Holyrood voters are 'scunnered' and that gives an opportunity to reckless extremists on left and right

After years of joint campaigning by Unionist and Nationalist Scots, Holyrood was a glittering prize.

In his inaugural speech to the new parliament on July 1, 1999, Labour First Minister Donald Dewar spoke of a “moment anchored in our history”.

“We look forward,” he told Holyrood’s first intake of MSPs, “to the time when this moment will be seen as a turning point: The day when democracy was renewed in Scotland, when we revitalised our place in this, our United Kingdom.”

On Thursday, Scots will vote in the seventh Scottish Parliamentary election since the dawn of devolution and it is reasonable to conclude that the late Donald Dewar’s dream of a renewed Scottish democracy is, at best, fading.

After years of frenetic – often splenetic – political argument in Scotland, the public’s appetite for yet another trip to the polls has diminished.

It is conventionally the case that any election is dominated by one or two key issues – the perpetual crisis in the NHS, perhaps, or the soaring cost-of-living – but this year, the campaign has been characterised by the lack of voter engagement.

This “scunner factor” has pollsters predicting a decline in voter turnout and a doubling in the percentage of those still, with just days until polls open, undecided.

Before the late Donald Dewar – First Minister for just 17 months until his untimely death in October 2000 – made his first speech to the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh’s Royal Mile thronged with voters, energised by this democratic renewal.

Last week, the director of polling firm More in Common, Luke Tryl, said focus groups he’d run during this year’s campaign were “possibly the most unenthusiastic” he’d even experienced. The response from voters to the choices on offer was often, he said, “meh”.

This new wave of voter apathy is accompanied by a breaking of old loyalties.

Not so very long ago, the idea that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK might become serious players in Scottish Politics was unthinkable. His Little Englander nationalism fed an appetite for change south of the border that was being met by the SNP. Where was the space for another insurgent political force?

Today, polls suggest that Reform UK, led in Scotland by Farage-appointee Malcolm Offord, is engaged in the closest imaginable battle with Anas Sarwar’s Scottish Labour to come second, after the SNP, on Thursday.

Much of that vote for Reform UK will come from the people who, previously, backed the Conservatives.

But while the Tories, under Russell Findlay, are on course, thanks to the Reform UK effect, to fall from second to fourth place this year, other parties are also losing the support of once-loyal voters.

A recent Survation poll found that the number of undecided voters had doubled since the same stage of the campaign five years.

Others have made up their minds. Among them are number whose love affair with the SNP has come to an end.

During the 2021 Holyrood campaign, the nationalists routinely polled in the the high 40s. Some surveys had them winning the support of more than half of Scottish voters.

Today, although the SNP continues to lead the polls, support has plummeted. The nationalists have polled in and around the mid 30s throughout this campaign.

The SNPs electoral heyday, with Nicola Sturgeon sweeping the country taking countless selfies while her opponents fought to minimise their losses, is over but the loss in support for the nationalists is nowhere near enough to displace them from their position as Scotland’s largest party.

And so John Swinney’s confident prediction that he’s leading the SNP towards its fifth consecutive Holyrood election victory is not unreasonable.

For all his confidence, however, if Swinney does go on to head the next Scottish Government, his will be an administration handed a grudging mandate by an electorate that, right now, awards none of Scotland’s six main parties a net positive rating.

Once polls have closed on Thursday, what we might consider the mainstream parties – the SNP, Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats – will all have questions to ask themselves about how they defend shrinking support bases from attacks from the Greens on the left and Reform on the right.

Each will, I’m certain, identify particular areas where they have slipped up. There will, particularly in the case of Scottish Labour, be internal squabbling about the culpability of the leader. And we may expect all party chiefs – winner and losers, alike – to tell us, with all the sincerity them can muster, that they have listened and learned.

But while, of course, each of the traditional four parties will have to address issues specific to itself, the current disengagement from politics by voters is a shared problem.

When mainstream politicians fail to bring the electorate with them, they create space for other, destabilising forces.

Right now, that space is being occupied by the Greens and Reform UK, two parties whose politics is driven by rage.

During this campaign we’ve heard, from candidates of both of those parties, comments which would have seen them disowned in the mainstream. From the grotesque racist dogwhistling of some Reform candidates to Green calls for the abolition of prisons and the prescription of cocaine by local GPs, the stream of reckless bullshit has been relentless.

Nonetheless, both parties continue to build support and will make their presences loud known in the next Holyrood session.

While the mainstream Scottish parties continue to fail to engage voters, these radical forces will grow stronger. They will increase their support and they will become ever more influential. Our discourse will grow hotter and darker.

As John Swinney and others on the centre ground fail to deliver interesting politics, they hasten the arrival of the sort of interesting times we wish for our enemies.