Election earthquake

The Scotsman

Deputy Editor Alan Young is joined by Political Editor Alistair Grant and Deputy Political Editor David Bol to reflect on a dramatic election night

Transcript

00:00Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Daily Bulletin for Friday, the day after a pretty

00:15incredible election result, a political earthquake indeed I'm sure. We're about to hear about

00:23Alistair Grant, Political Editor, you were at the Edinburgh Count, David Ball, our Deputy,

00:29you are in Glasgow. If I could come to you first, maybe Alistair, just to get your initial

00:37reflections. It's quite a remarkable change to the political landscape, not just in the

00:49UK but particularly in Scotland.

00:52Yeah, I mean what an incredible night, what an incredible result. I mean, all the cliches

00:58just do not do this justice. A political earthquake, a landslide result for Labour, I think the

01:04SNP just got buried under that Labour landslide that was happening across the UK. I've been

01:09in the Royal Highland Centre all night watching the count in Edinburgh, we had some amazing

01:13results here. Joanna Cherry, the very high profile SNP politician, lost her seat to Labour.

01:19She had a majority of just under 12,000 in 2019, so that's been a huge swing to Labour

01:25in that seat. Tommy Sheppard as well, another high profile figure, also lost his seat. Labour

01:30won four of Edinburgh's five constituencies and all six constituencies in Glasgow, which

01:40I'm sure David will go on to talk about, but just an incredible result for the party. Labour

01:45in Scotland obviously had the momentum behind them in this campaign, they were expected

01:48to do very well. Keir Starmer had that kind of narrative behind him throughout the whole

01:53general election campaign, we had poll after poll showing Labour landslide results across

01:58the UK. But I think in Scotland, no one expected the result to be quite this good for Labour

02:03and quite this bad for the SNP. The SNP won 48 seats in 2019, they now seem to be reduced

02:10to little more than a handful of seats, and Labour picking up seats all across the central

02:16belt in ways that, with massive swings, I don't think even they would have thought possible.

02:23We've also had a number of other interesting results, Douglas Ross losing his contest that

02:28he was, his seat that he was going for in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. Big result

02:35for the SNP there, Seamus Logan for the SNP. We've had the Lib Dems picking up Middenbartonshire,

02:42running Edinburgh West here tonight, so it's been a reasonable night for them as well.

02:46I think there's hopes as we're recording this that they might pick up Inverness as well.

02:50But just an absolutely incredible result for Labour, I think, in Scotland.

02:54Yeah, we can have a quick look at the state of the parties as we record this. David, if

03:03you can maybe just describe to us what a dramatic night it's been in Glasgow. Glasgow turning

03:10red again is a really big moment.

03:13For the Scottish Labour to send basically, to go from completely SNP to completely Labour,

03:21reversing that trend we've seen since the 2015 general election, where the SNP on the

03:26back of the independence referendum basically took over Glasgow. So it's just reversing

03:31that trend. As I asked to mention, we had all these seats in the central belt that we

03:35fought on a knife edge, so it was kind of expected the SNP would hold on to some of

03:39them. But the swing's been so much that Labour has been a force to be reckoned with in the

03:44central belt. Confident and flying high, I mean, Anas Sarwar turned up here and there

03:50was a huge crowd of activists waiting to greet him and very much playing it up, saying that

03:56we're going to have a good night. This is before we'd had any results in Glasgow, it

04:00was just the writing was kind of on the wall for the SNP here. We had Alison Thewlis, who

04:04lost her seat. It was a new seat, it was a bit of sympathy for Alison Thewlis because

04:08her Glasgow central seat was kind of abolished and the boundary changes weren't particularly

04:13kind to her. But she was kind of holding back the tears a little bit. We had David Linden

04:17losing his seat as well and Stuart MacDonald. So a lot of the big SNP names that we've become

04:23accustomed to will just be no longer in Westminster and we'll just have to get used to a new Labour

04:31team to represent Scotland, especially across the central belt.

04:35There's going to be some real soul-searching in the SNP now, you would think. They expected

04:42to lose big. No one imagined, like you said earlier, Alistair, that they would be left

04:49with, well, currently seven seats. It's absolutely incredible. Where does John Swinney go now?

04:55Yeah, I mean, I think soul-searching is the word. I mean, soul-searching can very quickly

05:00send you to finger-pointing. So they're going to have to try and avoid descending into some

05:04kind of internal navel-gazing row about how they got to this situation. But clearly the

05:09campaign they were running in Scotland did not hit home with voters. Part of that was

05:13due to this kind of Labour momentum across the UK and essentially this being an election

05:19in which Labour had this narrative of it being a change election, an election to get rid

05:23of the Tories, to get the Tories out of Westminster, to change the Prime Minister, to bring in a

05:29new kind of regime in Westminster. And that narrative was very hard for the SNP to deal

05:33with. You know, they're running in a Westminster campaign. They're obviously not going to be

05:37a party of government in Westminster. In the past, in recent elections, they've run on

05:41issues to do with the Constitution. Independence has been high on the agenda. That just wasn't

05:46the way this election played out. Although the SNP did put independence at the centre

05:50of their campaign. John Swinney repeatedly said independence was page one, line one of

05:55the SNP's manifesto. And I think some of the soul searching is going to have to be around

05:59that strategy, putting independence at the centre of that manifesto, put independence

06:05on the ballot paper. And this result has been a blow to the independence cause. I think

06:10the SNP are going to have to contend with that, contend with this result, what it means

06:14for that push for independence. They're clearly not going to be able to use this result to

06:19kind of push for a second referendum like they had hoped to. Their plan initially was

06:24to push for a second referendum if they got the majority of seats in Scotland. Clearly

06:29that's not happened. It's not got anywhere close to happening. I think sights will inevitably

06:33turn to the 2026 Holyrood election. I think Labour will use this result as a springboard

06:39going into that campaign and a star where the Scottish Labour leader will be wanting

06:43to become the next First Minister of Scotland. And they'll use this result to try and gain

06:48their momentum when it comes to Holyrood. The SNP, on the other hand, will be hoping

06:52that two years down the line, when that election comes round, people might be disillusioned

06:57with a Labour government in Westminster, they might be disillusioned with Keir Starmer.

07:01He's obviously going to be coming in as Prime Minister during an extremely tough time

07:06financially, a tough time for the country. People might not, they might be disillusioned

07:12with the pace of change that Labour have, and that might be something that the SNP can

07:16capitalise on. But a huge amount of soul-searching is going to have to be going on in the party,

07:20not least because they just are reduced to a rump of what they were formerly in Westminster.

07:25So they're going to have to contend with no longer being the third party in Westminster,

07:30no longer having that prominent position in PMQs that Ian Blackford and more recently

07:35Stephen Flynn made such good use of from the SNP's point of view. So it's going to

07:40be a whole different way of working for them. And it's just the SNP, the modern SNP,

07:45are not a party that is used to losing. There's actually a point that a Labour politician

07:49I was speaking to earlier on tonight in the small hours of the morning was making to me.

07:54He said they're not a party that's used to losing and they're going to have to,

07:57they've got a lot of activists, a lot of politicians that are just very used to winning

08:01elections. They're not used to having to kind of come together and rebuild after a

08:06defeat like this. And it'll be very interesting to see how they cope with that.

08:09And we might get a flavour of it later on today if John Swinney comes out and speaks

08:13to activists and speaks to the media later on.

08:17Indeed, we would, you would expect, David expect to hear from Anas Sarwar today,

08:22a very, very happy man, obviously. And he's made no secret about his ambitions

08:29for 2026 on the back of the results.

08:32Yeah, I mean, I spoke to him not long ago and he was very much pointing to the 2026

08:37election. That is the big focus now for Labour. This is the starting point of a,

08:42as Alistair mentioned, a sort of two-step sort of programme for Labour to have power

08:46in Scotland. The first bit is done now. As far as they're concerned, the focus will

08:51be on pointing out the SNP's record. The SNP are kind of on the ropes now,

08:55so it'll be very easy for Labour to pick apart their record, basically, the NHS

09:01and all the things we've come quite common to hear about. And that will be the focus

09:08of Labour going forward, really. They'll just want to put them in the frame

09:13to become the next Scottish government. And they'll have to deliver in the next

09:17couple of years. That's going to be tricky. But Alistair mentioned that it's going

09:20to be very tough for Labour and Keir Starmer to have an impact very quickly.

09:25The economy is obviously in a bit of a mess, to be perfectly honest,

09:28and they're hinging a lot of their sort of promises on sort of that economic

09:32growth that they're promising. And if that doesn't happen, then they're going

09:35to have to make some unpopular decisions, such as putting tax up or cutting spending.

09:40So Labour and Anas Sarwar haven't been used to having that thrown at them.

09:44It's been very comfortable to sort of point at the Tories and the SNP in government

09:49and point at their record and having the responsibility. That's over now.

09:53They'll have that responsibility and it will make it quite tricky for them

09:56in the lead up to that 2026 election. But that is the key for them now.

10:00So they're really, really fascinating times ahead.

10:04Thanks very much to you both. I'm going to let Alistair go because he's absolutely freezing.

10:08I can tell from here and he's been thrown out of the counting hall.

10:12We all have much more at Scotsman.com throughout the day with all the very latest news

10:18and expert analysis. If you can, please do subscribe.

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10:31from me in Edinburgh, from Alistair and from David.

10:35It's bye for now.

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