EUAN McCOLM: Twelve months of ineptitude, venality and back-stabbing - another remarkable year in Scottish politics!
SOURCE:Daily Mail
John Swinney saw in 2025 on a wave of promises. His SNP Government, he said, would work hard in the year ahead to eradicate child poverty and grow the economy while also tackling the climate crisis and improving public services.
John Swinney saw in 2025 on a wave of promises. His SNP Government, he said, would work hard in the year ahead to eradicate child poverty and grow the economy while also tackling the climate crisis and improving public services.
The First Minister sees out the year bogged down in yet another scandal.
The mind-bogglingly bizarre case of the SNP staffer who, after being caught secretly recording his female MSP boss, went on to work for another nationalist politician tells a story of an increasingly dysfunctional party of Government.
We’ll get back to that but there’s so much more to discuss. Between the First Minister’s empty promises of change and the SNP’s latest – and, possibly, weirdest – scandal, was the most remarkable year in Scottish politics, 12 months of ineptitude, venality, and back-stabbing.
In January, as hospitals struggled to cope with cases of winter flu and doctors continued to warn underinvestment had left the NHS on the brink of collapse, Mr Swinney pledged that his government would bring down waiting times and make it easier to get GP appointments.
He was ready to put the health service on a “path of modernisation and renewal”.
Then Mr Swinney scrapped a plan that was supposed to alleviate pressure on the NHS.
After years of delay and the waste of more than £30million, the SNP dropped its proposal to create a National Care Service.
The First Minister has ended 2025 bogged down in yet another scandal
Labour leader Anas Sarwar has flip flopped on women’s sex-based rights
Twelve years ago, Nigel Farage was forced to take refuge in an Edinburgh pub after being swarmed by an angry crowd. Police had to be called to protect him from the mob.
But Mr Farage is no longer so toxic with quite so many people in Scotland. After polling in February put Reform on 25 per cent across the UK, Mr Swinney spoke out about the rise of what he called “a politics of fear”.
During a press conference at his official residence, Bute House, the First Minister accused Nigel Farage and Reform UK of being apologists for the Russians and announced that he would convene a summit of political, faith, and community leaders to discuss the threat of the “far right”.
How selfless, perhaps even noble, it was of Mr Swinney to arrange an event at which he could be seen as a leader of leaders.
But the biggest story in Scottish politics in February was one most politicians were too scared to talk about.
The employment tribunal brought by nurse Sandie Peggie against her employers NHS Fife after she complained about the presence of trans doctor Beth Upton in a women’s changing room made headlines, day after day.
Mrs Peggie, a 52-year-old with an unblemished three decade record of service, was treated deplorably by NHS Fife. After asserting her right to single-sex protections, she was suspended from her job and subjected to a disciplinary process.
When Sandie Peggie’s case began making headlines, self-styled “progressive” MSPs witnessed a head on collision between public opinion and their personal faith in gender ideology.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and his deputy, Dame Jackie Baillie told a podcast they were right behind Mrs Peggie.
Mr Sarwar was quite clear that he had always supported women’s sex-based rights.
Well, up to a point… What about the fact that he’d whipped his MSPs in December 2022 to support then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s proposal to allow anyone to self-identify into the legally-recognised sex of their choice?
Ah, well, you see, if Mr Sarwar had known then what he knew now, things would have been different.
Many months later, the mystery of what special piece of knowledge Mr Sarwar lacked when he voted, three years ago, to strip away women’s sex-based rights and dismantle fundamental aspects of safeguarding remains unsolved.
The Scottish Labour leader handled his U-turn so badly that he satisfied nobody. The gender ideologues among his party’s ranks felt betrayed while the feminists who’d spent years telling him he was making a mistake felt insulted by the way in which he attempted to rewrite history.
In March, it was confirmed that Nicola Sturgeon would face no action in the Police Scotland investigation into SNP finances.
That announcement came as her estranged husband, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court charged with embezzlement.
The often brutal to-and-fro of Scottish politics was thrown into perspective on March 27. The death of SNP MSP Christina McKelvie after the return of the breast cancer she had previously defeated cast the darkest of shadows across Holyrood.
Ms McKelvie had been an MSP since 2007 and enjoyed warm friendships with members from across the political spectrum. Many in the Holyrood chamber were moved to tears when Ms McKelvie’s partner, deputy SNP leader Keith Brown paid a deeply personal tribute
'I’ve often thought of Christina as a star,' he said.
'She was glamorous, she was sparkly, she was fun. She was the best thing that ever happened to me.'
John Swinney’s attempts to reset the political agenda in April were thrown into chaos by the Supreme Court ruling in a case brought against the Scottish Government by the feminist group For Women Scotland.
The justices at the highest court in the land were quite clear: so far as the law is concerned, sex is a matter of biology, not feelings.
Another month, another reset. May saw Mr Swinney celebrate his first anniversary in office with a speech to parliament announcing a programme for government that was conciliatory in tone. He spoke of parties coming together in a spirit of cooperation.
But much of May saw the First Minister clash with opponents during campaigning in the by-election caused by Christina McKelvie’s death.
The constituency of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse is in territory that had once been resolutely Labour. If the party was to stand a chance of preventing a fifth consecutive SNP Holyrood victory next May, this was the sort of seat it had to win back.
John Swinney wrote Labour off from the start. This was a battle between the SNP and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, said the First Minister.
Nicola Sturgeon poses with her memoir, 'Frankly'
When polling day came around in June, Labour’s Davy Russell won the seat, nudging the SNP’s Katy Loudon into second. Reform’s Ross Lambie came a very close third.
As Holyrood prepared for its summer recess, it was clear that our politics was changing.
Reform’s impressive by-election performance could be accounted for in part by the collapse of the Tory vote but deeper analysis of the result suggested both Labour and, perhaps more surprisingly, the SNP lost votes to Mr Farage’s party.
Polling in June showed the SNP on course to win next May’s Holyrood election, with Labour in second and Reform in third.
Nigel Farage had become a serious force in Scottish politics despite rarely setting foot across the border.
Donald Trump arrived in Scotland in July for a private visit to his Aberdeenshire golf resort. He managed to fit in a chummy dinner with John Swinney who upset the independence movement’s keyboard warriors by behaving with dignity when hosting this democratic ally.
Apparently, instead of discussing areas of shared interest and making the case for the exemption of tariffs on Scotch whisky, the First Minister should have taken the opportunity to rehearse allegations levelled by the owners of an uncountable number of anonymous social media accounts.
Time was when political leaders would retire to relative obscurity. After his time as Prime Minister, Sir John Major spent much of his time in the afternoon tea fuelled world of cricket while, more recently, Gordon Brown has devoted his post-Downing Street life to charity work.
Nicola Sturgeon prefers a different approach to life out of power.
The publication of the former First Minister’s memoir, Frankly, in August was accompanied by a 30-minute long televised interview and a raft of reviews and think pieces.
Ms Sturgeon toured podcast studios, selling the book for which she received a £300,000 advance.
Frankly made waves for such mildly interesting things as Ms Sturgeon’s claim that nobody’s sexuality – her own included – was binary but the former First Minister’s presence on the publicity rounds confirmed that she is no longer the great asset to her party that she once was.
Ms Sturgeon was frequently tetchy and brittle during interviews and, in a time of Sandie Peggie, her monomaniacal adherence to trans ideology looked less progressive and more cranky.
Nicola Sturgeon’s “Life after politics” tour overshadowed what it feels sarcastic to describe as the big news of Tory MSP Graham Simpson’s defection to Reform, making him only the second ever MSP to represent the party at Holyrood.
Mr Simpson promised to treat former colleagues with respect. Former colleagues said Mr Simpson was a knucklehead.
Also announcing a move in August was Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes, whose decision not to seek re-election next year stunned colleagues who had marked her down as favourite to replace John Swinney as First Minister when the time comes for him to go.
August also saw Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater replaced as leaders of the Scottish Greens by Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay. This wasn’t so much a changing of the guard as a recycling scheme for cranks.
Politics is often an unsentimental business but the dismissal in September of Ian Murray as Scottish Secretary was especially brutal.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s replacement of Mr Murray with Douglas Alexander infuriated many Scottish Labour politicians who reckoned there was nothing wrong with they guy they had, thanks all the same.
Facing a backlash from north of the border, Sir Keir threw Mr Murray a sop, bringing him back into government as a minister in the departments of both culture and science.
Ian Murray continues to whinge about the humiliation, most recently in an interview in which he spoke of his wife’s anger about his sacking.
Tempers frequently run over in Holyrood but things got out of hand on September 17 when former Tory leader Douglas Ross accused the SNP’s Minister for Cabinet and Parliamentary Business, Jamie Hepburn, of assaulting him as the two were departing the debating chamber.
Two days after Mr Ross made his allegations, Mr Hepburn resigned from the Government.
October saw another resignation. This time, it was Ash Regan doing the quitting.
Ms Regan, who once stood for the SNP leadership, left the Alba Party to sit as an independent.
Meanwhile in the minor rearrangement of current stocks of cranks in Scotland, three Green Party councillors announced their defection to You Party, the shambolic attempt to create a “new” politics by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
On the evening of November 18, all political hostilities in Scotland were suspended.
Scotland’s 4-2 defeat of Denmark, a victory that sends the men’s national team to the 2026 World Cup, united the nation in celebration.
But messy politics swiftly came roaring back to shatter the calm.
Recent reform defector Malcolm Offord and Scots Tory leader Russell Findlay on BBC's Question Time
Days into December, Tory Peer Malcolm Offord – a former minister in the Scotland Office – announced his defection to Reform UK. Lord Offord will step down from the Upper House in order to run for Holyrood next May.
December also brought – partial – closure for Sandie Peggie with a tribunal ruling that she had been harassed by NHS Fife.
But although the judgment vindicated Sandie Peggie’s decision to take action, it was hopelessly flawed and littered with inaccurate or made up quotes.
An appeal is already on the cards.
The past 12 months have been tumultuous for Scottish politics but 2025 saved the best for last.
As MSPs prepared to lock their offices for Christmas, it emerged that a female SNP MSP had been secretly recorded by an employee who’d then leaked details of what he’d learned.
It gets worse. Not only was the employee in question not reported to the police, he was subsequently given a job by a different nationalist politician.
After an exhausting year in politics, the last thing John Swinney needed was a scandal like this.
What with the way in which it was all covered up and the fact the employee in question was given a new job, people might start thinking something stinks.
Fortunately, and we know this because he says so, the First Minister knew nothing about the whole messy business.