Prioritising the independence debate carries risk for Swinney

First things first; the big story is the remarkable achievement of the SNP being returned for a third decade in power, with a seat haul of 58, surpassed only by their own previous three victories between 2011 and 2021.

The party was in bad shape after the drubbing it took at the 2024 UK General Election. But less than two years later, John Swinney has done more than steady the ship, he taken control of it and steered it to a decisive victory.

Of course, the SNP has been fortunate in some regards. The rise of the Reform UK, drawing support primarily form disaffected Labour and Conservative voters, meant that the SNP could afford to lose around 10 percentage points of support since 2021 and still retain the vast majority of its seats. Friday’s count was littered with constituencies where the SNP held on with low vote shares due to Reform UK support. Labour’s collapse in support, driven in significant part by the unpopularity of the UK Government and Prime Minister, also aided the SNP, taking Labour from being election favourites 18 months ago to a distant joint second place now.

Behind the SNP, the distribution of seats in the new chamber illustrates the increasingly multi-party nature of Scottish politics, with five parties each having between 10 and 17 seats, and the UK-wide trend of insurgent parties gaining at the expense of the traditional Labour and Conservative duopoly.

The tie for second place between Scottish Labour and Reform UK, each on 17 seats, was also not particularly surprising, given polls had the two parties nip and tuck for the runner-up sport throughout the campaign. But reaction to the result will be very different; despair for Labour at its worst result of the devolved era; joy for Reform UK at winning a strong foothold in Scottish politics for the first time. Ironically, having spent the campaign duelling over whether or not they would work together if the result had been different, the tie for second now means that the parties will need to negotiate over issues like seating arrangement in the chamber and the order of asking questions at FMQs.

The predictability of the overall result masks some fascinating and often surprising local contests during a marathon counting session across the country. The early and decisive SNP capture of the Lib Dem stronghold of Shetland, the most genuine election surprise for those of us pouring over local data, was traded by the loss of the Western Isles to Labour, perhaps a case of voters passing judgement on issues around local ferry services to and from the islands.

The noteworthy results didn’t end there. The Scottish Greens captured their first ever constituency seats, most notably unseating Cabinet Secretary Angus Robertson in Edinburgh Central, an early indicator of a record haul of 15 seats for the Greens, taking the pro-independence parties, at 73 seats, well over the line in terms of a majority. Elsewhere, the Liberal Democrat strategy of laser focussing on a limited number of carefully chosen seats paid dividends, capturing Edinburgh Northern, Strathkelvin and Bearden and Skye, Lochaber and Badencoh from the SNP, giving the party its best result since 2007. As forecast by the polls, the Scottish Conservatives had their worst result of the devolved era, reduced to just 12 seats, despite rallying to hold three seats in the South of Scotland. In truth, the collapse of Tory support has been built-in to polling since the latter years of the unpopular Conservative UK governments until 2024.

As John Swinney plans his strategy for the next five years, there will be competing priorities and pressures. Talk of another independence referendum during the campaign will undoubtedly have motivated the SNP base, but the failure to land the SNP majority on which the party campaigned will almost certainly give the UK government even more reason not to agree to indyref 2. The SNP will cite the clear majority of pro-independence MSPs and may look for support to Cardiff and Belfast where there are now also nationalist governments, but there is little chance of a referendum any time soon.

And polling would suggest that voter priorities coalesce around two other issues; the cost of living, an increasingly salient issue due to the domestic impacts of the war in the Middle East, and the National Health Service. The constitutional issue is much less salient for voters, so the obvious risk with prioritising it is that it may alienate voters at an early stage of the new term.

Once the First Minister has decided how he wants the SNP to govern, most likely as a minority government seeking support from parties on legislation and budgets on an ad hoc basis rather than in formal coalition, there will be no shortage of pressing policy issues to address across the spectrum of devolved public services. Dominating all of these will be the increasingly precarious financial forecasts for the Scottish economy over the coming years, an issue that was conspicuous by its absence during the election campaign.

More immediately, 59 new MSPs (46 per cent of the chamber!) will be arriving for work at Holyrood tomorrow. Spare a thought for the Holyrood staff tasked with giving them a crash course in how parliament works so they can hit the ground running.

Mark Diffley is founder and director of Diffley Partnership