Scottish election result reveals a genuine democratic crisis that should alarm us all

In order to understand the election result, it’s important to look beyond the number of seats won by each party and their percentage vote-shares to the actual number of people who were prepared to support them.

Taking the highest result for each party in either the constituency or regional votes, the SNP, which clearly won the election with 58 out of 129 seats, were backed by 877,000 people, followed by Labour on 440,000, Reform UK on 383,000, the Scottish Greens on 322,000, the Conservatives on 272,000 and the Liberal Democrats on 261,000.

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Only themselves to blame

According to the National Records for Scotland, the number of people registered to vote in December was 4,266,700. Using this as the baseline means the SNP were backed by about one in five potential voters in Scotland, with Labour on roughly one in ten and the other parties on even less.

This helps explain the general sense of discontent at the election result, even if people who did not vote only have themselves to blame. It should be a particular warning to the SNP not to get too carried away in their campaign for a second independence referendum. A governing party that lacks the support of four out of five people in the country needs to tread carefully.

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When truly engaged with the issues, Scotland can vote in far, far greater numbers. The best example of this is the 2014 independence referendum, which saw more than 3.6 million people out of an electorate of just under 4.3 million cast a vote. Thursday’s election result may have been very different with that kind of turnout.

The alarming lack of interest in democracy is a crisis that should concern all parties and they should now work together on ways to wake half the the nation from their slumbers and dramatically increase the levels of participation. If the current trend continues, it could open the way for the rise of extreme parties that will only ever be supported by a small percentage of the population – and that would be really stupid.