Tonight could kill Scottish independence for a generation

The exit poll puts the SNP on 10 (ten) seats. That is very much at the low end of the spectrum of expectations among the Nationalists. The party won 48 out of 59 Scottish seats in 2019. There are 57 constituencies north of the border, and if John Swinney has managed to win only ten of those, he and his rank and file will be bitterly disappointed. On the ITV results programme, Nicola Sturgeon stuck the boot in, describing the exit poll as ‘the grimmer end of expectations for the SNP’ and said the party’s campaign failed to put forward a ‘unique selling point’. 

Swinney, formerly Sturgeon’s number two, stepped forward in May to replace her immediate successor Humza Yousaf, following 13 disastrous months in charge of the devolved Scottish government. He was sold as a safe pair of hands who could save the SNP from catastrophic losses in this election, but ten seats isn’t all that different to what might have been expected had Yousaf led the party into the election. The Swinney experiment has failed and failed categorically. 

Four observations off the back of this. 

First, Scottish independence is dead for at least a generation. With just a handful of Commons seats and a beleaguered Holyrood administration under fire for failing to deliver after 17 years in office, the SNP can no longer apply the same constitutional pressure on Westminster. A Labour government won’t have to give a second referendum a second thought. 

Second, Swinney’s leadership will now come under question. He has only been in the job for two months but he has also been a senior figure in the party leadership since 2007, almost without interruption. It will be very difficult for him to argue that he is the agent of change who can take the SNP forward and rebuild it.

Third, Labour must now be considered the favourite to win the 2026 Scottish parliament election, which would bring to an end two decades of SNP control and instal Anas Sarwar in Bute House as first minister. If tonight is the night that restores Labour as the dominant party of Scottish politics, 2026 will be the test of whether that dominance has any depth to it. On these numbers, it looks like it might. 

Fourth, the UK-wide exit poll isn’t as accurate when it comes to Scotland as it is in the rest of the country. Last time around, it overstated the SNP vote. With that caveat stated, it is not impossible that the SNP ends up with fewer seats than the Scottish Tories. That would be a seismic event.

The SNP’s message for many years now has been that independence would render Scotland a ‘Tory-free’ country. If Scotland has returned more Tories to Westminster than Nationalists, that would be a devastating blow for the SNP.