My predictions for 2026

It’s 31st December – which means it’s time for me to make a few predictions for the coming year. I've done this for the last 15 years so it feels like a tradition I have to continue.

As always, it's interesting to look over last year’s predictions. I predicted "a difficult time for Labour, much of it of their own making" and to "expect more of the same... poor communication, the absence of a coherent policy direction and a lack of coherent strategy in dealing with the media." I also forecast a tough 2025 for the Conservatives, commenting that "Kemi Badenoch is trying her best – but as time progresses it will become painfully obvious that her best isn’t good enough... she will survive the year, though..." I correctly saw the Conservatives doing badly in the local elections and employing tactics that only play into Reform's hands.

I was also right about the Liberal Democrats - a good year, but not a sensational one - and continuing to experience challenges in getting out clear messages. 

Elsewhere, I was correct about the German federal elections and correctly called the winners of each division in the SPFL, aside from League Two (East Fife finished a point behind Peterhead). I was also correct in saying that "Lando Norris's time has come". 

Where were my predictions not so accurate? Well, I didn't see the Liberals winning Canada's federal election and also called the presidential elections in Romania and Poland incorrectly. I also thought Rachel Reeves would no longer be in office (didn't everyone?).

So, what do I see happening in 2025? 

POLITICS

The Labour Party

Labour will remain in a mess of their own making, constantly on the defensive and continually making strategic and tactical errors. Nothing will improve, principally because Labour does not know how to turn things around and have no idea how to give voters a reason to support them.

This will be increasingly apparent in local elections but also in the Scottish Parliamentary election in which Labour will finish third in the popular vote. The electoral system will come to their aid and they will remain the second-largest party in terms of seats, but they will not look like a serious opposition.

Part of the reason for this will be ultra-authoritarian ideas, such as Anas Sarwar's proposed clampdown on knife crime (those of us with longer memories will remember what happened last time Scottish Labour proposed something similar in 2011). But, on the whole, it will be because Labour simply has nothing to offer. 

Ultimately, Labour will drift from one disaster to another stubbornly refusing to change. Their strategy will be to project themselves as competent rather than exciting, which not only confuses supporters who were hoping for change but fails to take account of the quality of Labour's front bench team.

Labour ministers will spend much of 2026 explaining that things are harder than they look, which is true but not inspiring. 

The Conservative Party

The parliamentary party will eventually lose patience with Kemi Badenoch who will resign as soon as she sees the knives are out. 

With the party in disarray, the Scottish Conservatives will lose more than half of their seats in the Scottish parliament. The party will approach the election with low expectations, which somehow still turn out to be ambitious as they will finish with fewer than ten seats for the first time ever. In the aftermath of electoral disaster, Conservatives promise a “serious rethink” about what went wrong, which produces several long papers, a couple of passionate speeches and very little agreement.

The party's existential crisis will become further apparent. Internally, the Conservatives will continue to wrestle with whether their current predicament is due to being too right-wing or not right-wing enough, and whether they are too chaotic or merely insufficiently enthusiastic about their own chaos. Meanwhile, former MPs - and a couple of current MPs - continue to defect to Reform. 

Robert Jenrick will be elected leader and the party will spend 2026 rediscovering the art of opposition - a process involving righteous anger and selective amnesia. The Conservatives will become very good at asking “Why hasn’t this been fixed yet?” while having few ideas about what the fixes should be.

At the party conference, Jenrick will create headlines, and a few laughs, when he invites Reform members to join the Tories. Policy discussions will be fraught, quickly turning into proxy arguments about the last five leaders. MPs will split loosely into camps described by journalists as “the right”, “the pragmatic centre”, and “people who are mostly just tired”. 

Jenrick's energy and aspirational talk will see the party pick up a few percentage points in opinion polls but little else will change. Suggestions of a leadership challenge will be firmly denied — usually in a sentence that begins with “Of course I support the leader, but…”

The Conservatives will discover that parliamentary process matters deeply once you no longer control it. Attempts to weaponise culture war issues will produce short-term media hits and long-term strategic arguments that never quite conclude. The party will end the year still searching for a convincing post-government identity and still convinced that one more leadership reset might fix everything.

The Liberal Democrats

Like 2025, the coming year will be a moderately good one from the Liberal Democrats' perspective. After three successive disappointing Holyrood elections, the Liberal Democrats will finally make some progress and finish up with more seats than the Conservatives - still short on where they were prior to 2011 but all the same enough to convince Alex Cole-Hamilton that a Liberal revival is just around the corner. Speaking to the media on the day after the election, he will praise activists' high work rate and the importance of addressing issues like ferries, schools, care, roads and dentistry before suddenly remembering to say something about independence.

The problems around media coverage and messaging will remain. The party will campaign hard as "the adults in the room", the sensible compromise and the reasonable centre - unfortunately, 2026 will be a year when few people want any of those things.

The Lib Dems continue to be the party most trusted on issues everyone agrees are important, but nobody votes on first. 

Ultimately, the party will have another quietly impressive year of local and by-election success, prompting journalists to ask, once again, “But what do they stand for, exactly?” while giving the party limited opportunities to answer the question.

Expect a year of slow, but frustrating, progress.

The Scottish National Party

As I predicted last year, "John Swinney has steadied the ship and is being aided by Labour’s performance at Westminster." He will also be helped by Labour's performance at Holyrood and Reform's involvement in the election, which will decimate the Scottish Conservatives and allow the SNP to reclaim many of the seats the Tories have held since 2016. 

Despite their problems in the last few years, the SNP remains the dominant force in Scottish politics and the default party of government. They will be helped by the fact that, while some are not entirely happy, most don't see Labour under Anas Sarwar as a viable alternative administration.

Aware of this, the SNP will campaign as a party that fully expects to "be judged on its record", while encouraging voters to judge opponents slightly more harshly.

The SNP will frame the election as a choice between continuity and uncertainty, while reminding voters that big change is still part of its ambition.  The party will want to sound both radical and reassuring.  Questions about independence will never be far away but the party will have no desire to focus on them, preferring instead to highlight Labour incompetence, Tory irrelevance and Reform's toxic British nationalism. 

The SNP will emerge, once again, as the largest party in Holyrood. They will be short of an overall majority but there will be a pro-independence majority in the Scottish parliament. Senior SNP officials will feel there will be no need for any formal arrangement with the Scottish Greens, something on which the Scottish Greens agree.

Reform UK

Reform isn't going away. The party will continue to poll impressively, particularly among people who insist they “don’t normally follow politics” but somehow know everything about "the current issues". 

We know what to expect from Reform - it will position itself as both anti-establishment and the only party brave enough to say what everyone else is apparently already saying. A big test will come in the Scottish parliamentary elections, in which the party's main contribution will be to split what was once the Conservative vote and aid the SNP.

That said, Reform will finish second in the popular vote and third overall in terms of seats. They will finish just behind Labour and won't do as well as the Conservatives did in 2021, but all the same Reform will have a sizeable parliamentary party after the election. 

Almost immediately Reform's Scottish branch will find itself at the centre of multiple controversies surrounding its personnel, raising questions about vetting. The party's Holyrood leader will claim a major cultural victory after using FMQs to force John Swinney to deny believing something he hadn't actually proposed.

Internal disagreements will be described as “healthy debate,” “frank exchanges,” and “completely normal for a movement this honest,” usually in that order. The rest of us will see Reform's group of MSPs as either "a shambles", "a national embarrassment" or "evidence of what they'd actually be like if they had a majority in Westminster". 

By the end of the year, it will be obvious (if not already) that Reform’s biggest strength remains its ability to dominate the conversation without necessarily dominating Parliament.

The Greens

The Scottish Greens will do as we have come to expect in the election, doing reasonably well in the regional vote but not making any new gains. They will, however, help to provide a pro-independence majority in Scotland. 

The Green Party in England and Wales, on the other hand, will be energised and revitalised under the leadership of Zack Polanski. Unlike the Lib Dems, the media will be quite interested in the Greens and will increasingly treat them as a permanent feature of the political landscape rather than a novelty - a development greeted with pride by Polanski and suspicion by others. 

Green Party spokespeople will become more visible within the mainstream news media and will often be seen delivering values-heavy arguments that are widely admired and gently sidelined in favour of louder, angrier voices.

Like the Lib Dems, the Greens will make steady but unspectacular gains in local elections. The problem they will have is spinning this success into a national narrative. 

Increased media scrutiny will not always work to the party's advantage, especially with the tendency of news media to resort to simplistic binaries. Economic framing will be difficult to control as opponents label them the "anti-growth" party.

There will be a lot of speculation about what the Greens' relationship will be with the Corbyn-Sultana Your Party, and also with the rest of the fragmented political left (assuming we can still consider George Galloway to be "left"?). None of this goes anywhere, precisely because such arrangements would be unworkable and Your Party proves to be deeply unprepared for what comes next and unable to seize the potential opportunities. No-one seems to consider the more important question of a potential electoral arrangement between the Greens and the Lib Dems who, between them, will be polling around 30% in opinion polls.

International

European politics in 2026 will be dominated by the question: “Are voters angry, exhausted, or just bored?” - with most elections suggesting “yes”.

Viktor Orbán will hold onto power in controversial circumstances in Hungary's Parliamentary election, with opposition leader Péter Magyar alleging electoral fraud.

Depressingly, the populist ANO will win the Czech Republic's senate elections while CHEGA's André Ventura will secure victory in the Portuguese presidential race.

The plight of the displaced population of Nagorno-Karabakh will continue to go unreported. 

FOOTBALL

I'm going to allow optimism to override reason here and predict that Heart of Midlothian will win their first league title since 1960. St Johnstone, Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Spartans will win their respective leagues. Glasgow City will win the SWPL. The Scottish Cup will be won by Motherwell, ensuring a season without either Rangers or Celtic winning anything for the first time since the 1954-55 season.

Clydebank will be promoted back to the SPFL with Edinburgh City going in the opposite direction.

Sadly, after struggling on to the end of the season Hamilton Academical will fold. I really hope I am wrong, but I can't see any other realistic outcome.

Celtic will announce a bold new era based on long-term planning, patience and a manager who lasts until November.

In England, Arsenal will win the league with a last minute goal at Crystal Palace. Sunderland will win the FA Cup. Manchester City will win the Women's Super League, ending Chelsea's dominance with their first league title in a decade.

Everyone will have forgotten about the hearing into Manchester City’s 115 alleged breaches of financial regulations.

VAR will be “improved” again, leading to longer delays and even more confidence that nobody understands it.

There will be some tournament taking place in the USA. The organisers will claim it is the "greatest tournament ever" while fans will take a different view. In regards the football, Scotland will do moderately well, drawing with Morocco, beating Haiti and losing to Brazil. Into the second round for the first time ever, Scotland will revert to type, going out in another glorious failure; after flighting back from 3-0 down they will concede a soft late penalty. England will start well and will progress to the quarter-finals where they will lose on penalties and the usual questions will be asked (and the usual answers given). 

ELSEWHERE

There will - again - be no progress made on social care, either in Scotland or in England and Wales. 

Donald Trump will continue to dominate headlines while real global power shifts towards India. 

The Mental Health Bill will become law, introducing some welcome changes but missing real opportunities to do something more far-reaching.

Glasgow will stage the Commonwealth Games and, despite the reduced format, will generally have been considered to have been great hosts. Unfortunately, it will be obvious that the Games have limited relevance and appeal. 

IN LIGHTER VEIN

AI will become good enough that nobody trusts anything anymore — including things that were definitely written by humans.

As pressure mounts on the new Archbishop of Canterbury in relation to historic abuse, the Church of England releases another thoughtful, well-intentioned report that is welcomed by nobody and criticised by everyone. 

Music in 2026 will be marked by a nostalgia for "a better, simpler time", which turns out to be 2019.

Liz Truss will announce she is to lead a new political party based on “ideas they don’t want you to know”, most of which were debunked during her own premiership.

Tommy Robinson will found a new church. Declaring himself the nation's spiritual leader he will criticise mainstream Christians, who he accuses of being "woke" and insufficiently angry about everything.

After its baffling peace prize, FIFA will unveil the Humanitarian Award. The first winner will be Donald Trump. Boris Johnson will secure a new job as FIFA's Global Optimism Envoy, tasked with explaining why things are actually going very well once you stop looking at them.

The England cricket team will discover fresh sporting despair in Test series against New Zealand and Pakistan, winning "moral victories" and bravely redefining what “rebuild” means.

Polish folk music enjoys a brief global renaissance after being discovered by streaming algorithms, mislabelled as “dark cottagecore”, and remixed beyond recognition.

Atomic Kitten will reunite to release an aggressively cheerful Christmas single about resilience, empowerment, and absolutely nothing that’s happened since 2003. They will narrowly miss Christmas Number One to AI-generated novelty act “DJ Gravyboat & The Festive Algorithms”, whose hit single “Wrap Me Up (In Sponsored Content)” briefly unites the nation in confusion.