LABOUR have won the first Scottish seat of the General Election as the SNP are facing collapse across the country.
Lillian Jones took Kilmarnock and Loudon from the SNP’s Alan Brown, winning 19,065 votes.
Brown had held the seat since 2015. His result was down 18 points on his 2019 figures, while Labour were up 26 points.
Shortly afterwards, the SNP’s Martin Doherty-Hughes lost West Dunbartonshire to Labour’s Douglas McAllister.
McAllister won 19,312 votes to Doherty-Hughes’ 13,302, as the SNP lost 16 points on their previous result. Labour were up 20 points.
The result comes as the BBC/ITV/Sky exit poll predicted a 170-seat majority for Labour across the UK, with the SNP dropping to just 10 seats, and a party source suggested it could lose all three of its seats in Edinburgh.
Meanwhile, former SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said: “This is not a good night for the SNP on these numbers.
“I think there will be a question about whether there was enough in the campaign to give out, effectively, a USP to the SNP in an election that was about getting the Tories out and replacing them with Labour.”
Speaking on ITV, she added: “This is at the grimmer end of the expectations for the SNP if the exit poll is right and, from what I’ve said earlier on, I expect it will be.
“This is seismic for Labour. There’s no getting away from that, it’s a massive achievement for Keir Starmer.”
The SNP’s campaign centred around calls for talks on another independence referendum if the party won a majority of seats at the election.
Following the exit poll result, Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes told the BBC: “I would strongly caution anybody against dismissing the robust, resilient and significant number of people in this country that support independence and the next Labour government will have to contend with that, we’ll have to listen to Scottish voters because even over the last few months – which have been difficult – that support for independence has remained strong.”
But she added the party would need to “listen to the voices of voters” and “set out our agenda to regain and rebuild the trust of the voters across Scotland”, she said.
