Well, we hope you all listened to us in January and got your bets in.
Enjoy your winnings. Because the real work starts now.
(As we write this there’s one Scottish seat waiting to be declared – Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, which had been SNP. So it’s still possible that the SNP could break double digits, but even in that case the winnings on the 13/8 bet would still have more than covered the 8/1 bet and left you in profit.)
Last night’s election was extraordinary in all sorts of ways. Labour’s majority of 166 (give or take a couple depending on those last few results) is well below even the lowest of predictions, but has been won on just barely over a third of the vote.
Keir Starmer won the backing of just 33.8% of the electorate – 6% FEWER than Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017, and only 2% more than Corbyn got in his shattering 2019 defeat. On a night of low turnout from a deeply disillusioned electorate, Labour’s total vote actually went DOWN on Corbyn’s tallies in both 2019 (by around 600,000) and 2017 (by around 3 million).
But because of the havoc wrought by Reform UK – who took 14% of the vote but only got four seats for it, while the Lib Dems got 71 seats for 12%, gaining 63 MPs on just 0.6% more vote share – and the UK’s comically broken electoral system, Starmer will govern like an emperor with one of the biggest majorities of all time, just a few shy of Tony Blair’s 179 in 1997, and against the wishes of almost 70% of the population.
The SNP clung like a drowning man to the line that their crushing defeat in Scotland was down to the election being about kicking out the Tories.
But that excuse was laughably false, because result after result showed Tory voters switching to Labour to kick out the SNP. The only seat the Tories lost in Scotland was Aberdeenshire North, as a result of Douglas Ross’s catastrophic decision to parachute himself in over the head of popular local incumbent David Duguid.
It caused such a mutiny in Tory ranks – the local party basically refused to campaign – that Ross had to stand down as the party’s Scottish leader.
And even there the SNP vote share went down, just not as much as the Tories. Labour were absolutely nowhere (they disowned their own candidate), and if even a fifth of the Reform vote had stayed with the Tories then Ross would have hung on.
(We must of course concede that technically Reform DO want to kick out the Tories, but only to replace them with much more extreme super-Tories.)
To pick an example genuinely at random, we stuck a pin in the electoral map, at Airdrie & Shotts. Here’s the 2019 result:
In 2024 the Tory vote melted from 18% to less than 5%, but largely because Reform came from nothing to take 8%. Those weren’t people who wanted Labour in power, they were people for whom the Tories weren’t Tory ENOUGH.
It makes no sense for SNP voters to switch to Labour to “kick out the Tories” when the SNP already held the seat and the Tories presented zero threat. They deserted the SNP because they didn’t want to vote SNP any more.
Conversely, switching your vote from the SNP to Labour in – another random example – Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock “to kick out the Tories” would have been an incredibly risky strategy, given that Labour were absolutely nowhere in the seat in 2019 and the Tories were only a couple of thousand behind.
But switch they did, with the SNP and Tory votes both being cut in half and a sizeable chunk of the latter going to Reform. The Labour vote did more than double, but it still wouldn’t have even been enough for second place five years ago.
The conclusion is clear: this was a vote to get rid of the SNP, not the Tories.
But we knew all this beforehand. Scotland’s election was never going to be about kicking out the Tories, because there were hardly any Tories to kick out – under 10% of the country’s seats at Westminster were occupied by Conservatives. In more than 20 seats, switching from SNP to Labour entailed risking MORE Tories winning because Labour were so far behind, in 3rd place or even worse.
Only some failures of Unionist tactical voting stopped the SNP ending up with FEWER seats than the Tories – eg in Aberdeen North, where voting Labour was completely insane from a Unionist perspective, with the party miles behind in 4th place.
But the Labour and Tory vote split in half, letting Stephen Flynn sneak through with a vote tally that again wouldn’t even have been enough to come second in 2019.
It was an extremely Pyrrhic victory for Flynn, whose plans to get elected to Holyrood in 2026 as a stepping stone to the party leadership now lie in tatters. Under the rules invented to stymie Joanna Cherry, he now can’t run for the Scottish Parliament without first standing down at Westminster – not a great look for the Westminster leader.
(Kate Forbes will probably be the happiest SNP politician in Scotland today.)
He’s now trapped in London, a nonentity leading a tiny rump that’s lost its prestigious role as the third-biggest party, away from the real Scottish action, and as a final twist of the knife he’s only going to have Pete Wishart and Kirsty Blackman to talk to.
(Blackman was also the beneficiary of a split Unionist vote. There were 25,000 anti-independence votes in Aberdeen North, but they fragmented and kept Blackman in the seat with just 14,500 despite her vote share plummeting from 54% to 34%.)
John Swinney duly issued the usual platitudes about listening and learning lessons, but absolutely nobody believes the SNP will actually do either, as last night’s parade of excuses and Swinney’s own toe-curling insistence that the SNP still had a mandate for a second referendum illustrated.
The party is stone-cold dead in the water, and the independence movement’s only regret should be that it held onto as many as nine seats. But alternative indy parties failed to make any sort of breakthrough last night – as far as we can tell Alba’s best showing was a dismal 2.8% for Neale Hanvey in Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy.
It’s hard to avoid contrasting Alba’s continued failure to launch with the pretty striking success of Reform in similar circumstances. While they may only have four seats, Alex Salmond would kill for Nigel Farage’s vote share. Fully 20% of Scottish voters want independence but didn’t vote for the SNP yesterday, and the vast majority of them didn’t vote for alternative indy parties either.
A rational explanation (or at least partial explanation) for that is that the SNP had to suffer a big defeat before people would start to accept that the party was no longer a credible route to independence and had to be replaced. It’s quite hard to get voters to believe a party with 80% of Scottish seats is a busted flush.
But last night certainly provided that watershed. The SNP is over, and now it’s time for people to stop clinging to the corpse, weeping and raging impotently at the heavens. Today is when the real work on the new era of the indy movement has to begin.
