The flags sent a message. As Sir Keir Starmer, accompanied by his wife Victoria, made his way to Downing Street on Friday morning the new prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was saluted by saltires as well as Union Jacks.
The blue and white cross, appropriated by the SNP for many years as though it were the nationalists’ own banner, was waved to greet a Labour prime minister. The Labour Party is now Britain’s national party, they said.
Labour won a landslide victory in Scotland with 37 seats — a gain of 36 — while the SNP lost half a million votes and secured only nine seats compared with the 48 they won in 2019. The Scottish Conservative vote share was almost halved but returned five MPs — one less than the last general election — and the Scottish Lib Dems secured six seats.
From the earliest days of his leadership, Starmer appreciated that Labour’s recovery in England would be greatly assisted by recovery in Scotland. He and his chief aide Morgan McSweeney — who lives in Lanark with his partner Imogen Walker, newly elected as the MP for Hamilton & Clyde Valley — paid more attention and dedicated more resources to Scotland than his predecessors.
He will be in Scotland again on Sunday to meet John Swinney, the first minister, with the intention of embracing “co-operation over conflict”.
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Labour’s Scottish campaign was set in motion about 18 months ago and shaped by focus groups and “mega polls”. These suggested the SNP was leaking voters in aspirational middle Scotland, which went into freefall when Nicola Sturgeon quit.
“These were people who had fallen out of love with the SNP but still liked Nicola Sturgeon,” a source said. “Then she left.”
Labour strategists had identified 26 target seats but the list grew when polls suggested that Ayrshire, where the party had previously slumped to third place in all four constituencies, became viable. On Friday morning, Labour returned MPs in every one.
Two weeks before polling day, Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, and his colleagues scanned the results of an MRP poll commissioned by the party. At a meeting with his deputy Jackie Baillie, Ian Murray, the presumptive secretary of state for Scotland, and John Paul McHugh, general secretary of Scottish Labour, the leadership decided to again expand the battleground. Resources would be shifted from “too close to call” seats to others where the party had previously been considered rank outsiders.
Even Labour dreamers outside the leadership group scarcely dared to think the party might eventually win 37 of Scotland’s 57 constituencies.
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Even in Dundee — the fabled “Yes City” — Chris Law clung on to the new Dundee Central constituency by only 675 votes. The SNP’s catastrophic result was “much worse than I thought in my darkest days,” one veteran said. “There is just shock among the entire party,” another insider said. The nationalists no longer hold any seats south of Stirling.
One candidate said: “There is going to be a massive revolt against HQ because there has been no support. They haven’t done anything. Throughout all of this, we haven’t been told what the message is. We haven’t been told what to say on the doors.”
Numerous SNP sources claim that the party sorely missed the experience and expertise of Peter Murrell, the husband of Sturgeon and former SNP chief executive now charged with embezzling party funds as part of the Police Scotland investigation into the SNP’s finances.
“The difference in three words? Peter f***ing Murrell,” one veteran MP said. Yet this was a double-edged reflection: the SNP missed Murrell’s election-organising expertise even as it also struggled to escape the shadow cast by his arrest.
On doorsteps across Scotland, candidates from all parties found that the SNP’s “psychodrama” repelled voters just as surely as the Conservatives’ record in government encouraged Scots to vote for change. Sturgeon’s arrest during the Operation Branchform investigation — though she was released without charge — and the indelible image of a police incident tent in her garden symbolised for many voters a party that had lost its way.
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The collapse of the SNP-Green coalition at Holyrood, precipitating Humza Yousaf’s resignation, further reinforced the idea that the SNP of 2024 was not the SNP that has dominated Scottish politics for nearly 20 years.
One vanquished SNP candidate said: “In short order, we need to do two things: competence and independence. We have to show we can run the country better and show how independence is the answer to the people’s daily struggles.”
According to Labour strategists, SNP support began to “evaporate” two months before the election — when Yousaf stood down as first minister and party leader, leaving behind Swinney, a politician better at government jobs than campaigning politics.
Increasingly, SNP insiders also appreciate that the decline in the party’s fortunes began on Sturgeon’s watch and has accelerated. Speaking from her perch as a pundit on ITV’s election night coverage, Sturgeon — who is still an MSP — appeared to distance herself from her colleagues, referring to the party as “they” rather than “we” and criticising Swinney’s campaign. “They’ve kind of left themselves between two stools on the independence campaign: you’ve got to follow it through on the day-to-day campaigning,” Sturgeon said.
The nationalists were unprepared and underfunded for the election and struggled to catch up. Although independence was the “page one, line one” manifesto promise, the party’s campaign was essentially defensive: reverse Brexit, oppose “austerity”, send a “strong opposition” to Westminster. Cumulatively, this messaging implicitly conceded that the SNP would be, at best, a marginal presence in the new parliament.
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“We must learn and we must listen,” said Stephen Flynn, the leader of the party group in the House of Commons, who held his Aberdeen South constituency with a sharply reduced majority.
Tommy Sheppard, who was defeated in Edinburgh East & Musselburgh, said: “The party lost its way for a period. It fought among itself when it should have been fighting a common enemy.”
The healing process may take some time. Alex Neil, the former health secretary and veteran Sturgeon critic, wrote: “Nicola was the main author of this defeat, along with Humza and John. They must take responsibility and make way for a fresh leadership team headed by Kate Forbes and Stephen Flynn.” Only this kind of new direction, dissident nationalists believe, can salvage hope from this election’s wreckage.
Yet one senior figure close to Swinney pointed out that many SNP voters stayed at home and could be convinced to return to the fold. “We cannot afford to lose the plot,” the source said. “A deep dive is needed, not listening to the siren voices of simple solutions.”
Looking to the 2026 Holyrood elections they note that Westminster voting patterns cannot be mapped on to voting intentions at a Holyrood election. However, pessimists fear that the “time for change” message deployed so ruthlessly against the Tories at this election will be used against the nationalists in 2026.
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Sarwar and his colleagues appreciate that the job is, at best, only half-done. Supplanting the SNP at Holyrood and returning Labour to office for the first time since 2007 is the real and ultimate prize. In Scottish politics there is no off-season. It is always “game on”.
