The general election result is a catastrophe for John Swinney and the Scottish National party, which has dominated Scottish politics for a decade. Now it has experienced a comprehensive defeat.
A decade on from the independence referendum, the SNP has been swept aside by a resurgent Labour across central and western Scotland, to a far greater degree than opinion polls predicted.
On the eve of the election, Swinney had insisted the race in Scotland was too close to call. Unlike Labour’s certain victory across England, he said, the SNP was in a nip and tuck race with Labour in Scotland.
In the event, the SNP has been humiliated, losing 80% of its Westminster seats, down by at least 38. Many of its voters stayed at home to register discontent at the party’s failure to deliver a second independence referendum or their disillusionment with the series of scandals hitting it at Holyrood, its policy failures and its divisions over gender recognition.
Others who backed the SNP at previous elections swung behind Keir Starmer’s message about kicking the Conservatives out of power, presumably impressed, too, by Labour’s newfound discipline and message coherence.
Those attributes were once key to the SNP’s surge to power under Alex Salmond and then Nicola Sturgeon. But over the past three years its voters have lost faith in the independence message. A significant minority now no longer decide how to vote based purely on their constitutional preferences, although in urban constituencies leftwing SNP voters switched to the pro-independence Greens, putting them in third place in some.
In the 2015 general election, the first held after the independence referendum, the SNP won an extraordinary victory, buoyed up by the post-referendum euphoria among yes voters. While the yes campaign had lost that referendum by 10 points, it had built and harnessed a generation-defining confidence among left-of-centre Scottish voters, across central Scotland in particular.
Led by Sturgeon, the SNP won nearly every Westminster seat in Scotland by taking 50% of the vote, reducing Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Tories to one seat each and becoming the third largest party in the Commons with 56 seats. Successive elections then whittled that away, leaving the SNP with 48 MPs before this election.
Swinney knew the party faced a difficult day on Thursday but he hoped the losses would be respectable. Numerous Scottish polls put Labour and the SNP only a few points apart on the national vote. Although Labour expected to win about 30 Scottish seats owing to the heavy concentration of its vote in central-belt seats, Swinney still hoped the SNP might scrape home in about 20 or more.
In the event, seat projections based on opinion polls were also wrong. In some seats it seems very likely that anti-Tory tactical voting played a significant part in the results.
With Scotland’s last count in Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire delayed until Saturday, Labour has won a 35.7% share of the vote, up 17 points from 2019, and the SNP 29.9%, down 15.1.
This election was difficult, too, for the Scottish Conservatives, who had been hoping for wins in six or seven seats but held five, despite deep cuts in their support. Their outgoing leader, Douglas Ross, was defeated by the SNP in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, one of the few rays of light for Swinney.
Ross had enraged his own party by replacing the incumbent Tory candidate, David Duguid, in the seat in an attempt to remain at Westminster. In doing so, he had broken his promise to quit the Commons and focus solely on being group leader at Holyrood. He has been forced to quit as Scottish Tory leader as a result.
Ross had repeatedly weaponised independence, attempting to scare Tory voters into swallowing any distaste they may have for the Conservatives at UK level by foregrounding the SNP’s quest for a second referendum.
That gambit failed to gain traction. The Tory share of the vote plummeted to 12.2%, with its support in some seats undermined by a switch by 150,000 of its hardcore voters to Nigel Farage’s rightwing Reform. Instead, the centrist Liberal Democrats benefited, winning at least three extra Commons seats across their old rural heartlands and more than doubling their Scottish representation.
Swinney is not expected to quit as SNP leader.His focus will be on ensuring Labour’s surge at Westminster is not repeated in the far more important elections to the Scottish parliament in 2026.
Yet these results make that far harder. Losing so many Westminster seats dramatically cuts the state funding that the SNP will receive, and greatly reduces the profile it gains from having so many prominent MPs and guaranteed speaking slots in the Commons.
Crucially, it profoundly changes the political weather in Scotland. If its voters no longer prioritise independence, it leaves the party on the defensive. It can no longer claim to be the radical insurgent at Westminster. Now it is just another party managing domestic decline at Holyrood.
