STEPHEN DAISLEY: After a year of political inanity, it's time to gird ourselves for twelve months of reckonings as 2026 crashes in...
As 2025 treads glumly into its final hours after twelve months of political inanity and economic torpor, we must gird ourselves for 2026 and whatever tribulations it has planned for us.
As 2025 treads glumly into its final hours after twelve months of political inanity and economic torpor, we must gird ourselves for 2026 and whatever tribulations it has planned for us.
It will be a year of reckonings. Reckonings at Holyrood and Westminster; reckonings for Keir Starmer, John Swinney, and Kemi Badenoch – and perhaps most eagerly-awaited of all, Nigel Farage.
Top of the pile will be the Scottish parliament elections. Come election day, the SNP will have been in power at Holyrood just shy of 19 years, and only the bravest of Bravehearts would try to paint two decades of Nationalist rule as a triumph for Scotland or her people.
The NHS treatment queues the SNP came to power promising to tackle persist, with the Nationalists consistently failing to meet waiting times targets they introduced.
Their record is even worse on education, with the attainment gap they undertook to close yawning wider than ever.
Then there’s the nationalised shipyard that took a decade to build two eye-wateringly expensive ferries.
The breaking of pledges to upgrade dangerous roads in service of Net Zero dogma, followed by the ditching of climate targets when they became too hard.
Not to mention a failed independence gambit, unyielding fixation on gender woo, and sundry scandals from iPad bills and grooming gang inquiries to a legislative foul-up on non-domestic rates.
SNP leader John Swinney faces a Holyrood reckoning next year
Most governments with a report card like this would be heading for a ballot-box battering, but if the polls are even vaguely accurate the SNP is heading for an unprecedented fifth consecutive term in government.
In which case, the reckoning will be for the opposition parties, in particular the Conservatives and Labour.
Both have capable leaders who have done yeoman’s work challenging the SNP on the state of the justice system, the decline of the NHS, and the culture of secrecy within the Scottish government.
It might be immensely frustrating to Russell Findlay and Anas Sarwar that, despite everything, the electorate prefers John Swinney.
It might be contrary to the voters’ interests to give the SNP another five years to confirm its inadequacy, but democracy is the prerogative to choose. There is no obligation to choose wisely.
Options remain for Findlay. Being anti-woke, anti-independence, anti-everything the SNP stands for has got him as far as it can.