Why 2026 demands renewal, not rotation
THIS TIME last year I wrote about Scotland’s political circus. A year on, the circus is still in town. Same tent. Same smell of soiled sawdust and mild panic.
The same performers insisting that this time the tightrope is definitely under control, but it’s the same clown show. The kind where everyone involved insists it’s terribly complicated, right up until it goes wrong and suddenly nobody was actually in charge.
What has changed is the audience. The clapping has stopped. The laughter’s gone a bit thin. And more people are starting to notice that the exits appear to be guarded.
Let’s stop flattering ourselves. This is not just about politicians. It’s about the entire political ecosystem that props them up and keeps the show running long after the applause has died. The agencies, the regulators, the quangos, the consultancies, the compliance layers, the communication specialists, the professional commentators and the well-fed non-executives all nodding along in agreement. Politics is the front act covering the real resistance to change lives underneath.
And it’s working exactly as designed.
This system is astonishingly resilient. It absorbs failure the way a sponge absorbs water. Scandals come and go. Leaders are replaced. Inquiries are announced. Nothing fundamental changes.
When something doesn’t work, it isn’t stopped. It’s refined. When outcomes deteriorate, the language improves. When a service is hollowed out, a glossy strategy document appears to explain why this is actually “transformation”.
Anyone who has ever watched a frontline team shrink while a new governance framework is launched will recognise the manoeuvre instantly.
This isn’t incompetence. It’s survival by reinventing a broken wheel. What we are witnessing is a vast network of institutions whose primary function has quietly shifted from serving the public to preserving themselves. Decisions are dispersed until no one can be blamed. Authority is diluted until nothing decisive can be done. Failure becomes a collective fog. Responsibility evaporates.
And then most folks shrug their shoulders and play along. You don’t have to agree with it. You just have to get on with your day.
We fill in the forms. We attend the consultations. We repeat the approved phrases. We pretend another review is progress. We complain privately and comply publicly. We tell ourselves this is just how complex systems work, as if complexity were a law of nature rather than a series of human choices made very carefully over time.
Anyone who has built something in the real world knows how absurd this is. When something fails, you replace it or shut it down. You don’t keep feeding it out of politeness. You accept that progress involves loss, that renewal requires disruption, and that keeping everything as it is is not stability but decay with better stationery.
Inside the tent, however, replacement is treated as vandalism. Change is framed as danger. Preservation is framed as responsibility. Decline, so long as it is managed politely and narrated correctly, is not only tolerated but rewarded.
The result is a system that punishes builders and protects performers. People who ask awkward questions are labelled disruptive. People who know how to fix things take one look at the incentives and quietly leave. Not in protest. In exhaustion.
There is also a quieter problem that polite politics rarely names.
Broken systems are exceptionally good at preventing competent people from ever getting near real authority. Standing for election is only the beginning. Selection processes reward conformity over capability. Campaigning favours performance over substance. Once elected, serious people discover they cannot hire who they need, remove persistent failure, or move at anything like the speed required to fix what’s broken. Power exists everywhere and nowhere at once.
This creates a vicious circle. The public quite reasonably demands better leadership. But the system filters out the very people most capable of delivering it. Those with experience of building, fixing and taking responsibility look at the obstacles and think twice. Those who persist are absorbed, sidelined, or exhausted into silence. Their absence is then used as proof that competence never existed, and the machine congratulates itself for surviving another challenge.
Meanwhile, outside the tent, ordinary life becomes harder. Not dramatically, but relentlessly. Wages stall. Costs rise. Services thin out. Everyone has a story. The phone call that goes nowhere because no one is allowed to decide anything. The form redesigned for the third time that still doesn’t solve the problem it exists to address. Everyone is busy. Nothing is fixed. It’s the kind of busyness that looks impressive on paper and achieves precisely hee-haw.
At the same time, the political conversation drifts further and further from lived reality. People worry about housing, safety, health, work, addiction and the slow erosion of community. Politics responds with managerial language, symbolic gestures and moral performances aimed primarily at other insiders. Governance becomes performative. Democracy starts to feel like a closed loop.
When dissatisfaction reaches this point, alternatives inevitably attract attention. And this is where the system reveals itself most clearly. Disruption is no longer treated as competition but as threat. Scrutiny tightens. Rules are rediscovered. Language hardens. Everything is declared an “emergency”. Change is not debated. It is contained. All very civilised. All very procedural. All designed to exhaust anyone foolish enough to believe renewal or repair might be possible.
This is not paranoia. It is institutional muscle memory. So let’s be absolutely clear.
This is not an argument that politics no longer matters. It is the opposite. Politics now matters more than ever precisely because real power has drifted into systems that no longer correct themselves. That is exactly why new political leadership in 2026 is essential. But not leadership that fronts the system, manages it politely, or learns to live within its limits.
What’s needed are politicians who understand that their task is confrontation – not accommodation. Not maintaining the machinery, but rewiring it. Not protecting institutions for their own sake, but replacing those that no longer serve the people they exist for.
Politics still matters because it is the only place where legitimate authority exists to change the rules of the system itself. Without elected leaders willing to use that authority, nothing underneath will ever shift. But without leaders who understand the scale of resistance they will face, elections simply rotate faces while outcomes remain stubbornly the same.
And here is the uncomfortable part.
This persists not because no one understands it, but because too many people who do understand it choose comfort over responsibility. The current reality is that it’s safer to manage decline than to challenge the structure producing it.
Rocking the system carries personal cost. Preserving it offers cover and a story you can tell yourself about why nothing fundamental can be done.
So yes, this is an analysis. But it is also an indictment.
If you can see this and still choose not to act, then you are helping to sustain the machinery you privately complain about. Not because you are wicked, but because you have accepted a lie: that this is as good as it gets, that nothing can really change, that someone else will step up.
Recovery teaches a harsher truth. Nothing changes until people stop colluding with denial. Not families. Not institutions. Not nations.
This is not a call for saviours. It is a demand for adults. For builders rather than performers. For people willing to form teams, accept risk and endure hostility because the alternative is watching the structure rot while pretending to manage it.
This is no longer about left or right. That argument is a distraction. The real divide is between preservation and renewal, between systems that exist to perpetuate themselves and people willing to accept the adult responsibility of replacement.
And this is why it matters here, now, in Scotland, as 2026 becomes real. The next election will not be decided by sharper slogans or clever positioning. It will turn on whether enough serious people are prepared to step forward knowing exactly what they are walking into. Not just a hostile chamber or a rough media cycle, but a deeply embedded system that resists challenge as a matter of habit.
Scottish politics greets that sort of seriousness with distortion, sneering, and a hailstorm of bad faith from people who would struggle to recognise integrity even if you sounded out every vowel for them. There is a real cost to that, and it needs to be named.
Scotland does not need more representatives who will learn to live with that reality. It needs people willing to confront it, dismantle what no longer works, and build something sturdier in its place.
If those people stay on the sidelines, the circus will roll on and the decline will be managed with ever greater finesse. If they step up, 2026 becomes something else entirely.
Not a change of cast but the beginning of renewal.
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