IT’S ONLY weeks old, but already 2025 has been generous to a fault in providing ample evidence of Gramsci’s oft-quoted depiction of the interregnum between a dying social order and an uncertain future. Exemplified by the “morbid symptom” of the Trump/Musk axis, we are witness to “a time of monsters” and demagogues. 

To say we live in dangerous times has become a mundane truism. So as the year unfolds, where can the Scottish left find grounds for an optimism of the spirit as the 2026 Scottish general election looms?

As reported in these pages, Reform is on course to win 13 seats at Holyrood next year. Polling data should of course be subject to a thoroughgoing scepticism. But the prospect of a rump of racist MSPs exploiting their Holyrood platform to sow hate and division should clarify the thoughts of the left’s broad spectrum. It is time for unity in the face of a far right growing in confidence. 

Among the 54 per cent expressing support for independence in a recent Norstat poll, 40 per cent voted for Reform in the 2024 general election. 

The myth of Scottish exceptionalism was always based on thin gruel. Though the political drivers of post-war majorities in favour of centre-left parties are worthy of exploration, the apparent growth of Reform north of the border should deal the infantile disorder of left-wing nationalism a mortal blow. 

The Proclaimers once scolded us for going cap in hand to the Westminster Parliament. Tesla’s curt snub to ex-SNP leadership candidate Ash Regan’s investment appeals surely calls for an encore. 

Should Reform gain a toe-hold in Scottish political life, the tectonic plates will have shifted an increment closer to the abyss. Nigel Farage claims an increased membership based on “organic” growth. But as Keir Starmer’s courting of Italian PM Giorgia Meloni demonstrates, the nurturing of the far right has long been enabled by a Trojan horse provided by mainstream political actors. 

As the UK government staggers like a Hogmanay drunk vainly seeking a lamppost to lean on, Anas Sarwar has opened up some discreet water between the Scottish and UK parties. 

The Scottish leader’s shifts — most recently on the Winter Fuel Allowance and Waspi women — may be strategic only and the contortions required to abstain on the Scottish Budget for not moving quickly enough to abolish a two-child benefit cap retained by the UK Labour government is impressive in its cognitive dissonance. But his distancing confirms an unease with a direction of travel previously expressed around head office directives on Gaza and picket lines. Do these apparent fissures offer the Scottish left inside and outside the party an opportunity to advance our politics? 

As an administrator on Scotland’s largest online Scottish Labour forum, I am sometimes struck by the absence of coherent alternatives to the centrist capture of the Labour Party. The social media landscape can feel like a “state of nature” where isolated individuals rail from atomised silos. 

The Silicon Valley “tech bros” now rallying behind Donald Trump parlayed a vision of a free marketplace of ideas. Given its profit maximisation blueprint, its mutation into a solipsistic “war of all against all” was inevitable. 

As the Marxist writer Richard Seymour points out, the online spell cast by the “Twittering Machine” is effective only because of the alienated vacuum it substitutes for. It is possible that the ideological apparatus of surveillance capitalism is simply not designed for the kind of organisational and propaganda work essential to the left’s success.

Can the Scottish left counter in workplaces and communities? The new will only be born if we can build alliances on the basis of existing and yet to be formed struggles. 

We need disruption, not accommodation. If we can unite around a radical constitutional project, beginning with the devolution of employment law, and popularise the STUC’s redistributive Budget for Communities, we may see the ground shift quickly.

Recent attempts to organise workers in Amazon warehouses demonstrate the potential to strike at the heart of the neoliberal economy. There are reasons to be cheerful. But as the barbarians gather at the gates and the climate catastrophe goes unchecked, the choices facing the Scottish labour movement are becoming ever starker.