Why did the SNP win again and has Labour a future asks Gerry Hassan
The recent Scottish Parliament elections saw the SNP win a record fifth term in a row; the arrival of Reform in votes and seats; a Green semi-surge; the continued decline of Scottish Labour; a cratering for the Tories, while the Lib Dems held on and strengthened their foothold.
What does this say about Scotland? Why do the SNP remain popular after two decades in office? Are Labour and Tories increasingly irrelevant? Will Reform be a permanent fixture, and if so, what kind of populist politics will they champion? And can the Greens escape the shadow of the SNP?
Scottish politics are often reduced to caricatures. Scotland is defined by a centre-left consensus, but not one very dynamic, innovative or radical. Instead, it is shaped by a cautious centrism which positions itself at odds with Westminster and its trajectory over recent decades: Thatcherism, Blairism, Cameron Conservatism. Add to this the independence question, and Scottish politics are imbued with a sense of difference, while underneath this, public opinion is not that different from the rest of the UK.
The SNP led by John Swinney were comfortably returned to office on a reduced vote: 38% FPTP and 27% regional list – with FPTP providing 57 of the SNP’s 58 seats in the 129-seat Parliament. This meant the Nationalists fell short of their declared aim of winning an overall majority – 65 seats – but this is not meant to happen in a broadly PR Parliament (and has only happened once in the seven devolved elections: 2011).
There was little surprise in the SNP winning, but the result begets wider questions about the SNP’s resilience and their opponents” weakness. The SNP have had a torrid past couple of years. The post-Sturgeon era was characterised by instability and doubt before John Swinney replaced Humza Yousaf as party leader and First Minister in 2024. This has been against the backdrop of the long-standing police investigation into SNP finances, which saw Peter Murrell, who was chief executive of the SNP and, for much of that period, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, recently found guilty of embezzling £400,000 from the party.
What of Scottish Labour?
Scottish Labour fell to its lowest vote in seven elections. The once mighty party won a mere 19.2% FPTP and 16% regional list vote. They seem to have no message or clear vision. This is not about Anas Sarwar’s leadership or Keir Starmer acting as a drag on the party’s fortunes. Rather, Labour have continued a remorseless decline across numerous UK and Scottish leaders and contexts.
The takeaway is that twenty years of opposition at Holyrood to the SNP have left the party still rudderless and unsure how to challenge Nationalist hegemony. Scottish Labour had no clear retail offer in the past election, but that has been the picture over their years in opposition. Suffice to say, “Scottish Labour” is a bit of a false moniker; for the party is still not autonomous but beholden to London Labour. Post-election a new party campaign has begun – “Just for Scotland” – that will face the opposition of party establishments north and south of the border.
Tories, Reform and Greens
If Labour are in a bad place, the Scottish Tories look in danger of extinction. They won 11.8% of the FPTP and regional list votes: the lowest votes in the party’s history. It now seems a long time ago that the party under Ruth Davidson’s leadership enjoyed a mini-revival. In retrospect, this was all about Davidson as a media darling and not about detoxifying the Tory brand in Scotland.
Reform won 15.8% of the FPTP and 16.5% of the regional list vote; in the first, 3.4 % behind Labour and in the second, 0.6% ahead of Labour – allowing Reform to claim that with the same number of MSPs, 17 (all list), they are now the main opposition and challengers to the SNP. The Scottish Parliament, unlike Westminster, has no “official opposition”, but Reform’s claim gives them not just equal rights with Labour in First Minister’s Questions but makes them appear as the party of momentum and the future. Underlying this, the median age of Reform voters is 57 years, compared to the Scottish Tories’ 62 years.
Reform’s appeal in Scotland has been a shock but is not hard to fathom. They have presented themselves as insurgents and the real opponents to two decades of SNP rule after Labour and Tory charges have failed to stick. Despite their Farage-appointed Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, being a multi-millionaire and former Tory Lord and minister with little political acumen, the party has been able to occupy the unapologetic right-wing terrain long only held in Scotland by the Tories post-Thatcher with a sense of defeatism. While immigration may be a less acute political issue, it is a lightning rod touching a whole host of discontents about the modern SNP – from an over-centralising SNP to failing public services and concocted concerns about “the tyranny of the woke’.
The other winners were the Scottish Greens – co-led by Gillian Mackay and Ross Greer. Ever-present in the Scottish Parliament from 1999, they won 2.2% of the FPTP vote (only standing in six constituencies) and 14.0% on the list; they nearly doubled their representation from eight in 2021 to fifteen in 2026 (ahead of Tories and Lib Dems). Not only that, but whereas before every MSP they have elected has been on the regional list this time they elected two FPTP MSPs (Glasgow Southside and Edinburgh Central, defeating the SNP: the former Nicola Sturgeon’s old seat).
The party has roots in the pro-independence vote, is the most popular with younger voters, and overall has the youngest voters (median age 35), and does not seem to have been negatively affected by its short period supporting the SNP in office. And yet with such numbers, the Greens will have to assert their independence in relation to the SNP and not be seen as offering cover for the Nationalists or allowing them to hide from scrutiny.
Why are the SNP so dominant?
The above picture is one of the SNP comfortably dominant despite their much-publicised problems. Labour and Tory seem to be struggling for air with the newer political forces, Reform and the Greens, making headway. For some, the SNP’s continued success is inexplicable or reducible to the salience of the independence question. But it is about more.
A post-election survey by Ipsos asked voters to assess the favourability/unfavourability of parties. The SNP was the only party which emerged with a positive rating: 44% positive; 38% negative: +6%. This is not just about independence but reflects long-term brand party positioning of itself as the defender of Scotland’s interests and embodiment of Scottish identity, standing up to Westminster. This gives the party a rich reservoir of goodwill to draw upon when, as in recent times, it has troubles – alongside a patchy record in office to defend.
The next most positive party are the Scottish Greens (-10), while Scottish Labour have seen a collapse in their favourability ratings post-2024 (-26). Meanwhile, there is still trouble and a ceiling on support for the right, with both the Tories (-40) and even more Reform seen as toxic and hugely unpopular with the vast majority of voters. Reform’s ratings: 19% favourable, 66% unfavourable, -47%, underline that Farage and Reform are still viewed in negative terms by most Scots.
Where are Scottish politics going?
Scotland looks set for another five years of SNP rule, taking the party to twenty-four years in office: unprecedented in today’s age across the West. The party looks suitably ensconced in power, able to repel challengers but there are vulnerabilities. The party is exhausted and hollowed out by two decades in power. Its new class of younger politicians (Jenny Gilruth as Deputy FM; Mairi McAllan) are all unproven and managerial technocrats who have only experienced the SNP on the up and never had to deal with more challenging, combative politics.
More than this, the Murrell scandal revealed the misgovernance of the SNP and the over-concentration of power in the hands of Sturgeon. While John Swinney is a more collegiate figure, no fundamentals in the party have been altered, and there is an element of denialism mixed with a desire to turn a new page. The Murrell scandal touched on how the SNP see themselves as a close-knit community, even as a tribe and a kind of extended family. Danny Finkelstein captured this when writing of the party post-Murrell: “Friends appointing friends, friends marrying friends, friends falling out with friends, friends divorcing friends, friends stealing from friends. At no point do they question whether perhaps this is happening because it isn’t a good idea to have a tiny interlocking political establishment of friends and families ….”
This is a prescient take on the modern SNP. The core membership pre-2014 was an interconnected, intimate tribe who had grown up together and entered government as a generational class. The party made a virtue of this in their 2011 manifesto, with its concluding pages containing photos of marriages, births and other significant days. But being a family comes at a cost of not asking inconvenient questions of those in power, and it isn’t an accident that the party’s two consequential leaders – Salmond and Sturgeon have both been implicated in police investigations. Salmond was found not guilty of sex charges in 2000, while Sturgeon was never charged but still has major questions to answer for her period as party leader when her husband, as chief executive, was systematically looting the party.
Where does this leave the SNP and their opponents? We are clearly in a transitional period as people prepare for the established leadership to vacate the scene. This means in the SNP, John Swinney and in Labour, Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer. A post-Swinney SNP must find a better way of governing Scotland, not concentrating power, while making difficult choices about public spending, and doing the heavy lifting on independence, not undertaken post-2014.
Labour does not have to look hard to find its problems. As Starmer’s premiership draws to an end, is there any prospect that a new leader can find a more convincing political project and mission that contains a story of Scotland, the UK and the purpose of the union? Maybe Andy Burnham can begin to flesh this out, but the general stance of Labour since 2014 has been to not champion such an agenda beyond empty mood music while in Scotland having little original to say.
Scottish politics may look stuck from the outside, but beneath the surface, major changes and convulsions are happening. Fundamental ruptures are underway, and whoever can best articulate and understand these has the prospect of shaping Scotland’s future. The SNP start with major advantages, Labour and the Tories diminished, but clinging to the status quo and a defensive social democracy will not be enough.