Scotland and the Black Swan

On Saturday Jim Sillars posted a tribute to Alex Salmond saying “Make Alex’s death a call to unity … Recognise that a divided movement cannot win.”

I think it’s fair to say that’s unlikely.

Despite Jim’s plea some people decided to use the event of a funeral service to shout “Traitor” at John Swinney and his wife, who suffers from MS, as they entered St Giles Cathedral. Despite some attempts to pretend this didn’t happen, or wasn’t uttered by someone from Alba, it clearly was.

Not everyone is trying to pretend this away. Eva Comrie writes: “Working class women & men are perfectly well entitled to call the FM a traitor because he did let down some who elected him and his colleagues ; he voted to remove women’s rights and he promoted SNP 1 and 2 when a vote for ALBA would have delivered Independence. Don’t forget.”

“A vote for Alba would have delivered independence”. Huge if true.

There’s been some discussion below the line about possible ways forward for the independence movement, and the rise (or demise) of Alba – or the ISP – or the New Scotland Party – is part of that discussion.

Politics everywhere is going through huge flux and spasms of change. Scotland is not immune to this. Take a look at what’s happening in Wales where Plaid Cymru is polling ahead of Labour for the first time since 2010, and where new polling also puts Reform level with Welsh Labour. In Ireland Mary Lou Macdonald’s Sinn Féin is topping the polls.

This volatility, and surges of populism is a global phenomenon – a response, in part, to the failure of liberal democracies to create credible solutions to the enduring problems of late capitalism. Scotland is not immune to this, and the consequences could go either way. Polling suggests for example that Reform UK could make inroads even here, where they have no base, where few of their core policies have any real support, and where they have no electoral record.

This is because the Conservative Party has collapsed under the weight of their own incompetence and because the racist and anti-immigration rhetoric of Reform plays well everywhere that simplistic scapegoats are required for social problems. Reform don’t need any real presence here, their leader is a permanent fixture in the broadcast media.

The Left in Scotland will need to organise against Reform to combat the propaganda that spills from them. The biggest con perpetrated by Farage and his ilk, is to convince ordinary people that the threat to our livelihoods comes from people fleeing warzones and not the elite that he himself represents.

So where could this volatility lead to?

Polling evidence suggests that Labour in Scotland could increase their MSPs by ten seats, from 22 to 32, that the Scottish Greens could pick up a couple more MSPs and that the Scottish Conservatives would essentially haemorrhage votes to Reform UK losing half their seats. The same polling suggests the SNP would lose 18 seats but still remain the largest party.

[polling data courtesy of Mark McGeoghegan (@markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social) — Bluesky]

The same polling models suggest that the Alba Party might peak at 2.3%. Perhaps, for all the calls of unity Alba should join forces with the ISP and the New Scotland Party to improve their electoral chances?

If you look at the red line for Labour in the lower graph you can see a downwards trajectory, and I think its safe to say that Keir Starmer’s ‘honeymoon’ – if it existed at all – is well and truly over.  Anas Sarwar’s ridiculous posturing over the Winter Fuel Payment’s was brutally exposed (‘Forgetful Politicians‘), and Scottish Labour are really struggling to establish themselves as distinct or separate from UK Labour. Starmer’s indefensible position on the situation in Gaza will also lead to a decline in support for Labour.

Labour’s collapse in Wales may be a portent of things to come here.

If such results were to come into being it would be a greatly undermined SNP, but it would also mean that a Lib-Lab coalition would not have sufficient numbers to form a government, unless they formed a Unionist bloc with the Conservatives.

Such a result would mean that the only path to power for the SNP would be through some kind of electoral pact with the Scottish Greens, who are still hurting from the dissolution of the Bute House Agreement. These numbers would also mean the emergence for the first time of a hard-right presence in the projected 14 Reform UK MSPs dwarfing even an inconsequential Liberal Democrat party under the unfortunate leadership of Alex Cole Hamilton. A collapse of the Scottish Conservative losing half their seats would also be a career-ending moment for Russell Findlay.

As usual its worth pointing out the proviso that these are projections and we have no real way of knowing for certain how the political landscape will look in a years time, entering 2026. But we can think of a couple of issues that will affect things. The extent to which the SNP – under Swinney or a new leader – can genuinely re-invent themselves and regain credibility among pro-independence supporters will be key for them. Perhaps also the SNP face a threat from Reform? As Mark McGeoghegan writes in the Herald:

“Reform UK is on the march. Having won 14.3% of the popular vote and five MPs in the July General Election, it is now polling as high as 21% in Britain-wide polling. If a General Election were held tomorrow, it could quadruple its MP tally or better. The next General Election will almost certainly not be held until 2028 or later, but it is set to make significant gains at local and devolved elections in the meantime.

That includes Scotland. Reform UK won 7% of the vote north of the Border in July’s General Election, and despite failing to win any seats had a substantial impact. It won 14.6% in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, where the SNP defeated then-Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross by a wafer-thin margin of 2.5 points. However, it also won a higher proportion of the vote than the winning party’s majority in an additional 11 seats, four of which were very narrow SNP holds against strong Labour challengers.”

Other questions include: how can Alba survive the demise of their leader? 2026 will either be a breakthrough event or a terminal one. Polls suggests the latter. A poll high-point of 2.3% would be well short of a target of about 5.5% required to get just one MSP elected as laid out here (‘What does it take to get elected in Scotland and Wales?‘).

How can Scottish Labour distance themselves from a right-drifting UK leadership? They cannot, and polling evidence suggests that what Joe Guinan has called “a species of sub-Blairism” will become more and more unpopular the more the public is exposed to their policies and political direction. The debacle of the GB Energy claims, and the reality that energy bills are promised to rise in January 2025 will be a blow to one of their flagship policies.

One thing that hasn’t really been talked about. There is an understandable mood of despair among some sections of the independence movement. And yet, the much anticipated hegemony resulting from a Labour landslide has not, in fact, transpired. Starmer’s government has proved to be a giant Nothing Burger and his slide in the opinion polls is remarkable, particularly for someone who was framed as an electoral success. Second, while the pro-independence parties in Scotland have suffered setbacks, the ascendancy of Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin too opens separate fronts against the Union.

The defence would previously have been Devolution itself. Indeed writing at the beginning of the year Simon Jenkins wrote (‘Northern Ireland will leave the union, and Scotland could too. True devolution is the only way to save it‘): “The UK is the only western European state whose unity is unstable, except for possibly Spain. Almost half of Northern Irish voters expect to rejoin the rest of Ireland within 20 years, and nearly 60% of Scots want some form of independence. Even in Wales, independence is favoured by almost a third. In all these cases, younger voters are the most eager for a breakup of the UK. This is hardly a trivial matter.”

He finished: “In Northern Ireland, the only long-term future must lie in reunion with the Republic, eased by a Britain that rejoins the European single market …

“Scotland is a different matter. As the UK in 2016 slid so casually out of the EU, so could Scotland slide out of the UK. It should, by size and economic potential, be as rich and independent as Ireland or Denmark. Ireland shook off its reliance on the UK and became a Celtic Tiger. While it might be a pity – and a sad comment on England – Scotland could do the same. The next British government should start by tearing up the Barnett formula and devolving real power – fiscal power – in Scotland. Otherwise we should welcome the future Denmark of the British Isles.”

The problem, for Jenkins, and the Union, is that Labour and the Conservatives have given up on devolution, and Reform are actively hostile to it. The idea that further powers would be devolved to Holyrood as part of a wider constitutional programme as proposed by Gordon Brown, was quietly shelved by Labour as soon as they got into power.

I am hesitant to engage in the “its darkest before the dawn” sort of cliché, but we are living in such times of political volatility that surges of political change that go completely against the grain can’t be ruled out. Black Swan theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, starting in 2001, to explain: “the disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations.” We live in times of such chaos, breakdown and collapse that the ‘old order’ of political predictions is increasingly difficult to maintain. We cannot rule out a Black Swan event in Scotland in 2026. This may be an obscure notion to cling onto for optimism in mid-winter but it’s all we’ve got right now.