John Swinney has admitted that the Scottish National party needs a period of “soul searching” after Labour’s landslide victory in Scotland.
Swinney, who took over as SNP leader eight weeks ago, said his party had endured “a very tough night” after losing at least 38 seats across central and western Scotland to a resurgent Labour.
Labour won 35.7% of the vote in Scotland, several points more than in the UK as a whole, and gained 36 seats, a result that shocked the SNP leadership and surprised Labour’s strategists.
With one seat in the Highlands not due to declare until Saturday owing to a discrepancy over the number of votes cast, on Friday Labour had won 37 of Scotland’s 57 constituencies, while the SNP had nine, with 29.9% of the vote. The Conservatives lost one of their six seats while the Liberal Democrats enjoyed their best Scottish result in generations, winning five.
Swinney said Labour’s “emphatic victory” showed that Scottish voters were no longer prioritising independence, which in turn meant the party needed to reassess how it achieved constitutional change.
The first minister claimed in the final days of the campaign that the election was still too close to call in Scotland, and had repeatedly said an SNP victory in Scotland would trigger talks on a fresh independence referendum.
“I have to accept we failed to convince people of the urgency of independence in this election campaign,” he said on Friday. “We’re obviously not winning that argument with the public [so] we’ve got to think long and hard about how we address that question.”
Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, who held his seat of Aberdeen South despite a 12.5-point fall in support, said his party had been swept aside by the “Starmer tsunami”.
He hinted that the sleaze crises at Holyrood, its policy divisions and internal disputes over how to achieve independence were to blame. These raised significant questions about the party’s fate in the Scottish parliament elections due in May 2026, he said.
“I’m absolutely scunnered, like I think everyone is in the SNP right now,” Flynn told ITV News on Friday morning. “We didn’t necessarily see the scale of this defeat coming. I think we knew we were in for a challenging election but the outcome is absolutely bleak.
“[We’ve] got a pretty short turnaround time now between now and the Scottish election in 2026, to change things to get things right, and to restore the trust that we once had from the people of Scotland.”
Swinney appeared to acknowledge that his devolved government in Edinburgh would now need to rebuild its relationship with the UK government by making common cause with the new Labour prime minister.
He said Scotland’s public finances were “under the most ferocious pressure” and he appealed to Starmer to “embark on a period of cooperation” with the Scottish government.
Speaking outside No 10, Starmer indicated he wanted to work collaboratively with the UK’s devolved governments. He said he wanted to “unite our country; four nations standing together again, facing down as we have so often in our past, the challenges of an insecure world, committed to a calm and patient rebuilding.”
Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, widely credited with masterminding his party’s revival, seemed more sceptical as he appeared unwilling to offer an olive branch when he appeared with Labour’s victorious candidates in Glasgow on Friday morning. He said Swinney now had to reflect on why the SNP had done so badly.
Sarwar’s priority was to convert the general election result into a Labour victory in the next Holyrood election. “You can see the verdict of the Scottish people, both to his [Swinney’s] approach in this election campaign but also the SNP’s approach to government, where they have failed far too many people,” he said.
The Scottish Tories largely defied predictions of a wipeout, losing only one of their seats to the SNP as Douglas Ross, the party’s outgoing leader, failed to hold Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. The party held all its seats in the south of Scotland, with reduced majorities.
Ross, who became the candidate at short notice after the incumbent Tory MP, David Duguid, was controversially ousted to make way for him, blamed Reform for his defeat. He lost by 942 votes, while Reform came third with 5,562.
There were other clear warning signs for the SNP elsewhere in Scotland. The Lib Dems took three seats from the SNP despite not increasing their national share of the vote, while the pro-independence Scottish Greens dramatically increased their support in urban seats where the SNP was defeated.
The Greens came third, ahead of the Lib Dems, in Edinburgh North and Leith and in Edinburgh East and Musselburgh with more than 10% of the vote, and also secured third place in several Glasgow seats.
Patrick Harvie, the Scottish Greens’ co-leader, said these results were “an important springboard” for future Scottish elections. “We have established our party as the third political force in Glasgow and have broken new ground across the country,” he said.
