John Swinney, the Scottish National party leader, has challenged Keir Starmer to show “greater respect” to the Scottish government after winning the Holyrood elections by a comfortable margin.
The Scottish National party secured a record fifth term in office on Friday after securing at least 57 of Holyrood’s 129 seats, with Labour and Reform vying for a distant second place.
With the final seven list seats from Highland and Islands still undeclared more than 14 hours after counting began on Friday, Labour were on 17 seats and Reform on 15, with Labour enduring its worst result since devolution in 1999.
While a record haul of at least 13 seats for the Scottish Greens leaves Holyrood with a pro-independence majority, Swinney fell short of winning the overall SNP majority he argued would be a mandate for holding a second independence referendum.
In interviews Swinney hinted he no longer plans to vigorously pursue that referendum proposal but said it was now incumbent on the UK government to treat the Scottish government as partners rather than opponents.
“My message to Downing Street tonight is very, very clear,” he told the BBC. “They have got a lot of listening to do, to the fact that Labour have been hammered here in Scotland, and an SNP government, after 19 years in office, has just been emphatically returned to office. Scotland needs respect as a consequence of that election outcome.”
That caution on independence will reflect the fact that the SNP’s national share of the vote, at 38.3%, was its lowest since 2007, suggesting voters had drifted away. Swinney’s party lost six constituency seats, chiefly to the Liberal Democrats, which enjoyed a surge of support in the Highlands.
The SNP’s support also fell in nearly every constituency, with only two exceptions. At the same time, national turnout fell to 53.1%, the lowest of the last three Holyrood elections.
Swinney first declared victory after the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, conceded early Friday afternoon his party had comprehensively lost, after admitting Labour had failed to counter the “national dissatisfaction” with Keir Starmer.
Speaking to the media in Glasgow after only seven of Holyrood’s 129 seats had been declared, Sarwar said: “We made an argument for change and, ultimately, it’s an argument we lost.”
He said he stood by his demands in February for Starmer to quit as UK Labour leader and prime minister. “My party is hurting today and it’s my job to hold it together,” he said. “We will continue to fight for the change we believe Scotland so desperately needs.
“The tragedy of this election campaign is that despite all the arguments we wanted to make about the health service, the future of our schools, about tackling homelessness, sadly that’s not what the election became about. It became about a national mood, and a national dissatisfaction.”
Despite spending a record amount on its campaign, Labour sources said they had been punished by a disillusioned electorate, with voters deserting the party or staying at home in protest at Starmer’s policies on welfare changes, his response to Israel’s war in Gaza and his engagement with Reform’s anti-immigration agenda.
In the biggest shock of the day, the Scottish Greens won their first Scottish constituency seat when their former co-leader Lorna Slater won Edinburgh Central, unseating the cabinet secretary for culture and external affairs, Angus Robertson, formerly the SNP’s Westminster leader.
In a humiliating defeat that presaged a Green surge in other areas, Robertson was consigned to third place, with Scottish Labour in second, handing Slater a 4,582-vote majority. Many voters were critical of Robertson’s meeting last year with Israel’s ambassador, but boundary changes also brought in a significant student vote, previously in Edinburgh Southern, and professionals who had abandoned Labour.
That was soon followed by a second constituency win for the Greens, when Holly Bruce defeated the SNP minister Kaukab Stewart in Glasgow Southside, the seat until recently held by the former first minister Nicola Sturgeon.
With this Scottish parliament election count being held on a Friday for the first time, the Liberal Democrats won the first of Holyrood’s 129 seats to be declared, holding Orkney with a record 70% vote share.
Liam McArthur, who has held Orkney for the Lib Dems since 2007, is seen as a contender to become Holyrood’s next presiding officer. He thanked his rival candidates for showing “you can have a political contest without knocking seven bells out of each other”.
That was the first swathe of Lib Dem victories over the SNP, unseating SNP MSPs in the Highlands seats of Caithness, Sutherland and Ross and Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, the newly created seat of Edinburgh Northern and Strathkelvin and Bearsden north of Glasgow.
Yet, in the first surprise result of the day, the SNP had won the former Lib Dem stronghold of Shetland for the first time. The Lib Dems had held the seat for 27 years.
On a very difficult day for Scottish Labour, it enjoyed a shock victory in the Western Isles, with its popular candidate, Donald MacKinnon, narrowly defeating the former SNP minister Alasdair Allan, who had held the seat for the SNP since 2007, by just 154 votes.
The Tories had convincing fought off Reform in the south of Scotland, retaining all its constituency seats in Dumfriesshire and the Scottish Borders.
Reform UKhad its strongest showing by coming close to winning Banffshire and Buchan Coast, where there was majority support for leave in the 2016 EU referendum. Karen Adam held it for the SNP by just 264 votes over Reform, with the SNP share falling by 10 percentage points.
The unpredictability was underscored by low turnouts in several constituencies.
Although some boundaries have changed, in several Glasgow seats with higher-than-average levels of deprivation, the turnout was as low as 43%. In the 2021 Holyrood election, turnout in comparable constituencies was in the low 50s.
In Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley south of Glasgow, the SNP won with 40% of the vote but its share of the vote fell by 13 percentage points. It held Dundee City West with 49.1% but recorded a 12.5-point fall in support. In both seats, Labour’s vote slightly improved. The SNP held Dundee City East, too, with 48.8%, but its vote fell by 10.4 points.
In the first wave of results Reform did well in Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley in western Scotland, coming second behind the SNP with a 24.1% vote share.
It had never contested that seat before, and its second place appeared to be largely at the expense of the Tories; their vote share fell by 17.9 points to just 12.7%.
Turnout in Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley was down by 10.7 points on 2021, to 48.7%.
In Edinburgh, Scotland’s wealthiest city, the turnout in the Scottish Greens’ target seat of Edinburgh Central was 54.7%. While subject to boundary changes, turnout in the comparable seat in 2021 was 62.5%.
