July 5, 2024 - 2:30pm

The 2024 general election will be remembered as the sobering moment when the Scottish National Party’s seemingly unstoppable electoral juggernaut came to a crashing stop.

The results speak for themselves. The SNP has lost 38 seats, and its share of the Scottish vote has fallen from 45% in 2019 to an estimated less than 30% today. Among the big beasts to fall were the outspoken gender-critical MP Joanna Cherry in Edinburgh South West and former MEP Alyn Smith while others, such as SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, barely clung on in Aberdeen South. Only the embarrassment of Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross — who ran a campaign almost as shambolic as the nationalists’ and lost his seat — and the rise of Reform UK spared the SNP from the abject humiliation of total wipeout.

Meanwhile, the Lazurus-like Scottish Labour Party has enjoyed an extraordinary resurgence, winning 37 seats across Scotland’s urban central belt and beyond. Its most symbolic victories came in Scotland’s biggest city, Glasgow — a former Labour heartland that was also one of only two local authority areas to back independence at the 2014 referendum.

Quaich-half-full Scottish nationalists might optimistically hope that this result is an aberration, a small setback that can be reversed. After all, the SNP lost 21 seats in the 2017 general election and went on to win them back in 2019, before triumphing at the Scottish Parliament election in 2021. But such wishful thinking would be misplaced: this general election has shown that the factors which previously propelled the SNP to power — and helped it bounce back in defeat — have rapidly vanished.

The SNP’s golden years under Alex Salmond were founded on his ability to appeal across the political divide and ally rural, socially-conservative Tartan Tories with urban, former Labour voters who felt disgruntled with Tony Blair and the failures of limited devolution. Salmond’s nationalism was nationwide, as popular in Balmedie as it was in Bargeddie. But, under his successor Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish nationalism then turned its back on its rural, conservative vote and focused on the progressive shibboleths of the major cities.

Swept from Scotland’s Central Belt by a resurgent Scottish Labour, the SNP is no longer a political movement that enjoys support across the country. It can no longer appeal across the urban-rural divide. It is no longer the party of the urban and suburban middle class, who have grown weary of high taxes, identity politics and failing public services.

Equally, the constitution has increasingly receded as an issue that motivates voters. SNP strategists had hoped the fact that around half of voters still notionally support independence would help strengthen their position. But these results show increasing numbers of pro-independence supporters are happy to vote for Unionist parties, with independence rarely ranked as a priority even among supporters of separation.

The loss of these twin factors is particularly dangerous for the nationalists as they will have little time to rebuild their voter base. The next Holyrood election is barely more than 18 months away and, on the basis of this general election result, many SNP seats in the Central Belt will be vulnerable to the Labour Party then too. The idea of fighting for the national interest can be assumed in Holyrood, making the SNP MSPs less important than the MPs supposedly holding Westminster to account.

The Nats will hope that their new(ish) leader John Swinney, and his impressive deputy Kate Forbes, can help distance the party from Operation Branchform, the ongoing police investigation into SNP finances. They have already indicated they will pursue a more pro-business approach than the former SNP first minister, Humza Yousaf, and the general election result will only further encourage them to ditch the party’s recent unpopular focus on gender and identity politics.

Yet, it seems unlikely that even a return to normalcy at the top of the SNP will be enough to save the nationalists now. It’s worth remembering that Swinney led the SNP to five seats in 2001 — he has never excited the nationalist base like Salmond or Sturgeon. After more than a decade of seeming invincibility, the SNP’s great electoral machine has finally broken down.


Andrew Liddle is a political commentator and historian based in Edinburgh.

ABTLiddle