Scotland’s voters used to be a dependable bunch – until we were rewarded for it with a parliament of our own. These days we can only be relied on to be either indecisive or disloyal. Sometimes we are both. In the 2007 Scottish parliament elections, we gave the Scottish National party (SNP) one seat more than Labour, ushering in the first pro-independence government (albeit a minority) in Scotland’s modern history. Three years later we overwhelmingly endorsed Labour in the UK general election, only to gift the SNP a Holyrood majority the following May. At the time this seemed like a kind of sophistication: Labour was best placed to take on the Tories down south, while the SNP was judged the most competent at the devolved level.
Then everything changed: the independence referendum in 2014 herded many lifelong Labour voters into the SNP’s camp, seemingly for good, and the SNP began dominating in both Westminster and Holyrood elections. When the SNP stumbled in the 2017 UK election, losing seats to both the Tories and Labour, it appeared to be more of a hiccup than a defeat, and the new order was restored in 2019 when the SNP won 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats.
That decade-long consolidation of power was forged, above all, in Scotland’s central belt, the old industrial heartland into which the Highlands were cleared and imperial wealth flowed from the 18th century onwards. In this densely populated band, squeezed around the nation’s gut, the urban working and middle classes were thrown together into the great electoral coalition through which Labour ruled Scotland for much of the 20th century. Thanks to Labour’s long reign, the central belt is still thought of as a sturdy basis for nationwide hegemony, and the SNP’s conquest of the region in 2015 seemed to usher in a new, and likely long, era of one-party predominance.
Yet all of a sudden, there is not a speck of yellow from the Forth to the Clyde. Only two gregarious splashes of Lib Dem orange – a hold in Edinburgh West and a gain from the SNP in Mid Dunbartonshire – now punctuate the deep red ravine that separates the handful of Tory and SNP seats scattered across the more rural north and south. Labour has returned to its Scottish fortress with an extraordinary bang.
The result is nothing short of catastrophic for the SNP. The party was expected to have a difficult night after a gruelling few years. Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as leader in 2023 left her risky “cooperation agreement” with the Scottish Green party in the hands of Humza Yousaf, a well meaning but insecure successor who quickly imploded the whole thing, and his own leadership, in a bungled attempt to show strength. His replacement, the party veteran and former leader John Swinney, was anointed as a safe pair of hands; he barely had time to paper over the yawning internal divisions of the Yousaf era before the general election was called. In all the commentary on Rishi Sunak’s early election gamble, there was little mention of its genuinely lethal effect on the SNP, which was forced to enter the campaign with an embarrassing shortage of funds and not even a whisper of a reset for its stalled policy agenda.
All of this occurred beneath the creeping stain and poison drip of rumour around an continuing police investigation into the SNP’s finances, in which Sturgeon’s husband, the party’s former chief executive, Peter Murrell, has been charged in relation to the embezzlement of party funds. The fresh breath of renewal that the SNP once offered to Scotland’s disillusioned central belters has turned into a sour grimace.
Even with all this, things are worse than they could have been. Twenty seats would have been a respectable basis from which to cautiously and humbly rebuild under Swinney’s new leadership, but the SNP is crawling home with nine at time of writing. It has been humiliated by the same kind of landslide – turbocharged by first past the post – with which it once flattened Labour, and which looks like not just a protest vote but a punishment beating. Regardless of the true causes, the result will only reinforce the idea that the SNP and the Scottish public are suddenly spinning wildly out of alignment.
The next Holyrood election is in 2026. Whether the SNP can recover in time depends, in part, on what lessons it learns from its leaden, timid campaign. The party undoubtedly struggled to cut through in an election that was dominated by the tantalising prospect of removing the Conservatives from power (less of an issue in 2015, when the SNP could hope for expanded influence in a predicted hung parliament). But it struggled to make a splash in those areas of clear differentiation from the Westminster consensus that could have boosted its vote – especially on Palestine, where Scottish Labour comfortably avoided the pockets of moral-force retribution doled out by independents and Greens in England.
The SNP may now listen more intently to Yousaf’s old critics on the right of the party, such as the deputy first minister, Kate Forbes, whose small-town rural conservatism is hardly a sensible base from which to try to reconquer Glasgow or Edinburgh. Labour, meanwhile, is in position to deliver its big retail offers to Scotland with the full might of British state: the party’s Scottish campaign, tacitly acknowledging the deep political differences with England, foregrounded Labour’s “new deal” for workers and trade unions, rejected austerity, and promised jobs and investment via GB Energy.
The SNP boasts a vision that can exceed the ambition of this social-democratic spin on Rachel Reeves’s “securonomics”, but it is sliding glumly down the agenda. Independence, the SNP’s great “get out the vote” weapon, has been suffocated by years of outright refusal from Conservatives and Labour, and the unwillingness of the Scottish public to entertain anything more radical than a legal referendum permitted by Westminster. Its spark is also undoubtedly diminished by the end of Tory rule.
Indeed, the SNP’s best hope now of avoiding another defeat in 2026 is one of two things. If Labour gives Scotland plenty of attention and investment over the next two years, the SNP at Holyrood may be able to claim some of it as its own doing, inverting its battle to avoid responsibility for 14 years of austerity. Or, if Labour fails to do so and things continue to decline, the SNP may be able to turn the tide of disenchantment back in its favour. With Labour at Westminster and the SNP at Holyrood, we are into relatively uncharted territory – it has happened only once before, between 2007 and 2010. Whatever happens, the main lesson is clear: disappoint the central belt at your peril.
Rory Scothorne is a historian and writer based in Edinburgh
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