MAYBE it is in the nature of living in interesting times that, even as great change roils in our collective future, a deadly calm still pervades Scotland’s political class.

Upheaval is our ordinary, change our constant. But never, in the past decade, the change we need.

I’ve always found that that feeling of change and contradictorily stillness, is perfectly captured in the opening lines of Irish poet WB Yeats’s The Second Coming: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Yeats may have been writing about post-war Europe in 1919, and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence but it is a feeling that has crept back into contemporary Britain too. The centre cannot hold. Our self-appointed masters have lost control – and all efforts to maintain the status quo only serve to further destabilise it.

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You need only look, with open eyes, at the state of politics today to see the truth in this.

Labour, having been elected on a surge of anti-Tory sentiment, have since plummeted in the polls as their paltry offering to the electorate becomes clearer. The SNP, at the tail end of a (frankly unheard of) near two decades in power, appear to have run out of ideas.

And the Conservatives, most revealingly, are acting as if taking great strides to the right will be enough to bring their dwindling numbers back to prominence.

This weakness – the desperate holding of the centre and the slide toward the populist right – all belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the state of the Union; a misunderstanding that may shape our parliament in ways unforeseen by 2026 when the Scottish electorate return to the polls once again.

None are prepared to counter the rise of anti-establishment parties such as Reform, because none are capable of doing so without appealing to the very establishment that has left pensioners to freeze in winter and presided over a multitude of economic turmoils. It is not by letting politicians like Nigel Farage pick the battlefield of future elections that we will defeat the far-right, but by challenging the establishment that insists on its own self-importance while endlessly ceding ground to the right.

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We need real change. That’s what Reform offer, even if that change is inherently bad for all of us. The problem for the SNP, Labour and Conservative parties is that, fundamentally, none are willing to stray too far from one another.

Yes, tax offerings and budgets vary in their inefficiencies between the parties, but they are meaningless when compared to the offerings of post-war Britain, when the top rate of tax for high earners was more than 90% – or even when it was 60% under Margaret Thatcher.

The current top rate of tax under the so-called Labour party is just 45% – and Labour’s Rachel Reeves is considering extending the previous Conservative Party’s income tax freeze until the end of the current parliament.

If we want a revolutionary return to the days of building the welfare state, that takes political will and it costs money. But Scotland has the opportunity right now to show that there is a different path, much as it did in 2014 when the Scottish electorate were last genuinely enthused about a political movement.

The Scottish Budget is to be published tomorrow – and if the SNP are serious about seeing off the threat of Reform sweeping up seats come 2026, now is the time to act, to set a new path. And most interestingly, it could be the grassroots of the Scottish Green Party that force their hand.

The Scottish Greens have rightly been criticised in the past for supporting SNP Budgets that included staggering cuts to local government and local services that, in my opinion, are at the heart of community-led change.

Baby boxes and the promise of a nationalised energy sector (that never materialised) are well and good, but it is the less flashy, grinding work of councillors and local service providers that often makes the most direct impact on the wellbeing of our citizens. And it is those services which have been hollowed out under successive Holyrood budgets that have only cut, cut, cut.

This time, however, Scottish Green MSPs will be unable to support any Budget that further hollows out local services, following the passing of a conference motion earlier this year. With near-unanimous support, Green members backed an amendment from activist and columnist Ellie Gomersall and councillor Anthony Carroll that binds the party into voting against any Budget that includes cuts to local services.

This is an issue that has been coming to a head within the Greens for a time now, and with this motion and the approaching Budget, the grassroot membership have staked a claim in the future of Scotland’s services.

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Without support from the Greens, where does that leave the SNP? They could seek the votes to pass their next Budget from the LibDems – but in doing so, they would further cement themselves as a party that cannot successfully tackle the messaging of far-right demagogues like Farage.

Or they could reflect on what must change, lest we end up with a slew of Reform MSPs and councillors in power over the next few years. That starts with a budget that commits to local spending once again, and a tax system that more equitably distributes wealth.

We have time to build a case for a real left-wing alternative to Holyrood’s cosy consensus – but that work must start now, and it must start with the next budget.

Lest we are left, in the words of Yeats, wondering on “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”