2025: The year hatred went mainstream

In the new Netflix series Beast in Me, Claire Danes plays a writer struggling with the follow-up to her bestselling memoir. During lunch with her new neighbour, a property mogul who may or may not have murdered his wife, she sets out the premise of her sophomore effort, a chronicle of the unlikely friendship between politically opposite former Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. “No one wants hope,” sociopathic Nile Jarvis (played by Welsh actor Matthew Rhys) tells her. “People just want gossip and carnage.” 

For some time it has felt like gossip and carnage have been key components on the mood board of modern politics. But 2025 was the year hate joined them – 2025 was the year hate went mainstream.  

It was the year Donald Trump, who referred to “American carnage” as far back as 2017, posted on social media in the hours after the murder of Rob Reiner, accusing him of “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” and essentially blaming the acclaimed director for his own death. 

It was the year right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead, his murder caught on camera and served up as entertainment on Elon Musk’s X for millions to see, whether they wanted to or not. When Kirk’s widow Erika told a memorial service she forgave her husband’s assassin, an act of Christian compassion, Trump demurred, telling the crowd: “I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry, Erika.” 

It was the year Prime Minister Keir Starmer used the phrase “island of strangers”, an apparently unwitting allusion to the infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech in which Enoch Powell warned of white Britons becoming “strangers in their own country”. Starmer later apologised, saying he deeply regretted using the phrase which neither he nor his speechwriters knew to be an echo of Powell’s. 

More than anything else, however, 2025 was the year Nigel Farage’s Reform UK began saying the quiet part out loud. From race-baiting during the Hamilton by-election to the cheerleading of protests against asylum seekers attempting to learn English, the party seemed intent on subverting Michelle Obama’s famous aphorism: When they go low, we go high. 

If current polling is to be believed, a party whose leader recently maligned the schoolchildren of immigrant families, blaming them for the “cultural smashing” of Glasgow, could be close to becoming the main party of opposition at Holyrood after May’s election. That’s a problem for those of us who still believe in liberal, progressive values, a problem Scotland’s existing political establishment seems entirely unequipped to tackle.  

Despite some of its elected members holding views which would have been beyond the pale just a few short years ago – MP Sarah Pochin complaining about too many black people in adverts or mayoral candidate Chris Parry telling British-born David Lammy to “go home” to the Caribbean – Reform has been ushered into the mainstream of Scottish politics, given a cloak of respectability by those such as former Tory MSP Graham Simpson or former Scotland Office minister Malcolm Offord, the latest high-profile defector unveiled by Farage on a visit to Falkirk earlier this month. 

In the final weeks of this year, the Holyrood bubble was gripped by the strange case of justice secretary Angela Constance, who misrepresented the views of leading child protection expert Alexis Jay and then lied about it. Never mind that the substantive issue here was one which could hardly be more serious – the rape of children in care by gangs of men – Constance’s behaviour meant considerable amounts of parliamentary time was spent trying to get the justice secretary to account for her actions and when that failed, trying to remove her from post. All when she could have simply corrected the record, apologised, and moved on. 

This is the deep, fetid funk Scottish politics finds itself in during the dying days of 2025. Where the party of government for the past 18 years, now under the declinist managerialism of John Swinney, looks a shoo-in to hold onto power for another five years.  

If the polls are correct and Reform manages to become one of the main opposition parties at Holyrood, its MSPs will enter a parliament which has singularly failed to grasp the challenges facing the country during these past four and a bit years. An SNP bereft of ideas and Labour and Tory parties in varying states of disarray look entirely unprepared for the populist challenge coming their way.  

If 2025 was a year marked by hate and division, then perhaps 2026 will be the year where we begin to recover, where the anger that seems to have built up in our society slowly begins to dissipate. Perhaps, although I won’t be holding my breath. For the time being there’s likely to be more gossip, more carnage. Hope was politically fashionable once – it’s time our leaders gave people a chance to believe in it again.