Swinney demands Starmer show Scotland respect after SNP election victory

Scottish First Minister John Swinney told Downing Street it must show Scotland “greater respect” after the Scottish National Party won a fifth consecutive term at Holyrood, as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party collapsed to a historic tie for second place with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

The SNP secured 58 of the Scottish Parliament’s 129 seats, falling short of the 65-seat majority Swinney had said would provide a mandate for a second independence referendum. The result, combined with a record 15 seats for the pro-independence Scottish Greens, gave nationalist parties a comfortable majority of 73 seats in the chamber.

“My message to Downing Street tonight is very, very clear,” Swinney told the BBC after the final results were declared in the early hours of Saturday morning, 16 hours after counting began. “They have got a lot of listening to do, to the fact that Labour have been hammered here in Scotland, and an SNP government, after 19 years in office, has just been emphatically returned to office.”

Swinney stopped short of renewing his demand for a referendum, a significant shift after months of framing the election as a de facto vote on independence. The softening reflects the SNP’s own arithmetic: the party’s national vote share fell to 38.3 per cent, its lowest since 2007, and it lost six constituency seats, chiefly to the resurgent Liberal Democrats in the Highlands. Turnout slumped to 53.1 per cent, the lowest of the last three Holyrood contests.

Labour routed

Scottish Labour endured its worst result since devolution in 1999, finishing with 17 seats, the same number as Reform UK, which had never previously won a seat at Holyrood. The two parties will now share the lead role in questioning the First Minister at the weekly First Minister’s Questions session.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar conceded defeat early Friday afternoon, before most seats had been declared. “We made an argument for change and, ultimately, it is an argument we lost,” Sarwar told reporters in Glasgow. “My party is hurting today and it is my job to hold it together.”

The rout in Scotland deepens the crisis around Starmer’s leadership, after Labour lost hundreds of council seats across England in the same round of local elections. Catherine West, the former Labour minister, has given the Cabinet until Monday to force Starmer out.

Reform and Greens surge

Reform UK came within 264 votes of winning the Banffshire and Buchan Coast constituency, where majority support for leave in the 2016 EU referendum gave Farage’s anti-immigration platform its strongest foothold north of the border. Reform also placed second in several western Scotland seats, largely at the expense of the Scottish Conservatives, who fell to fifth place with 12 seats.

The Scottish Greens delivered the biggest upset of the night when former co-leader Lorna Slater won Edinburgh Central, the party’s first constituency seat. She unseated SNP cabinet secretary Angus Robertson, who was pushed to third place. The Greens followed with a second constituency win in Glasgow Southside, the seat held until recently by former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

A fractured kingdom

The Scottish results fit a wider pattern of fragmentation across the United Kingdom. In Wales, the pro-independence Plaid Cymru was on course to become the largest party in the Senedd for the first time. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein continues to press for a border poll on Irish unification under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

“There is a real risk that we end up sleepwalking into the end of the United Kingdom,” George Foulkes, a former Labour minister for Scotland under Tony Blair, told Reuters. “Once these things get momentum, they are hard to stop.”

Polls show independence support at roughly 50 per cent in Scotland, and independence ranked only sixth among voter priorities behind the economy, health, immigration, education and housing, according to a YouGov survey. SNP and Plaid Cymru politicians believe the prospect of Farage winning a general election due by 2029 could sharpen the case for separation.

The Scottish Conservatives, reduced to 12 seats, faced an existential reckoning. The Liberal Democrats, by contrast, enjoyed their strongest night since the coalition years, seizing seats from the SNP across the Highlands and picking up Edinburgh Northern and the newly created Bearsden constituency north of Glasgow.

What happens next

Swinney will now attempt to govern with a minority administration, relying on issue-by-issue support from the Greens and, potentially, the Liberal Democrats. His immediate priority, he signalled, is extracting concessions from Westminster on spending and taxation powers rather than a swift push for a referendum.

For Starmer, the Scottish result removes the last electoral firewall. After losing councils across England and watching Labour sink to a tie with Reform in Scotland, the Prime Minister faces a Cabinet revolt that could end his premiership before the week is out.