The SNP have been consigned to irrelevance

While many eyes last night were fixed on Starmer’s victory – and the scale of it – my eyes were trained on the top of the screen, waiting to see the electoral outcome in Scotland. The polls during the campaign had shown some variation, but the consensus forecast was that the SNP was in line for a heavy defeat. So we waited.

And then the exit poll came out – SNP to lose 38 seats, almost four fifths of their Westminster total. Labour in Scotland up 18 points. As the projected results flashed across the screen, Rutherglen was the first to switch from SNP to Labour. And it kept on going. The screen showed a flood of yellow seats turning red. There were gasps all around the room.

Dumfries and Galloway was too close to call between Labour and the Tories. So too was East Kilbride, which needed a 13 point swing. Edinburgh South West, where I voted, looked to be a Labour gain. Ian Murray, the Labour MP for Edinburgh South, was on the TV, saying they couldn’t get carried away yet.

I slept a bit, to get ready for the real deluge of results which would come in between 3am and 5am. Sometime around 3:30am. Kettle on, TV on. BBC began forecasting the SNP to do even worse. Labour took Glasgow North from the SNP, a strong sign for Anas Sawar, leader of the Scottish Labour party.

Then East Kilbride went Labour, along with large swathes of Scotland’s central belt. The future of John Swinney and the state of the SNP was turning from bad to worse before our eyes.

It was hard to believe that after 15 or so years of dominating Scottish politics that the SNP would lose power in Westminster so monumentally. As the blood bath continued and soaked the Scottish map red, Swinney came out swinging, insisting that people still wanted independence and that this wasn’t the end.

As another Glasgow seat declared for Labour, it seemed the SNP was scrambling to justify its very existence. Alex Salmond, the former SNP leader, was on the BBC, saying independence wasn’t the problem – it was the SNP that was the problem. Yet Alba, Salmond’s alternative nationalist party, doesn’t seem to be doing too well, which perhaps undermined his argument.

During the campaign, Swinney had tried to frame the SNP’s impending loss of seats by saying that a big anti-Tory mood was driving voters towards Labour. But from conversations with friends, the reality on the ground was that people were fed up with both of the incumbent parties – the SNP in Holyrood and the Tories down in Westminster. A message from a friend, who initially told me they weren’t staying up, popped up on my phone: “Super happy to see Tory tears as well as SNP tears”.

Someone else said: “Perhaps if they concentrated on running Scotland instead of ruining Scotland, they might have done better”. Yet another message came in, this time to say that the SNP’s losses were because Swinney was an “eejit”. People weren’t on his side. I’m not convinced he’ll step down – he’s too stubborn, and new enough in the job to argue that it wasn’t his fault, that he inherited a mess.

8am. Coffee’s on and the SNP’s out – at least, out of Westminster. They have so far returned 9 MPs, a loss of 38 seats. Those results are already being used to argue both for and against the idea of a second Independence Referendum.

Ever since 2015, the yellow on the electoral map has mostly been that of the SNP, colouring Scotland the same colour as its gorse. But now, the yellow shading on the electoral map of Britain is not that of the SNP, but of the Lib Dems. Once it was the third largest party in Britain. Now, in UK politics, the SNP has been consigned to near total irrelevance.