Charlie Ellis surveys the 2026 election landscape and finds, as in football, a strangely unpredictable shifting pitch
‘I Don’t Recognise My Country’
That was former footballer turned pundit Pat Nevin after St Mirren’s late equaliser in the Scottish Cup semi-final against Celtic. His words captured the mood of a Scottish football season that has been, as Richard Gordon put it on Radio Scotland, “unparalleled.” His colleague Tom English went further: “You can’t predict anything this season of all seasons.” Both spoke before St Mirren faded in extra time, as Celtic produced a late goal blitz to win 6-2. The match distilled an unprecedented situation: the usually dominant Old Firm weakened, and Hearts still holding a genuine chance of breaking their long-standing grip on the league.
The parallels with politics are hard to miss. At UK level, both dominant parties are struggling, with insurgent forces rising to left and right. A sense of crisis in British society and its politics is widely felt. The prevailing belief that we are poorly governed has fuelled disillusionment locally and nationally. This is not unique to the UK; it echoes across most comparable Western democracies, suggesting problems run deeper than domestic policy failures. They are structural, fundamental, and there are no easy fixes in sight.
A Crisis Without a Name
The immediate conclusion many draw is that the present system is not working. Yet there is no widely accepted account of what ‘the present system’ actually is. In the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, the terrain was clearly mapped – for supporters, a status quo ripe for transformation; for opponents, a neoliberal project being imposed. Today, that clarity has evaporated. There is no consensus about what we are living through, no agreement about how to respond.
Much of today’s political confusion can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis, an event we have never fully digested. Two rival explanations emerged in its aftermath. For one camp, 2008 exposed a market system that had spun out of control, demanding stronger regulation and a more active state. For the other, it revealed a bloated, irresponsible state that had distorted markets and lived beyond its means.
Never reconciled, these interpretations hardened into parallel stories about what went wrong and who was to blame. The political landscape still operates on unresolved fault lines: one side convinced the market failed, the other convinced the state did. That tension sits beneath almost every contemporary dispute, fuelling the sense that we are living through a crisis we cannot quite name, let alone fix.
A Local Window onto National Tensions
A recent local hustings offers a useful glimpse into national tensions. On 16 April, Broughton Spurtle brought together candidates standing for the newly constituted Edinburgh North East & Leith seat.
The six participants were: Ben Macpherson (SNP); Jo Mowat (Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party); Gary Neill (Reform UK); Kate Nevens (Scottish Green Party); Liss Owen (Scottish Liberal Democrats); and Oliver Thomas (Scottish Labour Party). Mowat and Neill were in fact standing in Edinburgh Central, appearing here as proxies for Haris Young and David Lees, both unavailable; both also list candidates for Edinburgh East & Lothian region.
Events like this can reveal how local exchanges map onto wider national narratives.
The Reform–Conservative Dynamic
The relationship between Reform UK and Conservatives is one of the most significant and contested in current British politics, as evidenced by the steady flow of defections from the latter to the former. It was instructive to observe how Reform Gary Neill interacted with Tory Jo Mowat. On several occasions Neill expressed direct agreement with her, and the two shared a broad outlook: Scotland is being held back by a sclerotic, over-dominant state; liberating market forces is what the Scottish economy and society requires.
Neill confident and sure-footed on this terrain, drew on personal experience in business across several countries. Though acknowledging he was new to politics, he spoke with energy and conviction, at one point standing to give his remarks greater force. He was keen to press the case that Reform represents a genuinely new approach, a break from what he framed as decades of political failure.
He came somewhat unstuck when discussion turned to cultural and moral questions, particularly assisted dying. Neill drew a parallel between abortion and assisted dying, arguing that in both cases the person most directly affected was denied proper agency, contrasting what he saw as a disregard for human life with the protections afforded to those who had committed serious crimes. A noticeable portion of the audience turned against him at this point. For Kate Nevens, this was ‘a wild answer,’ reinforcing the view that Reform and the broader hard right are staking out increasingly extreme positions on social issues. Yet Reform’s continued rise in the polls suggests such views are more widely held than Nevens might prefer to acknowledge.
Reform Heads North
The rise of the radical populist right has become a dominant theme in contemporary politics across the UK and beyond. Growing popularity of Reform UK reflects a clear shift from centre-right towards the hard right – the Conservative Party’s beleaguered state says little about the underlying strength of right-wing politics more broadly.
This presents a profound challenge to Scotland and to perceptions of Scotland. John Curtice has spoken of the remarkable situation in which a party running at 6 or 7% in Britain-wide polls in the autumn of 2023 has become ‘a serious competitor to be the principal opposition party at Holyrood’. Reform’s leader in Scotland, Malcolm Offord, was therefore justified in claiming that this insurgent party had experienced a ‘meteoric rise’ north of the border.
Reform’s advance in Scotland directly challenges the long-held assumption that the country is immune to radical right-wing populism. It is here that Pat Nevin’s words carry wider resonance: ‘I don’t recognise my country.’ Reform is far from the only insurgent force in our politics.
Cultural Fault Lines
Almost inevitably, the question of trans rights produced the most intense exchanges of the evening, with Nevens finding that the most vocal sections of the audience were firmly opposed on this issue. Equally inevitably, her use of the word ‘genocide’ in relation to Gaza provoked a sharp response, with one audience member insisting there was no genocide, and that those who believed otherwise had swallowed ‘Islamist propaganda.’ Not issues that can be resolved at a local hustings, but there was value in seeing them aired openly. Nevens’s language, including her use of acronyms familiar in left-wing circles, occasionally risked alienating those outside her political tribe. That said, much of what she said did resonate with the audience, which raises a broader question: how representative are those who attend such events of the wider electorate?
Nevens argued that the Greens offer ‘a different kind of politics,’ and there does appear to be a genuine appetite for something new. Above all, the hustings showed the distance between the two ends of the panel. Where Neill and Nevens agree that the status quo has failed, they disagree profoundly about almost everything else. Both Reform and the Greens may well perform strongly in the forthcoming Scottish Parliament elections, but they are pointing in entirely opposite directions.
The Populist Trap
Intense focus on the populist right as a serious threat to democracy has a peculiar side effect: it risks validating their story, feeding the idea that only they are willing to truly shake things up. Treating populism as a kind of moral emergency can end up amplifying the very disruption it seeks to contain.
There is also a harder practical question. Daniel Kruger’s warning that our democratic system ‘cannot survive’ another failed government is a chilling thought. But what actually happens if a party like Reform UK gains power and proves unable to deliver? The likely answer is not a chastened return to the mainstream. A populist failure in office could fuel the argument that the entire political system is broken, opening space for solutions that are less concerned with pluralism and minority rights, and more focused on efficiency and majority will. That is a trajectory worth taking seriously.
The evidence from populist right-wing parties in power, and even from Reform-led councils closer to home, points to a consistent pattern. These parties are often highly effective at generating political energy and winning elections. Governance is a different matter. Their natural mode is grievance and anti-establishment critique. Once they have their hands on the tiller, that mode stops working. No longer the insurgents; they are the ones responsible. The history of movements associated with figures like Nigel Farage suggests that internal friction and falling out tend to follow. The skills that win elections are not the same as the ones needed to run anything.
The Battle for Narrative
Which raises the question: who decides whether a government is succeeding or failing?
Thatcher’s project, despite provoking fierce opposition and causing real hardship in many communities, held together partly because of a sympathetic media and a corps of commentators who could translate her policies into clear, compelling language. They shared a common story: reducing the reach of the state would free up entrepreneurialism and lead to national renewal. Everything that stood in the way – the unions, ‘loony left’ in local government, progressive voices in education – was framed as an obstacle. That coherent narrative kept the ideological momentum going even when reality on the ground was difficult.
The lesson is that the battle today may be less about policy than about which political forces can establish a story that people find convincing — one that names the problem clearly and points towards a credible solution.
Nobody has managed that yet. We remain stuck between two unresolved readings of the 2008 crisis, unsure whether the fault lay with the market or the state. Without a new shared account of what has gone wrong and what should come next, Western democracies are likely to keep oscillating between ineffective mainstream government and the appeal of those who promise to cut through the whole mess – with little idea of what to do once they are in charge.
Pat Nevin’s bafflement at St. Mirren’s equaliser feels rather apt. We’re all looking at a pitch we thought we understood, only to find the old patterns no longer hold.
A Royal Mail stamp bearing image of Bobby Moore: image footysphere CC By-SA.20
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