What happened to the Abolish Holyrood Party?

First, a huge thank you. The Abolish Holyrood campaign has taken off because of your support. We’ve gained over 3,000 Twitter followers, been featured in the press, and turned #AbolishHolyrood into one of the most talked-about hashtags in Scotland. Together, we’ve shown that the demand to end this failed parliament is real—and it’s growing. However, die to two important issues, it is not possible to continue to register a political party for 2026 at this time.

The Campaign Name

We had hoped to create a party with the name Abolish Holyrood, but the Electoral Commission (EC) will not allow “Holyrood” in an official party name. This also rules out any party name like, Close Holyrood/End Holyrood/Scrap Holyrood. However, we can use these statements on billboards, hashtags and other marketing.

The EC suggested the best way forward would be for us to contacted the Abolish The Scottish Parliament Party (ATSPP) and ask them to work with us, noting that this party, despite being dormant for five years, could block any application we would make for a similar name. To cut a long story short:

We met with 'Gus' Ferguson, leader of the ATSPP and proposed combining the dormant party's name with The Majority’s credibility and social media influence—60,000 of our followers, plus access to a wider anti-nationalist network of 250,000—as well as billboards and other marketing power to promote the campaign.
As we would be leading the campaign and raising the funds, we asked Gus to make us as the primary officers.
He said he would consider our proposal but did not respond to our calls. Eventually we were told that he did not want to cooperate with us in the party.
Weeks later, after he ran in the Barrhead, Liboside, and Uplawmoor by-election as Abolish Holyrood with no support from us, and received only 27 votes, we contacted him again, offering to put our resources behind the campaign, and offered him a lead candidate position or, if he wanted, a crowdfunded financial arrangement. Again, he refused.
Despite initially saying he was going to run under his other party, The British Unionist Party, and that ‘he wouldn’t stand in our way’, Gus now says he will run as ATSPP in 2026, feeding off our popularisation of #AbolishHolyrood.

The result: a man with no social media presence, no organisational support and no marketing skill has blocked the campaign he claims to champion—and now plans to leech off the work we, and others, have done to build the #AbolishHolyrood movement in order to grab unearned votes by default. Given his behaviour, I advise people not to vote for Gus Ferguson's ATSPP.

With this in mind, we would have had to move forward under a new party name, one that puts us at the top of the ballot paper: The best candidate for that name would have been A BETTER SCOTLAND, with the tagline Scrap Holyrood.

This would have given us billboards and leaflets that say: SCRAP HOLYROOD – Vote for A BETTER SCOTLAND. With time, we could have made this work. However, we would still need to be funded….

Funding the Campaign

At the end of September, we ran a short campign to guage interest for funding the party, hoping to raise pledges for a minimum of £3,000 a month to cover:

Full-time campaigning by the team
Party registration and compliance
Meetings and events across Scotland
Travel to reach communities everywhere
Candidate selection and support
Press releases and media outreach
Campaign materials, leaflets, and billboards
Website and back-office support

However, we did not meet the pledge amount—in fact we were nowhere near it—so we cannot continue with the party registration and will not be able to run in 2026. We will continue, for now, as an activist group. It's very disappointing: I feel we really did have a once-in-a-decade chance to make history and finally put an end to the Holyrood disaster. But, for now, we'll have to wait.

Mark Devlin: Founder of The Majority and leader of the Scrap Holyrood campaign.