Most people I have spoken to are not welcoming 2026 with what you could mistake for enthusiasm, and yet I’ve been waiting for this year to come for quite a long time. I think it will force us to face a crossroads on the path to Scottish independence. That’s a good thing.
The key feature in this is obviously the Scottish, Welsh and English local elections in the late spring. At the moment these look like they are going to unleash a series of forces which will fundamentally alter the dynamic of politics in Scotland.
But there are big global factors which are equally important – the Trump wrecking ball, the very substantial change in attitude to Big Tech, the emergence of a new generation of voters and the ongoing disintegration of the old European political model high among them.
We know a fair amount about what is likely to happen in the elections – the further collapse of Labour in Scotland, the total collapse of Labour in Wales, the likely collapse of Labour in English local government, a Reform presence in Scotland for the first time, a substantial Reform block in English local government, a close race between Reform and Plaid Cymru for who benefits most from the Welsh Labour collapse.
The SNP will return to Holyrood as comfortably the biggest party, Reform will run waste across England and Keir Starmer will face a leadership challenge and (my guess), probably lose. (Wales is relevant too, but would require its own article…)
What is less predictable is the detail. I am very much not alone in believing that national polls in Scotland may not reflect the election outcome. There is still clear evidence of low motivation among SNP voters and there are horrible local issues which will distort the results.
The level of anger at the SNP in the Highlands over pylons and wind farms is unprecedented, Galloway and South Ayrshire feel so neglected they are tilting heavily towards Reform and I hear worrying things about central belt working class attitudes towards the SNP.
No pollster has predicted a majority for the SNP and if the above is true it might be further away than some predict. At the moment it looks like the SNP will be within one other party’s votes for a majority. If so it will find a way to govern for five years, either via some formal agreement or case-by-case negotiations.
But if it were to fall more than one other party’s votes short of a majority it would be in trouble. That was certainly the fear before Labour’s most recent collapse and it is why the SNP is running a core votes strategy, not reaching out to new voters but rather trying to motivate its existing voter base.
The Greens may well pick up more seats in this election but in terms of governing, they would make uncomfortable bedfellows for Swinney’s cautious, centrist SNP.
And while they could form a pro-indy majority, the SNP has idiotically and self-servingly made an SNP-only majority the condition for seeking independence negotiations, making easy for London to say ‘well, they were your conditions’.
I’m not meeting a lot of activists who are saying ‘oh well, if that doesn’t work we’ll just doggedly accept another five years of cautious, uninspiring, error-strewn government and then give them another shot in 2031’
So the absolute best case scenario is that the SNP scrapes a majority of seats not because it is close to a majority of votes but because of obtuse electoral arithmetic. That will come up against a UK Labour in turmoil which will no more want talk of a referendum on independence than it will want winter flu. It will be a dead end.
The reason I think all this is important is that I have never bought into the idea that the route to independence was to not talk about independence or engage with voters but instead to wait for an SNP majority to emerge. That has been the dominant narrative for more than a decade now.
It was never going to work because as I keep arguing, big social change requires actions across may spheres – civic, local, issue-based and cultural as much as political. Political parties do not become more popular the longer they are in power.
The primary function of the ‘parliamentary route to independence’ narrative has been control. For me it has always been a disciplining myth, a story told again and again to suppress demands for an effective strategy which actually includes more than the card-carrying party members (or even most of them for that matter…).
The SNP has one last chance to prove me wrong, win big in both the popular vote and parliamentary seats, open negotiations to set a date for a referendum and start building a proper campaign.
But I doubt this will happen and I’m not meeting a lot of activists who are saying ‘oh well, if that doesn’t work we’ll just doggedly accept another five years of cautious, uninspiring, error-strewn government and then give them another shot in 2031’.
Late last year there was a reality check about the claim that there was some international legal route to independence (there isn’t) and so my expectation is that by the end of this year we will be forced to have a proper discussion about what the hell we’re doing and why it isn’t working. That’s all I’ve been hoping for
If the independence movement talks centrist we can’t win working class Scotland and if we can’t win working class Scotland we can’t win independence
The other contexts I mentioned are also really important. The Big Tech backlash is coming from the fact that it is now offers a dreadful communication channel dominated by AI slop, saturation advertising and the political ideologies of its owners (and the President to whom they are kow-towing).
If you are following what has been happening closely you’ll find that all the successful insurgent political campaigns that have worked have been based on local organising. You can no longer shift the public by posting stuff on Facebook any more than you can by sitting in a TV studio at 11 o’clock at night.
Without proper, real, effective, modern local organising, we cannot communicate effectively with our audience. And that needs us to pay attention to the disintegration of the European political model, predicated on centrism, control from the top and prioritising corporate needs. It’s all failing.
The current SNP is very centrist and its narratives sound much the same as Macron or Merz or Starmer and those are all dead men walking, politically-speaking. If the independence movement talks centrist we can’t win working class Scotland and if we can’t win working class Scotland we can’t win independence.
Energy speculators not communities, landlords not renters, upper-middle-class Council Tax perks not reform, selling Scottish assets to foreign speculators on the cheap – these are the wrong stories to tell.
Equally as important; as a movement we have a woeful understanding of Gen Z, a crucial voting demographic which has been driving change in a number of nations. We can’t win without them either, and we’re not engaged with them at all. We barely know how to; I’ve just turned 53 and I’m still pretty well the youngest person in most of the independence meetings I go to.
All of this and a lot more is accelerating whether we want it to or not and they all offer real opportunity for us. Our stubborn refusal to accept all of this and to pretend we can keep going for the next ten years as we did in the last ten years is our biggest problem.
So I think we’ve got a cold, hard reality check coming. And I think we need it. Which is why I think 2026 is so important.