Deputy Editor Alan Young is joined by Political Editor Alistair Grant and Deputy Political Editor David Bol to reflect on a dramatic election night
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00:00Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Daily Bulletin for Friday, the day after a pretty
00:15incredible election result, a political earthquake indeed I'm sure. We're about to hear about
00:23Alistair Grant, Political Editor, you were at the Edinburgh Count, David Ball, our Deputy,
00:29you are in Glasgow. If I could come to you first, maybe Alistair, just to get your initial
00:37reflections. It's quite a remarkable change to the political landscape, not just in the
00:49UK but particularly in Scotland.
00:52Yeah, I mean what an incredible night, what an incredible result. I mean, all the cliches
00:58just do not do this justice. A political earthquake, a landslide result for Labour, I think the
01:04SNP just got buried under that Labour landslide that was happening across the UK. I've been
01:09in the Royal Highland Centre all night watching the count in Edinburgh, we had some amazing
01:13results here. Joanna Cherry, the very high profile SNP politician, lost her seat to Labour.
01:19She had a majority of just under 12,000 in 2019, so that's been a huge swing to Labour
01:25in that seat. Tommy Sheppard as well, another high profile figure, also lost his seat. Labour
01:30won four of Edinburgh's five constituencies and all six constituencies in Glasgow, which
01:40I'm sure David will go on to talk about, but just an incredible result for the party. Labour
01:45in Scotland obviously had the momentum behind them in this campaign, they were expected
01:48to do very well. Keir Starmer had that kind of narrative behind him throughout the whole
01:53general election campaign, we had poll after poll showing Labour landslide results across
01:58the UK. But I think in Scotland, no one expected the result to be quite this good for Labour
02:03and quite this bad for the SNP. The SNP won 48 seats in 2019, they now seem to be reduced
02:10to little more than a handful of seats, and Labour picking up seats all across the central
02:16belt in ways that, with massive swings, I don't think even they would have thought possible.
02:23We've also had a number of other interesting results, Douglas Ross losing his contest that
02:28he was, his seat that he was going for in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. Big result
02:35for the SNP there, Seamus Logan for the SNP. We've had the Lib Dems picking up Middenbartonshire,
02:42running Edinburgh West here tonight, so it's been a reasonable night for them as well.
02:46I think there's hopes as we're recording this that they might pick up Inverness as well.
02:50But just an absolutely incredible result for Labour, I think, in Scotland.
02:54Yeah, we can have a quick look at the state of the parties as we record this. David, if
03:03you can maybe just describe to us what a dramatic night it's been in Glasgow. Glasgow turning
03:10red again is a really big moment.
03:13For the Scottish Labour to send basically, to go from completely SNP to completely Labour,
03:21reversing that trend we've seen since the 2015 general election, where the SNP on the
03:26back of the independence referendum basically took over Glasgow. So it's just reversing
03:31that trend. As I asked to mention, we had all these seats in the central belt that we
03:35fought on a knife edge, so it was kind of expected the SNP would hold on to some of
03:39them. But the swing's been so much that Labour has been a force to be reckoned with in the
03:44central belt. Confident and flying high, I mean, Anas Sarwar turned up here and there
03:50was a huge crowd of activists waiting to greet him and very much playing it up, saying that
03:56we're going to have a good night. This is before we'd had any results in Glasgow, it
04:00was just the writing was kind of on the wall for the SNP here. We had Alison Thewlis, who
04:04lost her seat. It was a new seat, it was a bit of sympathy for Alison Thewlis because
04:08her Glasgow central seat was kind of abolished and the boundary changes weren't particularly
04:13kind to her. But she was kind of holding back the tears a little bit. We had David Linden
04:17losing his seat as well and Stuart MacDonald. So a lot of the big SNP names that we've become
04:23accustomed to will just be no longer in Westminster and we'll just have to get used to a new Labour
04:31team to represent Scotland, especially across the central belt.
04:35There's going to be some real soul-searching in the SNP now, you would think. They expected
04:42to lose big. No one imagined, like you said earlier, Alistair, that they would be left
04:49with, well, currently seven seats. It's absolutely incredible. Where does John Swinney go now?
04:55Yeah, I mean, I think soul-searching is the word. I mean, soul-searching can very quickly
05:00send you to finger-pointing. So they're going to have to try and avoid descending into some
05:04kind of internal navel-gazing row about how they got to this situation. But clearly the
05:09campaign they were running in Scotland did not hit home with voters. Part of that was
05:13due to this kind of Labour momentum across the UK and essentially this being an election
05:19in which Labour had this narrative of it being a change election, an election to get rid
05:23of the Tories, to get the Tories out of Westminster, to change the Prime Minister, to bring in a
05:29new kind of regime in Westminster. And that narrative was very hard for the SNP to deal
05:33with. You know, they're running in a Westminster campaign. They're obviously not going to be
05:37a party of government in Westminster. In the past, in recent elections, they've run on
05:41issues to do with the Constitution. Independence has been high on the agenda. That just wasn't
05:46the way this election played out. Although the SNP did put independence at the centre
05:50of their campaign. John Swinney repeatedly said independence was page one, line one of
05:55the SNP's manifesto. And I think some of the soul searching is going to have to be around
05:59that strategy, putting independence at the centre of that manifesto, put independence
06:05on the ballot paper. And this result has been a blow to the independence cause. I think
06:10the SNP are going to have to contend with that, contend with this result, what it means
06:14for that push for independence. They're clearly not going to be able to use this result to
06:19kind of push for a second referendum like they had hoped to. Their plan initially was
06:24to push for a second referendum if they got the majority of seats in Scotland. Clearly
06:29that's not happened. It's not got anywhere close to happening. I think sights will inevitably
06:33turn to the 2026 Holyrood election. I think Labour will use this result as a springboard
06:39going into that campaign and a star where the Scottish Labour leader will be wanting
06:43to become the next First Minister of Scotland. And they'll use this result to try and gain
06:48their momentum when it comes to Holyrood. The SNP, on the other hand, will be hoping
06:52that two years down the line, when that election comes round, people might be disillusioned
06:57with a Labour government in Westminster, they might be disillusioned with Keir Starmer.
07:01He's obviously going to be coming in as Prime Minister during an extremely tough time
07:06financially, a tough time for the country. People might not, they might be disillusioned
07:12with the pace of change that Labour have, and that might be something that the SNP can
07:16capitalise on. But a huge amount of soul-searching is going to have to be going on in the party,
07:20not least because they just are reduced to a rump of what they were formerly in Westminster.
07:25So they're going to have to contend with no longer being the third party in Westminster,
07:30no longer having that prominent position in PMQs that Ian Blackford and more recently
07:35Stephen Flynn made such good use of from the SNP's point of view. So it's going to
07:40be a whole different way of working for them. And it's just the SNP, the modern SNP,
07:45are not a party that is used to losing. There's actually a point that a Labour politician
07:49I was speaking to earlier on tonight in the small hours of the morning was making to me.
07:54He said they're not a party that's used to losing and they're going to have to,
07:57they've got a lot of activists, a lot of politicians that are just very used to winning
08:01elections. They're not used to having to kind of come together and rebuild after a
08:06defeat like this. And it'll be very interesting to see how they cope with that.
08:09And we might get a flavour of it later on today if John Swinney comes out and speaks
08:13to activists and speaks to the media later on.
08:17Indeed, we would, you would expect, David expect to hear from Anas Sarwar today,
08:22a very, very happy man, obviously. And he's made no secret about his ambitions
08:29for 2026 on the back of the results.
08:32Yeah, I mean, I spoke to him not long ago and he was very much pointing to the 2026
08:37election. That is the big focus now for Labour. This is the starting point of a,
08:42as Alistair mentioned, a sort of two-step sort of programme for Labour to have power
08:46in Scotland. The first bit is done now. As far as they're concerned, the focus will
08:51be on pointing out the SNP's record. The SNP are kind of on the ropes now,
08:55so it'll be very easy for Labour to pick apart their record, basically, the NHS
09:01and all the things we've come quite common to hear about. And that will be the focus
09:08of Labour going forward, really. They'll just want to put them in the frame
09:13to become the next Scottish government. And they'll have to deliver in the next
09:17couple of years. That's going to be tricky. But Alistair mentioned that it's going
09:20to be very tough for Labour and Keir Starmer to have an impact very quickly.
09:25The economy is obviously in a bit of a mess, to be perfectly honest,
09:28and they're hinging a lot of their sort of promises on sort of that economic
09:32growth that they're promising. And if that doesn't happen, then they're going
09:35to have to make some unpopular decisions, such as putting tax up or cutting spending.
09:40So Labour and Anas Sarwar haven't been used to having that thrown at them.
09:44It's been very comfortable to sort of point at the Tories and the SNP in government
09:49and point at their record and having the responsibility. That's over now.
09:53They'll have that responsibility and it will make it quite tricky for them
09:56in the lead up to that 2026 election. But that is the key for them now.
10:00So they're really, really fascinating times ahead.
10:04Thanks very much to you both. I'm going to let Alistair go because he's absolutely freezing.
10:08I can tell from here and he's been thrown out of the counting hall.
10:12We all have much more at Scotsman.com throughout the day with all the very latest news
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10:31from me in Edinburgh, from Alistair and from David.
10:35It's bye for now.