Why most distorted election result in history risks leading SNP astray

Yet as the grip of the two largest parties on UK opinion reaches a historic low, it is increasingly difficult to argue that there is simply no problem worth discussing, when it comes to the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system.  Since Thursday, election night guru Sir John Curtice has led an unusually widespread chorus of comment on the disparity between the number of seats won by the parties and their actual shares of the vote, describing the outcome as “the most disproportionate in history”. 

And naturally enough, most of the comment has focussed on Keir Starmer’s Labour party, and its extraordinary, tightly focussed achievement in winning 65 per cent of seats in the House of Commons, on the basis of just 33.7 per cent of the vote. If the imbalances created by first-past-the-post hold dangers for the winners, though – mainly the danger of delusions of grandeur, of which the cautious Sir Keir is doubtless all too aware – then they also have profound impacts on the losers.

Nigel Farage’s Reform, for example, won only five seats – less than one per cent of the Commons - despite winning four million votes (14 per cent). They attracted half a million votes more than the Liberal Democrats, who, astonishingly, won 14 times as many seats (71), adding to the sense of grievance that is Reform’s main stock-in-trade.

And if Thursday’s election result failed to reflect the rise of Reform, it also inflicted a particularly painful blow on the SNP, by hugely exaggerating the impact of what was already a serious decline in support. It’s true that recent Westminster election results in Scotland have all bordered on the nonsensical, in terms of seats; in 2015, for example, the SNP won all but three of Scotland’s Commons seats with just half of the vote.

A traumatic result

This time around, though, the SNP have become the victims of what is now an extremely volatile battle between Labour and the SNP for the support of Scotland’s social democratic majority. The SNP lost a third of the votes it won in 2019, plummeting from 45 per cent to just under 30; but it lost more than 80 per cent of its seats, and is now reduced from 48 MPs to a mere rump of nine, while Labour have 37 – a result scarcely justified by a share of the vote which saw Labour just five points ahead of the SNP, on 35.3 per cent.

And the danger of this traumatic result is that it creates a massive sense of crisis in the SNP, which leads to hasty and self-destructive decisions. That the party has received a strong negative message from Scotland’s voters is clear. Exactly what the message was saying, though, is more difficult to read; and already, many strident critics within and beyond the independence camp are pushing their own solutions.

Some accuse the party of betraying progressive and radical values, during its long enforced role as the administrator of Tory austerity in Scotland. Others, meanwhile, think it self-evident that the way forward lies in dumping green policies and alliances, while reversing the party’s position on the gender recognition issue (which in fact has very low salience with voters), and electing Kate Forbes as leader.

Demands for change

Neither side, though, reckons with the very strong possibility that the main factors shifting votes away from the SNP have relatively little to do with the party’s broadly popular social policies, and much more to do with questions of competence and integrity; the latter intensified both by the Michael Matheson scandal, and by Police Scotland’s ongoing Operation Branchform investigation.

What the SNP leadership now faces, in other words, is a period in which they will face huge demands to make changes which are relatively easy to achieve – to change leaders again, dump various headline policies and adopt others, or talk tough on independence when there is no way of delivering on that talk – when in fact the necessary changes may be less high profile, and much more difficult; changes such as complete and transparent reform of the structures and working methods of the party, and – even more intractably – a serious effort to address the poor handling of policy that has dogged the Scottish Government in recent years, from botched consultations to badly drafted legislation, and weak implementation and enforcement. 

Return to electoral margins

These problems, of course, are not unique to Scottish Government – indeed they have plagued UK Government for decades. To have any chance of achieving independence, though, the Scottish Government will have to show that it can offer something better not only in terms of policy – indeed policy differences may be small, now the Tories are out of power – but in terms of using small-nation synergies, and 21st-century approaches to grassroots democracy, to deliver a better quality of government, more accessible, more responsive, and ultimately more effective.

That the SNP has drifted so far from that vision of better government has perhaps been its greatest failure in recent years, along with the failure to remain open to new ideas and talent that almost always seems to accompany long periods in power; and the shock of this defeat, well handled, could become a major catalyst for renewal.

A huge and ill-thought-out overreaction to last week’s massive loss of Westminster seats, though, could lead the party straight back to the electoral margins from which it so impressively emerged, 20 years ago. And although that is an outcome that the party’s opponents are now understandably eager to see, it’s one that calmer heads in the SNP would be well advised to deny them; as we enter the long run-up to the 2026 Scottish Parliament elections.