Scotland sees the light as SNP roundly rejected

It was entirely typical of Nicola Sturgeon that she chose to spend election night in the glare of a television studio, knowing that the party she led for nine years was in for a humiliating drubbing.

Few political leaders have quite her brass neck – even the rhino-hided Liz Truss couldn’t face her constituents after narrowly losing her seat – and it will no doubt stand Sturgeon in good stead when she tries to forge a career outside of politics.

Asked by ITV’s Tom Bradby “isn’t this all your fault?” when the exit poll revealed the scale of the SNP wipeout, Sturgeon blamed everyone but herself: Brexit, austerity, the SNP campaign (that is, her former colleagues), and, of course, the Tories.

The context, she said, was kicking the Tories but while that may have been the case in most of the UK, in Scotland the target was predominantly her own party.

Nationwide, the Labour landslide was not achieved on the back of a bigger share of the vote, but in Scotland the picture was different.

Labour won a 17 point increase in its support in Scotland and has almost regained the hegemony it enjoyed north of the border prior to the independence referendum of 2014, which the Unionists won but which propelled the Scottish Nationalists to a long run of electoral success.

That era is now over, with the SNP’s share of the vote down 15 points and the party losing all but nine (with one result still being counted) of its 48 Westminster seats. The Nationalist rump will be an invisible presence on the Commons green benches, its third-party status relinquished to the much mightier Lib Dems.

However Sturgeon chooses to spin such a calamity, the truth is that the rot set in on her watch. Both her successors since she stood down in February 2023, Humza Yousaf and John Swinney, were from within her camp and had neither the time nor the inclination to depart radically from her agenda.

And it was that agenda, driven by her narrow preoccupations, that turned a country that had been largely behind her into a hostile electorate.

According to the SNP’s Joanna Cherry, who lost her Edinburgh South West seat, the issues that came up on doorsteps were the SNP’s policy failings at Holyrood and a series of scandals embroiling the party hierarchy.

“It’s what you do with power that counts,” said Cherry, who has been in the vanguard of Sturgeon’s critics, especially on the subject of women’s rights.

The former First Minister’s obsession with gender recognition reform was a classic example of her “I know best” arrogance that brooked no argument and took no account of public opinion. Only when her hubris saw a male rapist being sent to a women’s prison did her legislative ambitions crumple, along with her authority.

That a Conservative government minister, the then Scottish Secretary Alister Jack, had to step in and veto Scotland’s ill-judged GRR bill was a symptom of the SNP’s detachment from reality.

The not-insignificant matter of her and her husband (former party chief executive) Peter Murrell’s arrests, along with party treasurer Colin Beattie, over missing SNP funds finally ended her political trajectory.

Murrell has subsequently been charged with embezzlement while Sturgeon, who protests her innocence, awaits her fate.

Public trust, though, disappeared overnight as disenchanted voters realised the SNP was not going to deliver on any of its promises, whether on the constitution or on its devolved responsibilities.

From closing the educational attainment gap to cutting NHS waiting times, and from addressing Scotland’s shocking drug deaths to lifting children out of poverty, the party has failed, always putting its own interests before Scotland’s.

Psephologist John Curtice said the SNP has been rejected over its competence [or lack of] in government in Scotland.

If the party cannot run a devolved administration, with all the largesse it receives from UK coffers, it will struggle to convince voters that Scotland can go it alone.

Sturgeon said last year that this election would be a referendum on independence and Swinney has insisted throughout the campaign that even winning a majority of the Scottish seats (29) would give the party a mandate for a new independence push.

Well, no one is talking about mandates today. Instead, Swinney, whose heart is surely not in this for the long haul, has pledged to “listen and learn” from the disaster and bring people together in his party, a reproach perhaps to the divisive Sturgeon years.

Independence may not be dead, and voters tend to behave differently in Scottish elections, which will next be held in 2026. But 4 July will go down as the day Scotland saw the light and freed itself from the Nationalist stranglehold that has blinkered its vision and stifled its progress for the best part of two decades.

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