‘Anyone’s guess’: 2026 Holyrood election all to play for after tumultuous year in the polls

Scottish Labour’s stunning victory in July should have been the major moment of the year for the party. But instead the bigger story has been that of its fall.

A series of unpopular decisions made by Keir Starmer since entering Downing Street has turned the taste of success sour, and the idea of Anas Sarwar becoming the next first minister seems even less likely now than it did in January.

For all its promise of “change”, UK Labour has failed to deliver. Issues with the biggest cut-through – the winter fuel payments, the early release of prisoners, inheritance tax rises on farms and the increase to National Insurance – have all been viewed negatively according to researchers at More in Common.  

That is impacting on how the electorate views the party in Scotland. Allan Faulds, of leading poll aggregation website Ballot Box Scotland, describes what we’ve seen in the last six months of the year as a “really big Labour collapse”. The number of people who intend to vote for the party has fallen between eight and 10 per centage points compared to their peak, he says.

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Meanwhile the SNP had a tough start to the year but now seems set to benefit from Labour’s woes. John Swinney was barely in the door of Bute House when the election was called and only managed 30 per cent of the vote – but since then, Swinney appears to have stabilised the ship.

“Stabilise is exactly the right word,” says Faulds, “because looking at the figures, they're only up about one per cent compared to their lowest point in my average. They haven't recovered, they've stabilised.

“What's interesting is that although the Scottish Parliament is proportional, since a large part of it is first-past-the-post if Labour are losing 10 per cent of their support, that ends up giving the SNP a lot more constituency seats in their proportional share, which is why some of the recent projections have been so stunning.

“The SNP should not be on 60 seats having lost about a quarter of their support compared to 2021. They're only there because Labour have lost so much support.”

The poll Faulds is talking about was published at the start of December by the Sunday Times, which according to Ballot Box Scotland’s modelling would see the SNP just five seats shy of a majority, Labour moving to second place but with one fewer MSPs than they currently have, and the Conservatives falling back to third.

While the struggles of the Labour UK Government have taken the wind out of Sarwar’s sails, that does not mean the party’s hopes for the next Holyrood election are dead. Rachel Ormston, research director as Ipsos Scotland, points to the early days of the Blair government which “didn't get amazing ratings to start with” yet went on to win three more elections. “It's not always the case that just continues to go downhill,” she adds.

Short honeymoon

That said, she also highlights that Labour’s short honeymoon reflects what the general election vote was about – removing the Conservatives, not installing Labour. “The support for Labour, there were warning signs even at the time that was quite shallow and conditional,” she says. “I think that will be the concern for Labour going into Holyrood – how much of that support are they going to keep, and how much was it conditional support that was lent to them in order to secure a Labour government at Westminster?”

But what did it for the Conservative government could also be what does it for the SNP. “People might decide that they just want to change in leadership, even if they're not completely convinced of the alternative,” Ormston adds.

While 2025 should be a year without an election, we will start to see parties hone their messaging ahead of 2026. For the electorate, the main issues continue to be cost-of-living and public services. Independence, meanwhile, has fallen from the top of the agenda.

Ormston explains: “[Independence] really wasn't something that was coming up as an issue that was factoring into people's general election vote. Holyrood elections are different, but so far the polling that I've seen this year where they have asked about that again, independence really isn't featuring for that many people in their top three issues. It's much more NHS, cost of living, public services-type issues.

“That's a challenge for both the SNP and Labour. Labour will be being judged, to some degree, on the record of the UK Government. The SNP will be being judged on the record of the last 17 years.

“In some ways, the fact that independence is down the agenda will help Labour more than the SNP, because how they pitched themselves in relation to the constitutional issue has been an ongoing challenge for Labour. I don't think they've cracked that. What's happened is it's gone down the list of people's priorities, so they haven't needed to worry about it quite as much.

“For the SNP, if it's down people's list of priorities, maybe that's more difficult because then it's purely on record in government, which we know that people aren't especially happy with these days.”

New battles

One looming challenge for all parties is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. That Sunday Times poll, conducted by Norstat, showed growing support for the right-wing outfit. Faulds’ modelling put the party on 13 seats, leapfrogging both the Greens (six seats) and the Lib Dems (10).

This is quite the change for Scotland, he says. “Scotland has never, even at the peak of Ukip support, had much support for a party further right of the Conservatives. It's notable that Reform across the UK got a pretty similar vote share [in this year’s election] to what Ukip got in 2015, but in Scotland they got about four or five times as many votes as Ukip got in 2015. That seal has been broken and we are seeing Reform going up in the polls.

“That's why Labour have lost so much support. There's this idea that because Reform are on the right and they have aimed at the Conservative voter base, that that's where they're drawing all their support away from. But if you look at the general election results in England, it wasn't the south-east of England, the Conservative heartland, where Reform UK got the most votes overall, it was the north-east of England, a Labour heartland.

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“You’re seeing the same thing in Scotland across the by-elections where they've done best. Yes, they did extremely well in Fraserburgh, which is one of the few pro-Brexit areas, but places like Armadale and Blackridge, Whitburn and Blackburn, Glasgow’s North East, those are not places that have ever had any real Conservative support. Those are areas that historically have been very strongly Labour.”

How that impacts either party will depend on whether Reform is intent on standing in every constituency seat in Scotland, or mostly focusing on the list. Faulds doesn’t believe they would win a constituency seat but having a candidate their could easily sway the result away from the other unionist parties.

As for the two other smaller Holyrood parties, he expects the Greens to do slightly better than the polls currently suggest – pointing to frequent lulls for the party in mid-term polling – while the Lib Dem strategy, he says, is “interesting”. “They've got a Goldilocks zone where they want Labour to do well enough that the Lib Dems can go into government with them… [But] the better Labour do, the less well the Lib Dems will do because they're fishing in the same pool of voters. It’s worth watching whether they can get that balance right.”

Ormston also expects the Conservatives to lose seats in 2026 and Reform to pick some up. Meanwhile, the Greens might benefit from “disaffected SNP supporters”, she says, “particularly those for whom independence is in their top three issues”.

But for the first time in a long time, the outcome of the next Scottish Parliament election is still all to play for. As Ormston explains, “Labour and the SNP, how that pans out is the big question. And at this point that is anyone's guess, because it could go either way.”