John Swinney had promised that a majority of SNP MPs would be his mandate for a second independence referendum. By the small hours of the count, that plan lay in ruins.
Scottish Daily Express reported that when it went to press, Labour had 37 seats in Scotland. The SNP had seven, the Liberal Democrats four and the Conservatives three. Pollsters expected the Nationalists to finish with only eight. At the last election the SNP held 48 seats and Labour held a single one, so the two parties had effectively swapped places.
Anas Sarwar led Scottish Labour to that result, and the party’s gains came alongside a UK-wide win that put Sir Keir Starmer on course for Downing Street. The biggest swings from SNP to Labour came in the Central Belt. Labour took every seat in Glasgow. In Edinburgh, the SNP lost ground to a mix of Labour and Liberal Democrat challengers, and Joanna Cherry and Deidre Brock were among those removed.
Seats that changed hands
In East Renfrewshire, Blair McDougall, a former chief strategist for Better Together, lifted Labour from third place to first. Chris Kane did the same in Stirling and Strathallan and ousted Alyn Smith in the process.
The vote share told the same story. The SNP was heading for about 30%, against 45% five years earlier. Labour was set to collect almost 40%.
The Conservatives had a bad night too. In dozens of Scottish seats they slipped behind Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Douglas Ross lost Aberdeenshire North and Moray East to the SNP, and the Reform vote played a part in that outcome.
Swinney apologises
Swinney, who had led the SNP for eight weeks, apologised to colleagues who had lost their seats. “I’m very sorry to the colleagues who have lost their seats and will lose their seats in the course of this evening,” he said.
He also admitted the party had not shaken off its troubles. “You don’t recover from those tough times in an instant, and we’ve not managed to recover from them during this election campaign,” he said. “We’ve got to build the trust and the confidence of the public in Scotland.”
The blame-hunting began quickly. Cherry pointed at Nicola Sturgeon, saying “recent scandals” had hurt the party’s reputation, and she also cited an obsession with identity politics around gender. Asked on BBC Scotland how much fault lay with Sturgeon, Cherry said Sturgeon had to take her “share” but that it could not fall on one person.
Starmer’s speech
In his victory address, Starmer said “election victories don’t fall from the sky”. He told the country: “We said we would end the chaos and we will. We said we would turn the page and we have.”
He spoke of his parents and the security they felt, a hope he said working-class families like his own could build on. That hope “might not burn brightly in Britain at the moment”, he said, “but we have earned the mandate to relight the fire.”
Sources
Sources
- 2024 United Kingdom general election in Scotland – Wikipedia
- SNP suffers crushing General Election defeat leaving independence…
