“The Scottish lion has roared,” declared Alex Salmond after the 2015 general election as a roch wind swept away the Scottish Labour Party and propelled 56 SNP MPs to London. Last Thursday, the wind changed direction. The SNP, said Stephen Flynn, were caught up in the ‘Starmer tsunami’.
The decade of hegemony which began with a roar came to an end with a whimper. More of a wounded animal than a lion, the SNP retreated north to their Perthshire heartlands. In the central belt, they made way for a new crop of Scottish Labour MPs whose victory was less a resounding endorsement than a rejection of incumbent governments in London and Edinburgh.
Labour’s Anti-Politics
Running against a Government which had already conceded defeat, Labour did not need to promise socio-economic change, just to ‘end the chaos’. Years of febrile political turmoil combined with an abject failure to address social inequality exhausted the public’s patience and trust in politicians plummeted. Exploiting that apathy, Keir Starmer offered ‘a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives,’ committing to put political and economic questions beyond the concern of the public once and for all. Now that the adults are back in charge, the argument goes, people have the burden of politics lifted from their backs. Without resolving the fractures in Labour’s electoral coalition which plagued the party in 2019, Keir Starmer won a 174-seat majority.
Having successfully depoliticised the election, Labour’s new generation of technocrats is free to enlist the assistance of private capital to do the jobs for which it once would have commissioned the state. The inheritors of 14 years of Conservative government would sooner banish questions of political economy from the public realm than repair the damage neoliberalism has done to Britain’s social fabric. Against this backdrop, the number of people who turned out to vote in last Thursday’s ‘change election’ will be of little concern to Britain’s new government. As John Curtis noted, turnout fell by eight points to 60 per cent, the second-lowest figure since 1885. In parts of Britain the number was much lower. Just 47% of the electorate turned out in Glasgow North East, for example.
I spent polling day between Lanark, Glasgow and Grangemouth. These were electoral battlegrounds and yet you would have been forgiven for forgetting there was an election at all. I didn’t see posters in windows, let alone teams of canvassers. Politics felt remote. In parts of Glasgow, 88% of all 0 – 15-year-olds live below the breadline. Grangemouth’s future is at stake with plans to close the town’s oil refinery next year. South Lanarkshire Council just made £13 million worth of cuts. All three areas voted for ‘change’ but with little hope it would arrive. In the months to come, Keir Starmer will depend on this demoralisation to navigate difficult questions. Such feelings – along with Labour’s capacity to successfully apply sticking plasters – are often forgotten by those who argue Starmer’s government will quickly be beset by crises that offer opportunities to the left. Nonetheless, this is the fragile reality behind Labour’s landslide – and an almost
post-ideological campaign.
Elected with just 33.7% of the vote, Keir Starmer’s premiership begins from a historically low base. After eight years in government, two elections and an illegal war, Tony Blair still managed to win a higher share, as did Jim Callaghan in 1979. Labour’s ocean is wide but shallow. On Thursday, Keir Starmer assembled a new, temporary electoral coalition. In 89 constituencies, Reform UK are hot on Labour’s heels. Independent left-of-Labour candidates have already forced high-profile defeats in others. Keir Starmer has delayed confronting the fault lines that led to Labour’s 2019 defeat. Wedded to the economic orthodoxy with nothing apparently political to say, he cannot escape them forever.
Labour won its lowest-ever share of the vote in deprived areas on Thursday and its highest-ever share in affluent areas. Starmer’s Party deserted social democracy long before polling day, but the nature of their victory will accelerate class dealignment. The question is which parts of his time-limited electoral coalition will Keir Starmer seek to retain, and which will he jettison. If his four years as Leader of the Opposition are anything to go by, the answer is obvious – and creates potential opportunities for a left buoyed by historic independent breakthroughs. Unlike five years ago when two contrasting national visions were offered to voters, this was an election which substituted an embarrassed, exhausted class of managers for their sensible colleagues. Ideology was an afterthought and the results bore it out. In 2017, with the future of post-Brexit Britain on the ballot, 82% of those who voted backed either Labour or the Conservatives. This time, just 59% did while the Tories lost more deposits than Reform.
A Crushing Defeat for the SNP
Ultimately, Labour’s vote share only increased at all on the previous election because of a 17 per cent increase in support for Scottish Labour. Every single one of their 35 new seats was won from the SNP, who endured their worst result at a Westminster election since 2010. Watching the results live on ITV, Nicola Sturgeon distanced herself from her defeated party as she so often did while First Minister. “They” did not put independence front and centre of the campaign, argued Sturgeon. This just isn’t true. For weeks, John Swinney’s sole message was that, with the powers of independence, Scotland could stop A, B, and C – austerity, Brexit and the cost of living.
That this critique was all Sturgeon could muster without infringing on her own reputation reveals the extent to which the SNP’s fate was sealed long before Rishi Sunak called the election. To regular readers of this website, the deep, structural sources of the SNP’s problems are well-rehearsed. I wrote about them earlier this year in the aftermath of Humza Yousaf’s resignation so here I will highlight just a few. Organisationally, the SNP is hollow following the departure of the activists recruited in the aftermath of the referendum. Politically, their mismanagement of Scotland’s services and failure to enact radical reform has bred discontent among the public. Strategically, the party has been without a compelling narrative since November 2022 when Nicola Sturgeon’s final gamble backfired in the UK Supreme Court. Couple these problems with the police investigation into party finances and the SNP never looked like winning.
Whether it was parochial party political broadcasts, childish acronyms, obsessing over Taylor Swift or John Swinney’s yellow sunglasses, the campaign’s lack of seriousness had a distinct Last Days of Rome feel to it. This weakness saw the SNP lose half a million votes and allowed Labour to gain without any discernible offer on further devolution or self-determination. The SNP will take comfort from the fact they retained 30% of the vote. When you consider that the Party had three leaders in one year and offered no viable route to independence, this figure can be understood as the residual vote of a well-established party. Welcome news in SNP HQ perhaps, but this dispels the illusion of insurgency upon which the SNP has come to rely. John Swinney’s insistence that he leads the most left-wing party on the ballot paper, having administered swingeing public sector cuts, was only the latest example of such dependence.
The significance of the SNP’s retreat from Scotland’s central belt should not be understated. For Alex Salmond and then Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP’s bid for Glasgow, Edinburgh and everything in between was vital. It embodied their efforts to break the back of working-class laborism and make a claim for the nation’s centre of gravity. No longer confined to the periphery, the SNP entered Scotland’s economic core speaking the language of social democracy.
Having voted Yes in 2014, Glasgow took on a new significance in an SNP political project administered from Edinburgh. Now the SNP do not have a single MP in either city. Indeed, the handful they did win were those traditionally held by ‘Tartan Tories’. The impact of this changed composition on central questions, such as the future of North Sea oil, remains to be seen. “I feel that it is the Labour party that left me, not the other way about,” said Mhairi Black, with ample justification, as she delivered her Maiden speech to the House of Commons in 2015. Nine years ago, her words resonated with thousands of working-class Scots. But that was then and this is now. Last Thursday, many who had voted SNP in successive post-2014 elections begrudgingly returned to the Labour Party. Black herself read the writing on the wall and opted not to contest the election.
Meanwhile, Douglas Alexander, the veteran MP she ousted as a 20-year-old, returned to Parliament. Labour took votes from both the SNP and the Conservatives to win 37 seats in Scotland. On the surface, the Party’s blind refusal to cede any ground on the national question was rewarded. They won the waiting game. Labour’s unwavering unionism outlasted the period for which the SNP’s electorate was prepared to wait for a second referendum. After all, voting Labour is easier when even the SNP no longer believe that independence is a realistic prospect. It is unlikely that without a more substantial offer to independence supporters Labour will be afforded such an easy ride at the next Holyrood election. Indeed, for the moment this offer is precluded by Labour’s dependence on unionist tactical votes. Britain’s electoral geography is temporarily reconfigured.
However, the ‘Starmer Tsunami’ may blow over in Scotland before 2026. Behind the headlines, the results of this election highlighted an apathy toward mainstream politics that the victors are set against addressing. 19 million people stayed at home and few among those who voted did so with any enthusiasm. Now that the dust has settled, the task facing the left in Scotland – where turnout was below the national average – and across Britain is clear. Without running a campaign, Farage’s Reform won 7% of the vote in Scotland. UKIP, for context, never reached 2%.
History teaches us that the centre cannot hold. Failure to combat widespread alienation with a compelling left-wing narrative will only see Reform’s numbers rise in the years to come. There are many lessons from this election, but the importance of learning this one cannot be underestimated.