The dynamic in Scotland diverges from the British context, argues Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

The UK general election in Scotland produced spectacular swings and a changed political landscape. Labour was the big winner on the night. It won 340,000 more votes than in 2019 and 37 of 57 seats, almost two-thirds of the seats up for grabs in Scotland.

Back in 2019, the party had won only one seat on the back just short of a fifth of the vote. This time, in 2024, winning just over a third of the vote, it won two-thirds of the seats. While the result was on par with elsewhere in the UK, the overall trend is different. Labour increased its vote in Scotland but shed votes overall in the UK. The swing was moreover even more spectacular than anything achieved in the UK.

That needs explanation. Perhaps the simplest way to explain the result is to start with an observation: Scottish independence was visibly off the agenda in this campaign. Ever since the failed campaign to win independence in 2014, the SNP had sucked up the independence vote in Scotland to win decisive victories both to the devolved Holyrood parliament and the Westminster parliament.

Neoliberal Scotland

But there was something different about this election campaign. If the SNP’s former leader Nicola Sturgeon had promised to run the next general election as a proxy referendum, that was a promise subsequently ditched by her successors, Humza Yousaf and John Swinney. The truth is that the SNP itself has come to recognise that independence is simply not on the agenda.

The main reason for that is that the independence movement was channelled behind a single party, the SNP, which was increasingly run by a small group of people wedded to neoliberal economics. Their strategy was to win elections promising independence, and then to deliver social-liberal policies in the devolved government, thus securing the backing not just of the popular classes, but critically also of big business.

That was the main goal of the Sustainable Growth Commission published in 2018. The programme was criticised by the left as a ‘cuts commission’ as it wedded Scotland to the use of the British pound until the economy met six tests. The result of these tests, which included so-called fiscal sustainability, was the implementation of austerity. A report by the Institute for Fiscal Stability argued that the plan envisaged ‘spending on public services and benefits falling by 4% of GDP over the course of a decade.’

Since then, social inequalities in Scotland have been rising, and approaching levels south of the border. Scotland was reckoned to have around 19% of its population in poverty, three percentage points lower than England, according to a report released in mid-2023. It has been failing to meet the Scottish government’s targets on education, health inequalities and commitments towards net-zero emissions. Deaths from alcohol reached a fourteen-year high this year.

Political failure

It was not just economic and social issues that blighted the SNP’s record in power. There was also the deep shock and dismay at the party’s funding scandal, which saw Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, and party chairman, Peter Murrell, charged for embezzlement in April 2024. The party’s corruption scandal had broken earlier and probably been at the root cause of Sturgeon’s shock resignation in spring 2023.

Ever since the party looked rudderless and compromised. Its purges of opposition had left few untainted by association with Sturgeon, and the leadership candidates on offer appeared to differentiate between themselves most over whether they were socially liberal or conservative. The truth was, however, that they had all voted for the neoliberal budget after the neoliberal budget, aided and abetted in government since August 2021 by the Scottish Greens.

By the time of the general election in July 2024, the threat of a Tory-run Westminster seemed remote. Indeed, the Tory implosion is important as context for the Scottish result. Both in the UK – and in Scotland, where it lost half its vote – the Conservative Party was the big loser. In fact, in Scotland, it fell into fourth place, behind the Liberal Democrats, who won more seats on fewer votes.

The Tory collapse meant that many Scots could feel safe delivering a protest vote against the devolved government in Holyrood. They could vote for Labour in the safe knowledge that the Tories were on their way out. Others might well have abandoned the SNP for good, disgusted by the cynicism with which it treated the independence cause and the promises to its base.

There is no knowing where Scottish politics goes from here. But the SNP-Green majority is now under threat at the next Holyrood election due in May 2026. The SNP won 30% on a decreased turnout but fell from 48 to nine seats. Theoretically, the party could still energise sections of its base that had stayed home or win back some voters who had switched to Labour to deliver a protest vote in May 2026. Given Holyrood elections are run on a mixed-member proportional representation basis, it is not impossible for the SNP to recover. 

But the SNP seems in decline. Its current leader, John Swinney, is not yesterday’s man. He is the day before yesterday’s man. He led the party through a poor run in the early 2000s, before its meteoric rise under Alex Salmond. The party’s decision to put him up again showed that the two wings of the SNP could not find a suitable unifying candidate and had no ambitious plan going forward. The party’s overall image as clean and competent is in tatters as we enter a new and critical era in Scottish history.

Beyond the SNP

Meanwhile, the Scottish Greens did not achieve a breakthrough at the expense of the SNP. They increased their vote from 1% to almost 4%, and they did achieve a degree of success by coming third in Glasgow. However, nationally, they trailed Reform UK, which garnered 7% without even having campaigned in a significant way. Reform UK failed to win an MP, but in a mixed-member proportional representation system, it may see its fortunes improve.

There seems little else on the horizon. Alex Salmond’s Alba party won a derisory 0.5% of the popular vote, while a variety of independents won just 0.4% of the total. Meanwhile, the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition garnered barely over 1,500 and the once-powerful Scottish Socialist Party won slightly more than a thousand votes, only just more than 0.1% of the popular vote put together.

Such a trend marks Scotland out as different from England, where the Greens won four seats and pro-Gaza independents including Jeremy Corbyn nudged five seats, with a flurry of convincing and even spectacular second places in a number of important constituencies. Such a strong result contrasted with Reform UK’s five MPs, albeit on a total of four million votes.

What needs to be recognised is that the left broadly defined in England did well because of the depth and breadth of the Palestine solidarity movement. The pro-Gaza independents in particular did well in a large number of constituencies because of organic links with a vibrant extra-parliamentary movement, with deep and historical roots in the anti-war campaigning to which the Stop the War Coalition and CND have been central in the past couple of decades or so.

Extra-parliamentary movements in Scotland simply never reached such breadth and depth since the mass anti-establishment campaign and vote of 2014. The decline of the independence movement was primarily political, in that the SNP established near-total ideological hegemony over the movement after 2014, and hollowed it out over time. Despite independence still running high in the polls, no viable political vehicle emerged to channel mass dissatisfaction with the government in Holyrood in a non-unionist direction, especially after the Greens entered government in 2021. 

Towards a new left in Scotland

With the decline of the SNP, there is now a space opening to the left of Scottish politics. There is no inevitability about how it will be filled. Scottish Labour has shown a level of adaptability which suggests it may continue to benefit from the SNP’s decline. Its ability to oppose Trident and call for a ceasefire marks it out from British Labour, and there’s no way of seeing if it will be able to mark out opposition to a flagship Starmer policy over the next two years to give it the edge over the SNP in May 2026.

But whether the SNP or Scottish Labour come out on top in Holyrood, neither party is likely to achieve the level of dominance enjoyed by the SNP in the last decade, nor will their weddedness to neoliberalism provide an answer to Scotland’s problems. It is not impossible, going by the results of the general election this year, that the parliament in 2026 will be highly fragmented. There will also likely be increasing dissatisfaction with Starmer’s government in London. This should provide an opportunity for the emergence of a new left. Critically, such a left will need to oppose both Westminster and Holyrood. While it is possible that such a left could put forward a candidate or two to raise its profile in 2026, possibly in connection with any left electoral vehicle that emerges south of the border, what remains most pressing is the need to rebuild conscious, mass working-class opposition to austerity, war and racism. The job is not easy, but broadening out the work of organisations like the Stop the War Coalition, which organised a big national solidarity demonstration in Glasgow in June 2024, and emulating that model in other spheres of struggle, would be a good first step.