Vince Mills reports on the continued fall of Scottish Labour and the SNP and the rise of the right.

It is hardly surprising that the focus of politics in Scotland has been on the fall and fall of the Scottish Labour Party (SLP). A poll in late January, this time from YouGov, provided more evidence that the SLP is on the highway to electoral hell. Data were collected before the full impact of the ban on Andy Burhan, the denial of compensation to the WASPI women and the most recent exposure of the antics of Mandelson as Business Secretary, allegedly passing secrets to Epstein in 2009.

In the poll, the SLP scored only 15 per cent in the constituency vote, 15 per cent in the regional list and that would give them, according to polling expert Professor John Curtice just 15 seats in the Scottish Parliament in the May election.  If this indeed were the result in four months’ time, it would be Labour’s worst result in either a Westminster or Holyrood election in 116 years.

No wonder, then, that this potential catastrophe has distracted from the performance of the likely but surprising victors of May 2026 – the Scottish National Party (SNP). I say “surprising” because the poll gave the SNP only 35 per cent of the constituency vote, down 14 points since the 2021 election, 29 per cent of the list vote, down 11 points. Indeed, such a performance in May would be their lowest share of the regional vote since 2003. Ironically it would be similar to Starmer’s victory in 2024, shallow but widespread, achieved through comparatively narrow victories in the constituencies’ first past the post section, almost certainly intensifying calls for the Scottish Parliament to adopt a fully proportional system.

Before we try to make sense of this, as you will have probably guessed, the left outside the SLP has not been able to take advantage of the collapse of what you might describe as Scottish social democracy. While the Greens managed a creditable Constituency voteof9 per cent, it is unlikely that would deliver them more than one seat by that route. In the proportional regional listvotetheir 12 per cent vote would, according to Professor John Curtice, give them 10 seats in the 129 member Parliament. Your Party are likely to mount a challenge.  They met this weekend (10^th, 11^th February) in Dundee to decide. However, they are likely, according to Professor Curtice, to take what votes they win, from the Greens, hardly changing the balance of the Parliament in the unlikely outcome of them winning any seats at all.

The real victors in the poll, sorry to say, are Reform UK. Reform UK scored 20 per cent in both the constituency and regional list sections. According to Professor Curtice’s extrapolations, this would give them 23 seats, second to the SNP and ahead of Labour’s 15 in this poll. Although it should be noted that this poll is a bit of an outlier in that it has Reform UK performing slightly better than other pollsters, nevertheless it looks increasingly likely that Reform will be the opposition to the SNP’s ruling party after the May elections.

Such a scenario is deeply worrying because it will offer the right in Scotland a megaphone to peddle their politics of grievance, based on their racist assumptions and the SNP’s certain continued failure to address real working-class concerns. According to the YouGov poll only 25 per cent of Scots approve of the SNP Scottish government’s record to date.  By contrast, 57 per cent disapprove.

No wonder. According to the YouGov poll, the economy and then health are the top two issues of most importance to Scottish voters. The SNP’s utter failure in both of these areas is inextricably tied to their craven support for neo-liberal economics – financialisation, outsourcing and precarity. In Keep left: Red Paper on Scotland 2025, Richard Leonard outgoing MSP for Central Scotland, points out that control of the Scottish economy by foreign owners has increased and the Scottish Parliament has had no significant impact on stopping this process despite 19 years of SNP control. 

Indeed, under the SNP, attracting foreign direct investment has been a priority. This includes newer sectors like renewable energy. These are dominated by multinationals whose headquarters are overseas.  Furthermore, as the leasing of ScotWind demonstrates, if anything, the Scottish government is accelerating the sell-off of Scottish energy assets to private corporations and overseas state-owned utilities.

Manufacturing jobs in Scotland have declined by 130,000 since the advent of the Scottish Parliament. As Richard Leonard points out, however, Scotland’s manufacturing base still remains massively important. As recently as 2023, it accounted for 53 per cent of the value of all Scotland’s international exports. Since then, of course, Scotland has lost the petro-chemical plant at Grangemouth and last week production ended at the Mossmorran chemical works in Fife. All of this pushes workers into unemployment or precarious poorly paid jobs. The SNP has utterly failed to address this ongoing crisis in the Scottish economy.

And if you think Scotland’s economy is in bad shape, you want to have a look at health. Two words – “scandal” and “crisis” dominate its coverage in the Scottish media. Last month NHS Greater and Clyde admitted that some infections among child cancer patients at the state-of-the-art Queen Elizabeth University Hospital were “on the balance of probabilities” caused by the hospital environment. It is yet to be seen whether this was at heart an administrative, political or resources driven problem, but whatever the cause, it has become emblematic of the SNP’s failure to improve health outcomes in Scotland.

But the real crisis is actually not to be found in these high-profile failures; it is in the chronic poor health and early deaths that are driven by a complex interplay of poor housing, poor diet, poor education and poor healthcare for poor people. In short, poverty. Just one quote from the Health Foundation’s 2025 Inequality Landscape illuminates the despair in many working-class communities:

“Scotland’s rates of drug-related deaths, alcohol-specific deaths and deaths from suicide remain the highest in the UK, with drug misuse mortality among the highest in Western Europe; around 70% of deaths across these causes were among men in 2023. The burden is concentrated in the most deprived communities and contributes to Scotland’s stark male life-expectancy gap (13+ years between the most and least deprived).”

The Scottish government can and often does point its finger at the UK government for an inadequate settlement to meet Scottish needs, but the reality is, as the Scottish TUC pointed out in its report Taxing Wealth for a Fairer and Greener Scotland, the SNP has the power to introduce wealth taxes that could be used to raise the money necessary to transform public services in Scotland. Will the SNP do this? Will they hell.

Consequently, there will be political space for the radical right to blame immigrants for unemployment, precarity and rotten services. For immigration is the third most important concern of Scots according to the YouGov poll. Attitudes to immigration in Scotland have changed over the last ten years.  The fact that it could have risen so far up the list popular concerns is partly a result of the far right’s capacity to mainstream their ideas. But it is also the result of political parties – and in Scotland that means primarily the SNP – failing to address the material conditions of working-class people and in that failure, offer an open goal to racist solutions to ills of capitalism. This is not helped by an assumption, widespread amongst independence supporters, that Scots are less inclined to be racist than the English because Scots are in some way also oppressed – as opposed to our Scotland’s actual history as a partner in imperialism and colonialism.

After the elections in May the wider movement will have to mobilise against what is almost certainly going to be a surge by the radical right. Scottish Labour has been poor on this issue anyway, but it will in any case be much diminished in the Scottish Parliament. By continuing on its neo-liberal course the SNP will continue to foster conditions that create support for a radical right. The Scottish left has a fight on its hands.

Vince Mills is a member of the Red Paper Collective.

Image: Grangemouth petrochemical works https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grangemouth_petrochemical_works_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3525746.jpg Source: Geograph Britain and Ireland. Author: Richard Webb, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.