Redgauntlet

Redgauntlet is back for 2025. Last month, the First Minister invited the leaders of Scotland’s major political parties, churches and trade unions to a summit which aims to lock Reform UK out of Holyrood after the 2026 Elections. 

Earlier that week, one Norstat poll had suggested that Nigel Farage’s party could win as many as 15 seats in the Scottish Parliament next year. The same poll found that Reform could win 14% of the constituency vote, placing them just four percentage points behind the Scottish Labour Party.

But how should the left respond to John Swinney’s summit? What forces form Reform UK’s base in Scotland? And what can be done to halt their advance?

To answer these questions, Coll McCail is joined by Frances Curran and Neil Findlay.

The final episode of the inaugural season of Redgauntlet, ‘Scotland and the World’, investigates Scotland’s place in the axis of Atlanticism over the last 25 years and asks how Scotland’s left can support those on the frontlines of anti-imperialist struggle.

Has the first quarter-century of the Scottish Parliament strengthened ‘fortress Scotland’ or has it created avenues to advance a worldview independent of Washington?  Is, as Karl Liebknecht wrote a century ago, the main enemy still at home? Or is it past time our priorities shifted to finding meaningful ways to support those struggling for liberation in the South? 

To answer these questions, Coll McCail is joined by Jonathon Shafi and Amy Tait. 

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Production Credits: Cailean Gallagher, Rory Hamilton and Coll McCail.

Music Credit: Anna Tait Westwell

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The Scottish independence referendum was the climax of a phase in politics when many people on the left - on either side of the debate - had a good sense of what was to be done. They didn’t always agree, but it often felt like the energy would endure regardless.

The decade that followed was shaped by the sense that the winners had lost and the losers had won. The SNP skyrocketed. Labour collapsed. Parts of the left in Scotland turned to Corbyn’s leadership, only for the left of UK Labour to be decimated.

After ten years, things are shifting again with the SNP’s decline, signs of a Scottish Labour revival, and the left talking afresh about new formations. But is it clear ten years after the referendum what the left in Scotland should now do? What is to be done?

Cailean Gallagher is joined by Sarah Collins and Chris Stephens to offer an answer to Lenin’s question.

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Production Credits: Cailean Gallagher, Rory Hamilton and Coll McCail.

Music Credit: Anna Tait Westwell

In 2004, Edwin Morgan wrote that Scots wanted their new parliament at the foot of Edinbrugh's Royal Mile "to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture." What Scots did not want of their parliament, however, was a "nest of fearties." Ultimately, continued Morgan, "the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want."

Today, ‘it wizny me’ appears baked into Holyrood's vocabulary. The Scottish Parliament presides over a litany of botched infrastructure projects, bungled schemes and broken promises. Alistair Grey’s plea to ‘work as if in the early days of a better nation’ has fallen on deaf ears as politicians accept, rather than push the boundaries of, Scotland’s current constitutional settlement.

Jenny Morrison and Andy Wightman join Coll McCail to discuss this rut and whether Scotland can escape it.

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Production Credits: Cailean Gallagher, Rory Hamilton and Coll McCail.

Music Credit: Anna Tait Westwell

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Who Owns Scotland

The second episode of Redgauntlet examines the role of writers, storytellers and artists in shaping our politics. In the 1980s and 1990s – so the story goes – writers, artists and intellectuals prodded Scotland towards constitutional change, giving voice to a working class that was muted by the Union. Amidst the doldrums of devolution, sometimes it feels as if those times are past.


To explore what currents of culture are taking the Left – and Scotland – toward a better future, Cailean Gallagher is joined in Edinburgh by Erin Farley and Scott Hames. 

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Production Credits: Rory Hamilton, Nelli Nemeth, Coll McCail and Cailean Gallagher. 


Music Credit: Anna Tait Westwell.

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Redgauntlet is the Scottish politics show from Skotia and Scottish Left Review.

Our first episode explores Scotland's constitutional bind. John Swinney insists independence will be line one of the SNP’s general election manifesto, but he knows his party has exhausted the constitutional routes to a second referendum. Scottish Labour looks set for gains across the central belt in July, while Keir Starmer wraps himself in a union jack. With the General Election just weeks away, the electorate remains evenly divided on the independence question. 

To interrogate the independence impasse and explore how Scotland can escape this doom loop, Coll McCail is joined by Cat Boyd and Kenny Farquharson.

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Production Credits: Fred Lyth, Rory Hamilton, Cailean Gallagher and Nelli Nemeth.

Music Credit: Anna Tait Westwell.

With thanks to Owl Shed Studios, Edinburgh.

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The Jaggy Thistle

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