Coffee House Shots: will Scotland switch course in 2026? with Gordon McKee
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
The Spectator heads into Christmas a little bit less Scottish as we bid farewell to our political correspondent Lucy Dunn. Before Lucy leaves for STV, she joins Coffee House Shots – with fellow Scots Michael Simmons and Labour MP Gordon McKee – for one final episode reflecting on the state of Scottish politics. They discuss whether the SNP has stabilised Scottish politics this year, make predictions for what could happen at the 2026 Holyrood elections and ponder whether the Scottish influence in Westminster has grown stronger under Starmer. Plus, from Reform to the SNP – how new is the threat of populism in Scotland?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Give something clever this Christmas. |
| 0:02.2 | Treat a loved one to a year of The Spectator, in print and online, for just £99. |
| 0:07.9 | And we'll send you a bottle of our very own English sparkling wine worth £48 £48, absolutely free. |
| 0:15.3 | Have a bright and sparkling Christmas with the Spectator. |
| 0:17.7 | Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash Christmas. |
| 0:28.1 | Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffeehouse Shots. I'm Michael Simmons. |
| 0:34.1 | We get some complaints on this podcast occasionally and some of the xenophobic ones |
| 0:39.2 | are from people who say that there are too many Scottish accents on Spectator Podcasts. Well, |
| 0:45.6 | for those people, I've got some good news for you. Lucy Dunn, our political correspondent, |
| 0:51.0 | is leaving us to join STV. But for her last ever appearance on coffee house shots, |
| 0:58.1 | she joins me today along with Gordon McKee, the Labour MP for Glasgow South. Lucy, |
| 1:04.4 | let's start with you. What are your reflections when we look back over Scottish politics this |
| 1:09.0 | year? Is it fair to say it's been a more stable year than the past few years? |
| 1:12.5 | Well, it's interesting. |
| 1:13.2 | I think for the SNP things have definitely settled down over the last 18 months. |
| 1:17.3 | You know, we had Nicola Sturgeon's resignation in early 2023. |
| 1:21.3 | There was a very combative leadership contest that followed that, quite unedifying, I think, for all involved. |
| 1:27.3 | Humsey Yusuf's tenure in Scotland. And now we've got John Swinney. to leadership contests that followed that, quite unedifying, I think, for all involved. Humza |
| 1:27.6 | Yusuf's tenure in Scotland. And now we've got John Swinney, who has sort of studied the ship. I think all those kind of ship metaphors tend to be thrown out. But yeah, so I think for the S&P things to settle down. But I do think in general, we're at a really interesting point in Scottish politics, and that there's a sort of |
| 1:44.6 | fragmentation going on. You see it across the whole of the UK, but I suppose because we're |
| 1:48.5 | six months out from this Hollywood election, we're looking at just how well reform are polling |
| 1:55.7 | in Scotland. I think a couple years ago you wouldn't necessarily have thought that would be the |
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