capitalist collapse. An increasingly distant echo of a real desire and movement for change, but an echo nonetheless.
It has been helped by the fact that its two main rivals – Labour and the Tories – are the prime expressions of the old failed centre and are thoroughly discredited. Related to this is the fact that the SNP can set itself against the often outright venal politics of Westminster.
As an aside, this was a good election for the SNP in the sense that it did not achieve a majority. The last thing the Swinney administration wants to do is meaningfully challenge Westminster over the constitution – this would mean invoking the mass movement, something the SNP, content to rule a devolved Scotland, is not willing to countenance.
But, as stated, the dial here has moved. The big story in Scotland wasn’t the SNP’s victory. It was the performance of two forces which, in widely different ways, reflect the breakdown of the old consensus and, in a muddled way, polarisation: the Scottish Greens and Reform.
Gramsci’s line about how, on the left as we analyse developments, we need pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will is well quoted. But it’s worth also revisiting the lead-up line: “we need to create sober, patient people, who do not despair in the face of the worst horror and who do not get excited about every little thing”.
On the left, we need this when analysing the rise of Reform and the Greens (taken as a UK whole – the performance of the Scottish party at the Holyrood election was linked to the Polanski-bounce down south).
There can be no illusions in what the Scottish Greens can achieve (especially when rhetoric comes into collision with the prospect of ministerial portfolios), likewise we should not catastrophise about Reform.
That said, the latter is the clear and present danger, obviously, and the former at least points to the potential for developments on the left.
Rather, we need thorough-going and precise analysis. The nature of Reform as a phenomenon of the right must be debated in order to combat it. Its returns in working-class communities in Glasgow were sobering. We need to work out what this formulation is – is it a ‘normal’ right wing capitalist party operating in an Overton window which has moved to the right, with a populist engine bolted on? Is it a precursor of an actual fascist movement?
There is a compelling case that if you are from a community suffering from attacks and harassment from the far right, this is pitifully academic. But in recognising that, we have a duty to proper analysis – and from this to work out how the left organises.
This was not a good election for the Scottish left as it stands. Results were pitiful – the Scottish Socialist Party at least managed a nationwide campaign, has a wealth of experience, a proud history and well-respected activists.
But at under 10,000 votes, something is off, the brand knackered. The urgency is such that those outside the party have to hope comrades inside it are taking time to have an honest appraisal.
As for what was once Your Party Scotland (for the record, I’m a still member – for now), there’s a feeling that the bureaucratic maneuvering of the Corbyn cabal in the UK leadership which prevented a run may have been a blessing in disguise.
A rushed, dispiriting campaign, echoing the windmill-tilt by RISE in 2016, could have knocked the stuffing out of activists.
The real turn must be to finding new ways of organising, of consolidating relationships already built through the YPS experience, and of beginning the process of bringing the left together, of linking up with campaigns and communities. Patient, steady but also urgent work and with no, or few, shortcuts, and not party-building by fiat or wishful thinking.
Because we have worse coming down the line and we need to be ready: the Reform vote in the Scottish elections was a foreshadow of what could happen in 2029 if there is a Reform victory at Westminster.
That would represent an all-out attack not just on our class and communities, but also the very foundations of democracy in Scotland. It will need a mass movement to counter it, and in the meantime we must de-claw Reform and the far right in our communities while putting forward a real prospectus for socialist change.
The clock is ticking, the dial jumping. Let’s get on with it.
