“It’s the Crisis, Stupid!”- Permacrisis and the 2026 Scottish Parliament election

Dr Paul Anderson

Senior Lecturer in Politics at Liverpool John Moores University. His research is largely focused on devolution in the UK and intergovernmental relations. Author of Territorial Politics in Catalonia and Scotland: Nations in Flux (2024).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-paul-anderson-8b150879

Dr Coree Brown Swan

Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Stirling, and Director of the Scottish Political Archive. Her research centres on the politics of independence and union in the United Kingdom, crisis and territorial contestation, and the impact of the UK Internal Market Act on the territorial constitution.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/coree-brown-swan-a469556/

Dr Judith Sijstermans

Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. Her research analyses the political parties and movements that promote nationalist politics, with a dual focus on independence-seeking nationalists and far right nationalists.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jsijstermans/

Scottish Election 2026

Section 1: Parties and the campaign

  1. How SNP and Swinney stopped the rot (Eddie Barnes)
  2. The Scottish green wave breaks at last (Dr Jonathan Parker)
  3. What went wrong for Labour (Prof Kezia Dugdale)
  4. The Scottish Conservatives (Dr Alan Convery)
  5. Reform’s courting of Scotland’s post-industrial communities (Dr Maike Dinger and Prof Darren Lilleker)
  6. From chatbots to the ballotbox – how voters used AI to learn about the Scottish Parliament election (Dr Louise Luxton, Dr Timea Balogh, Elise Frelin & Prof Zoe Greene)
  7. Online advertising in the Scottish Parliament election (Kate Dimson and Prof Cristian Vaccari)
  8. Boring is not a virtue: Lessons from Scottish parties’ campaigns on TikTok (Prof Ana Ines Langer, Dr Lluis de Nadal)
  9. When parties travel, does negativity follow? Comparing campaigns on X (Dr Aybuke Atalay, Dr Ricardo Ribeiro Ferreira)
  10. Minding the distance: leaders in the election manifestos (Dr Michael Higgins, Prof Angela Smith)
  11. “It’s the Crisis, Stupid!” – Permacrisis and the 2026 Scottish Parliament election (Dr Paul Anderson, Dr Coree Brown Swan, Dr Judith Sijstermans
  12. ‘Whither Scottish national identity? The Reform UK challenge to an inclusive Scotland’ (Dr Murray Leith, Dr Duncan Sim)
  13. Environmental politics: flooded off the agenda? (Dr Kristen Nicolson)
  14. A disappearing crisis? Climate debate in the 2026 Scottish election campaign (Dr William Dinan)
  15. The Curious Case of the Co-operative Party and Lessons for Labour (Katharine McCrossan)

In recent years, we have become no strangers to the language of crisis. The Scottish Parliament election in 2021 took place amidst the COVID-19 crisis, quickly followed by a cost-of-living crisis, exacerbated by geopolitical crises such as the Russia –Ukraine war, and against the backdrop of the ever-looming climate crisis. This perpetual state of crisis was likewise a hallmark of the 2026 election campaign. The cost-of-living remained a live issue, fuelled by new geopolitical realities, with the ongoing US-Iran conflict disrupting energy markets and supply chains and pushing up, once again, the cost of fuel and food. This is coupled with longstanding concerns about the NHS, housing and education, which are often characterised as in a state of crisis.

YouGov polling on issue salience during the 2026 campaign revealed “the economy” to be the top concern of a majority of voters in Scotland. Across Scotland’s five main political parties (Conservatives, Greens, Labour, Liberal Democrats and the SNP), the cost-of-living was ranked the top issue by a majority of all supporters (ranging from 58% among those intending to vote Conservative to 68% for Labour). This was not the case, however, for the new kids on the block, Reform UK, with only 46% of supporters considering this a top issue whereas 81% believed immigration to be the most important issue.

Political parties are thus forced to confront concerns over crisis and, in fact, crises provide “windows of opportunity” for “framing contests” to claim credit and attribute blame. That is to say: crises often become a game of political ping-pong between parties. In Scotland, where the constitutional question is never far from the surface – crisis becomes ammunition in the argument for Union or independence. In their 2026 election manifestos, the cost-of-living was the defining issue.

The SNP has persistently employed crisis language, often appending “Westminster” to their discussions of the cost-of-living to attach blame to the UK. The party devoted an entire section of its manifesto to the cost of living, championing its record in government. John Swinney’s personal positioning mattered here. The SNP portrayed Swinney’s leadership as a steady hand in turbulent times. In the manifesto’s introduction, he wrote, “Our energy wealth should be cutting your costs…Instead, we face the prospect of even higher bills, because Scotland’s energy is not in Scotland’s hands.” For the SNP, the cost-of-living crisis is a consequence of Scotland’s place in the Union which provides an opportunity to deflect blame, a strategy further aided by the US-initiated crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.

While the SNP pointed fingers at Westminster, unionist parties blamed Holyrood and the SNP’s decades of governing. These parties focus on domestic crises in devolved policy areas which they frame as challenges of the SNP’s making. Echoing UK Labour’s 2024 manifesto titled “Change”, Scottish Labour followed suit, using crisis as a pretext for change. A promise to “fix the mess” was a persistent refrain made more challenging by low confidence in Labour’s position in London, emphasising the challenges of blaming in multi-level systems. The SNP blamed Westminster, while Scottish Labour blamed Holyrood, illustrating the entrenchment of nationalist-unionist contestation.

For Reform UK, housing affordability, energy bills, and stretched public services were filtered through the lens of immigration. They did not shy away from crisis but pointed to an “asylum crisis” or a “housing crisis” rather than a cost-of-living crisis. This instrumentalised high bills in the terms that resonate with and mobilise their political base. While they substituted the asylum crisis for the cost-of-living crisis, Reform still took part in blame games, this time aimed at migrants and those political parties, including Labour’s UK Government and Holyrood’s SNP and the Greens, seen as supporting higher migration.

Reflecting on the campaign, the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggested that despite their different ideological positioning, all parties shared “a lack of realism regarding just how tough the fiscal challenges facing the next Scottish Government are.” John Swinney, newly returned to government, will face a crowded in-tray – with cost-of-living and the broader economy at the top of the pile. We might expect narratives of crisis – and ensuing blame attribution – to become the new norm.

The cost-of-living crisis reinforced contestation between state and substate nationalists, and reinforced the supposed “outsider” role of the populist radical right but did not disrupt it. What emerges from all of this is a campaign that lends credence to two old adages: “it’s the economy, stupid” and “nothing new under the sun”, giving this “crisis” election an ultimately predictable script.