A political earthquake
Alistair Grant, David Bol and Rachel Amery discuss an extraordinary night, fresh from attending general election counts in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth.
Alistair Grant, David Bol and Rachel Amery discuss an extraordinary night, fresh from attending general election counts in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth.
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00:00Hello and welcome to the Steamy, the Scotsman's Politics podcast. I'm Alistair Grant, the
00:12Scotsman's Political Editor, and I'm joined by David Ball, the Scotsman's Deputy Political
00:16Editor, and by Rachel Aimery, the Scotsman's Political Correspondent. And we're recording
00:20this on Friday morning. We've all been up all night covering the counts, the general
00:25election counts in Edinburgh, in Glasgow, and in Perth, respectively. And what an extraordinary,
00:32crazy, mad night it was. Labour has won a crushing majority, and the Tories have suffered
00:38a historic defeat. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss lost her seat. Commons Leader Penny
00:43Mordaunt lost her seat. Jacob Rees-Mogg lost his seat. Defence Secretary Grant Shapps lost
00:48his seat. It really was a terrible, terrible night for the Tories. And in Scotland, the
00:54SNP was buried under the SNP landslide. The Nationalists have had a pretty disastrous
01:00night, I think it's safe to say, losing seats to the SNP across the central belt. Glasgow
01:04turned red. Four of the five Edinburgh constituencies went. Labour as well. It was pretty remarkable.
01:12John Swinney, the SNP leader and First Minister, has conceded it was a very difficult and damaging
01:17night, and there will now be a need for some soul-searching. Now, Rachel, you were at the
01:21Count in Perth, and I believe John Swinney was there. What did he say, and how did he
01:25come across?
01:26Well, when he first arrived, he did, of course, arrive to a great round of applause. All the
01:32cameras on him, lots of cheers from the audience there at the Count in Perth. It did kind of
01:37go downhill a bit for him from there, though, because, as you were saying, it's been a really
01:41bad night for the SNP. I think all the polls, even the worst polls that we saw during this
01:46election campaign, were not nearly as bad as it has actually turned out for them. They've
01:52lost completely almost everything in the central belt, haven't they? It's just been disastrous
01:57for them, and such big names have been going, which I'm sure we'll get into later in the
02:02podcast, some of the big names that have lost their seats. But, yeah, John Swinney basically
02:06having to concede that, yes, it's been a very tough night for them. He said it was a very,
02:09very tough night. That's telling of the tough times the party's had off late. He does say
02:15that he needs to sort of look again at what the party now needs to do to serve Scotland
02:19better, and how they need to work a bit better now on the back of this result. He did ask
02:25if he was wanting, if he was going to be staying on as SNP leader. Of course, when he was first
02:29elected only a few months ago, he did say that he'd be leading the party to the 2026
02:34election, and today he says he is not resigning on the back of this disastrous result. He
02:38will be carrying on as SNP leader. Independence, though, was another question that he spoke
02:44to about. Of course, you'll all know the sort of the back and forth of what the SNP's policy
02:49of independence is going to be, and they said it was going to be if they won the majority
02:53of Scottish seats in this election. Of course, they're nowhere near that, not even close
02:58to winning that sort of number of seats in Scotland. And they've now tried to sort of
03:04go to say, well, John Swinney this morning was saying that it's now still a mandate for
03:08independence because they have a majority in Holyrood, which is what they won in 2021.
03:13So kind of ignoring the fact that it's been a really bad night for them and saying, oh,
03:16but remember a few years ago in Holyrood, we had a great election then, just remember that.
03:20So, yeah, very different change of tone throughout the night for John Swinney there.
03:26Yeah, but the SNP seems to be very much putting independence on the back burner, though, because
03:30John Swinney was kind of saying, you know, he accepts that people have not put it as
03:34a priority. I can't remember what his exact quote was, but it was something like that.
03:38Stephen Flynn, the SNP's Westminster leader, who held on to his seat in Aberdeen South
03:44by a reduced majority, but still managed to hold on to it, I think was saying as well
03:48that it's going to be hard to kind of hold that line about the kind of independence mandate
03:53or it's hard to kind of play that with the public at the moment.
03:57But David, Glasgow, pretty remarkable. I mean, Labour were absolutely desperate to win back
04:03Glasgow, which is traditional heartland for the party, but it turned SNP in the aftermath
04:09of the 2014 independence referendum. And they've done it. All six constituencies have gone Labour.
04:15They have painted the city red. I imagine Anna Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader,
04:20was completely cock-a-hoop about this.
04:22Oh, yeah, he was delirious. I mean, he's quite an upbeat guy anyway, but like he arrived at
04:27the count and we were running quite late. So I think he probably intended to arrive
04:32with all these seats won already. So he came in and basically all he could say was,
04:36we're on course to win a majority and basically take all these seats off the SNP.
04:42And basically within sort of an hour, we had all six seats declared one after the other,
04:47bang, bang, bang. And it was all basically turning from SNP to Labour.
04:52I mean, as you mentioned, that 2015 general election in the wake of the independence
04:58referendum, the SNP just lapped up support in Glasgow for independence. And we're basically
05:04just back to square one. We're back to a pre-independence sort of situation for the
05:08pre-referendum situation for the SNP. And obviously we had people like Alastair Thewlis
05:14and Carol Monaghan and David Linden sort of losing their seats. These are big names that
05:19have been kind of big voices for the SNP and Scottish MPs for the last few years.
05:26And just one after the other, they were just kind of gone. Alastair Thewlis looked quite
05:31emotional, to be to be honest. She spent a lot of time just kind of staring at the counters
05:37as they were looking through her votes. And she kind of knew the right was on the wall.
05:42And you got to feel a bit sorry for her because her constituency was kind of abolished. So
05:46the boundary changes have not been particularly kind to her. But this is kind of the sort of
05:51the centrepiece of that Labour revival in the central belt. Anas Sarwar, when he became
05:57leader after Richard Leonard, very early on made clear that there's a lot of talk about
06:01the red wall in the north of England sort of falling. But this one went first, like considerably
06:06before the sort of Brexit wall in England. And this is them now rebuilding that sort of thing.
06:12He also acknowledged the independence question. He kind of appreciated that a lot of people who
06:18support independence in Glasgow and the central belt had kind of lent him their support this time
06:23and trying to make that point that he's still going to look after their needs,
06:27even if they disagree with that. And interestingly, he said to me that even there'll be some people
06:32who voted for Labour who in the future might vote for independence. So although it's gone away for
06:37now, he's obviously acknowledging that it's not gone away indefinitely and people still do to
06:42care about independence. Yeah, yeah. And I was just looking back, actually, I think I was talking
06:47about Stephen Flynn's quote earlier on, I think his line was that he accepts that the SNP's
06:51independence mandate was now a hard sell. So he's kind of, yeah, I think it's interesting they're
06:56kind of changing language about that. And we'll probably hear from John Swinney later on this
07:00morning, actually, and he'll probably maybe speak a bit more about these kind of issues.
07:04But let's touch on some of those big names that lost their seats. I mean, I'm just having a look
07:09back at it here. We've got people like, I mean, I was at the count in Edinburgh, Joanna Cherry,
07:14Edinburgh South West. In 2019, she had a majority of just under 12,000. She was seen as someone who,
07:21you know, has a level of support, maybe outwith the party, a level of support just for her as an
07:26individual. But she remarkably lost her seat to Labour's Scott Arthur. And I thought it was
07:33interesting afterwards she was speaking to journalists and very much not pulling her
07:38punches about where she thinks the party's gone wrong. She said, I fear that under the leadership
07:43of Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP has squandered opportunities to advance the cause of independence,
07:48squandered opportunities to continue her previous reputation for governing well. So she's very much
07:55kind of, she's obviously been a critic of the SNP's leadership under Nicola Sturgeon in the
07:59past. That's well known. But I just thought that was quite notable. Elsewhere, you had Tommy
08:05Shepard, Edinburgh East and Muscle Bra lost a seat. Kirsten Oswald, the SNP's deputy Westminster leader,
08:10defeated in East Renfrewshire by Blair MacDougall. It really was quite a, just quite a tough,
08:16a tough night for these high profile figures, Rachel, wasn't it? Absolutely. I mean, it was
08:21quite interesting in the Perth count because we actually had a group of Labour campaigners
08:27with an eye on Alowan Grangemouth at the Perth count that I was at because the guy there, Brian
08:33Leishman, is a Perth councillor. So there's actually a group in the room at the Perth and Kinross county
08:38who had their eye on the Alowan Grangemouth count and are cheering up in the room when he won that
08:43seat, which obviously meant that both John Nicholson and Ken MacAskill are out. They're gone now because
08:50of that verdict. So that's another two big names in one constituency gone. It's just quite incredible
08:57to see these really big, well-known names in Scottish politics just gone. It's also quite
09:03interesting, I think, because there's now a lot of very experienced, very well-known SNP figures
09:09out of a job. What do they do now? Where do they go? There's not going to be any holiday for all
09:14of them. It's a long time to wait till the next general election. It's a bit of a headache as to
09:20what all these well-known names, what are they all going to do now? Because there's lots of them,
09:25isn't there? Especially in the Edinburgh and Glasgow areas. Yeah, and Joanna Cherry was referencing
09:30that, that she'll spend some time thinking about what she's going to do next, but she's not the
09:34kind of person that is going to just go away and live a quiet life. She's going to want to get
09:40involved. She's going to want to be out there. It'll be very interesting to see what some of
09:46these people do next. Yes, we've definitely not heard the last of Joanna Cherry, have we?
09:51No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, I could see her with her eyes in Holyrood for the future,
09:55to be honest. But David, we talked about soul-searching within the SNP, where they'll go
10:02next. Where do you think this leaves the party and where do you think this leaves the issue of
10:08independence? That's very tricky, isn't it? I mean, John Swinney's quite fortunate that the
10:14election was called so soon after him coming in, because as disastrous as it is, you can't really
10:19pin this on him. I mean, he's kind of, it could have been even worse. If you look at some of the
10:24polling beforehand, OK, the results have been absolutely dreadful, but we could be looking at
10:28a complete wipeout if it's kind of ebbed away even more. Independence, I mean, where does it go from
10:35here? Because the strategy before this was pretty shaky, to be honest. It was sort of using this
10:41election as maybe a de facto referendum. We weren't really sure. And they kept sort of harping
10:47back to that Holyrood mandate, sort of ignoring whatever happened here when they were sort of
10:53looking at the writing on the wall. So I actually don't know what they're going to do about
10:56independence. I don't see what the route is for it. Ian Blackford on the radio this morning was
11:01kind of acknowledging that it isn't people's biggest priority and that the SNP need to kind of
11:06acknowledge that and go back to kind of their record and looking at people's priorities,
11:12which I guess is why Labour has had such an impact, because they're kind of focusing on things that
11:17are maybe chiming more with the public. I don't know what the SNP do from here,
11:21because they're obviously, at Westminster, they're kind of powerless and voiceless. They're
11:26not going to get those questions at PMQs that Stephen Flynn had been fairly effective
11:32over, especially with a new prime minister. That would have been a good opportunity to
11:36kind of use their voice. And that's just kind of gone. So they're going to have to have a
11:40complete rethink. You can just imagine what the next SNP conference is going to be like.
11:45And that selection process for 2026, with all those MPs out of work now, it's going to be,
11:52well, yeah, it's going to be file hooks.
11:56And Rachel, I mean, obviously, one of the big stories of the night was the Aberdeenshire North
12:01and Moray East constituency. Douglas Ross had announced halfway through the general election
12:07campaign period that he was going to run for that seat. He previously said he wasn't going to
12:12re-stand for Westminster, so he could focus on Holyrood, where he's obviously, or he was,
12:17the Scottish Tory leader and MSP. He's now the outgoing leader because after a backlash,
12:23he then said that he would stand down as party leader and stand down as an MSP if he won this
12:27seat. But pretty dramatically, he didn't. The SNP's Seamus Logan beat him. So where does this
12:34leave Douglas Ross? Do you think he's just going to come back to Holyrood and be a backbench MSP?
12:39Yes, I've just got my election notebook in front of me now to look at the results here.
12:44It was quite close. So we've got Seamus Logan on 13,455 and Douglas Ross on 12,513. So it's
12:52pretty close. It was obviously a hard one, a battle, that one. But as you said, that's Douglas
12:59Ross taking a huge political gamble, not just on his own political career, but on other people,
13:05the party's political careers as well, and on the party's reputation as well. And it's backfired
13:10quite spectacularly on him. And that is quite the defeat for him to put himself out in that sort of
13:18way. Exactly what does he do now? Because he's going to stand down as Scottish Conservative
13:24leader in Holyrood, go to the backbenches. He's not going to go to Westminster. I can't imagine
13:30him wanting to be nice and quiet and enjoy his life on the backbenches like some of the SNP
13:35figures have done in recent months. I can't imagine him doing that. So where does he go
13:40from here? Does he decide to fall back more onto his refereeing, linesman career? Is that maybe
13:45where his future lies now? Because he's no longer on the frontbenches of Holyrood, he's no longer
13:51in Westminster. Where does he go from here? He's taken a massive political gamble and it's really
13:56backfired on him, hasn't it? What do you think, David? Where does he go from here?
14:01Oh, he's had an absolute shocker. I mean, it couldn't have gone worse. It really couldn't.
14:06He's managed to alienate all his colleagues and lose his sort of escape route from what was quite
14:12a disastrous situation at Holyrood. I don't really know what options are there. He's going to have to
14:17just have a humiliating stint on the backbenches at Holyrood. I don't know what options are there
14:24for him, to be honest. It's not great. He's had a very difficult election campaign. Obviously,
14:30having to quit halfway through is just like ridiculous, really, let's be honest.
14:35And I guess he thought if he could win that election, then that gives him that route
14:40to Westminster and he can kind of focus on that and sort of leave on a high.
14:45But where he goes from here now is, well, he's going to have to just be a backbench MSP for one
14:51of his colleagues who probably helped sort of turf him out. I mean, he's had a rebellion against
14:56him. Maybe the refereeing is what he's going to focus on. He does like to have more than one job,
15:01so maybe he will like to focus on something else alongside this.
15:05It's quite interesting because when we had that emergency press conference,
15:09which we only got two hours notice of, when Douglas Ross announced that he was standing in
15:13this constituency, we were asking him how it was all going to work logistically. And he was very
15:18much saying that I can do this job and this job, we can travel this way, we can do this,
15:22all set out. And I wonder if you could just go back to that moment and say to him,
15:26don't worry about any of these plans, they're not going to happen. It's just incredible that they
15:30had a plan in place as to how he was going to do all these different jobs and how he was going to
15:35work between Westminster and Holyrood. And maybe they shouldn't have bothered spending so much time
15:40on the logistics and more time on the campaign, perhaps. Yeah, and I think if you look at the
15:45votes, and you might have this in front of you, Rachel, but the reform votes in that seat,
15:49the votes for Nigel Farage's Reform UK basically cost Douglas Ross the seat, which is something
15:55that the Tories were banging on about in the run-up to this election. They were going on and
15:59on about how a vote for reform will let the SNP in, it will just eat into our vote. And whether
16:05or not you agree with, whether that's a good thing or not, you turned out to be correct.
16:10That is exactly what happened. It's particularly in that seat. I think that's probably the best
16:14seat that you can think of where it's made a huge difference. So the candidate Joe Hart got
16:205,562 votes. So can you imagine if Reform were not in this election at all? Those five and a half
16:27thousand votes would probably have gone to Douglas Ross, and then he would have beaten Seamus Logan
16:31and won that seat. So I think this is one of the seats where that is a really, really interesting
16:37sort of player in the game at this point. But Reform, it's quite interesting because I kind
16:41of thought before this election, yes, Reform have a big role to play down in England, but in Scotland,
16:46probably not so much. And I've definitely been proven wrong on that one. Reform have had a
16:51brilliant night in Scotland. They have overtaken the Conservatives in Glasgow and Midlothian in
16:58loads of areas. They've done really, really well. So that's another big headache for the
17:04Conservatives moving forward, because if they manage to keep that momentum up, particularly
17:09because they have won some seats down south in England, if they can keep that momentum up to the
17:132026 Holyrood election, that could be a big headache for the Conservatives in Holyrood as well.
17:18Yeah, it's interesting. I was speaking to a Labour, sorry, a Tory figure at the count in Edinburgh who
17:23was making the point, like you kind of say, that we sometimes have this complacent
17:28assumption that Reform are not really a force in Scotland and, you know, Scottish politics is its
17:32own kind of thing. It's got its own atmosphere going on that they were pointing out that actually,
17:38yeah, Reform was cutting through in some of these areas. Obviously not enough to ever
17:41be challenging for a seat, but to the extent that they are taking votes from other parties,
17:45predominantly probably the Tories, although some of those votes will be Labour as well,
17:49and that is having an impact on how these seats turn out. But I wanted to, and I don't want this
17:56podcast to be too long because I don't know about you guys, but I'm seriously flagging, but I wanted
18:00to, before we go off, just talk about the 2026 election. I know it seems ridiculous, we've just
18:06finished this election, but Labour will essentially use this result as a springboard into that
18:12election. They'll try and gather the momentum. You've got Keir Starmer in Downing Street,
18:16Anna Sarwar in Scotland wants to be First Minister. They'll try and push that momentum
18:22forward into 2026 and the SNP, you'd think, will be hoping that people in Scotland will be
18:28disillusioned with Keir Starmer and the Labour Party by 2026 because, you know, maybe some of
18:33their promises won't have happened. Keir Starmer will be going to Downing Street at this
18:37extremely difficult time for the country, the finances are awful, you know, they probably
18:44will have to make very difficult decisions, potentially spending cuts, potentially tax rises.
18:49So yeah, the dynamic there will be so interesting. What do you think?
18:55Yeah, I mean, Anna Sarwar has been very comfy at Holyrood, basically been able to sort of
19:03kick off at two governments and sit in the middle with no responsibility
19:07and nothing to really have thrown at him. But that's all going to change now because
19:12Labour are in charge and he's going to have to, he's going to have to deal with the sort of fallout
19:18from that. And two years is a long time out from the Holyrood election.
19:26I mean, we've kind of, the polling we've seen for Holyrood has been basically Labour and SNP
19:32neck and neck. So who's going to form the biggest parties kind of up for grabs. But
19:37it depends on the direction of travel, really. If people get disillusioned, like you said,
19:40with the UK government, and it's probably going to be a slow burner for Keir Starmer,
19:44given the economic sort of situation, people maybe won't see a lot of change that's been
19:50promised straight away. And given people are still in the cost of living crisis and inflation is
19:54still there, even though it's a lot lower, they're going to sort of turn on Labour potentially. And
20:00he's got a huge mandate now, a huge majority Keir Starmer. And if people don't start seeing
20:06sort of tangible things quickly, Labour are going to come under a bit of pressure,
20:10which they haven't really had, particularly in Scotland for a long time. But Anas Salah's focus
20:15has been on Holyrood throughout this campaign. And you went to his manifesto launch, and it was
20:19all about 2026. He was talking about it after the election results this morning, basically saying
20:27that part one is done. And we just need to part two to bring a Scottish Labour government. And
20:32that's kind of what they're after. And they've made no secret about that. But it's going to be
20:37trickier than, obviously, they've kind of eased to victory in this one. But I think the Holyrood
20:42one, two years down the line is going to be a completely different task to succeed in.
20:51What do you think, Rachel?
20:52Yeah, absolutely. It depends where the next two years goes. If Keir Starmer does a good job,
20:57and people can see sort of lots of benefits to them personally, then yeah, I think Anas Salah is
21:04on course to do very well at his chance of becoming First Minister. However, if things
21:08don't quite so well for Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, if he does come up with these headaches
21:12and blocks, and maybe has a few U-turns on policy announcements, then the SNP can fall back on their
21:20usual stick off. Well, look how bad Westminster is. Look how bad the deal is you're getting for
21:24Scotland. So it's really going to depend on how the next two years goes for Keir Starmer
21:28as to how well Anas Salah is going to do.
21:31Yeah, I was actually just googling on my phone there, because one of the points that people
21:34always make is that how people vote in Westminster elections in Scotland doesn't necessarily
21:39translate into how they'll vote in a Scottish Parliament election. And people always use
21:43the example of the 2010 UK election, in which the SNP won a handful of seats in Scotland.
21:49I think it was sixth. And then the following year in Holyrood got their kind of unprecedented
21:55majority. So it just doesn't necessarily mean that the SNP are doomed or going to perform
22:05spectacularly badly in 2026. I think there is still a lot to play for.
22:10You know, two years is a long time in politics as well. But I think that's probably all we've
22:14got time for. Actually, I was about to say we're going to go off and sleep, but we're
22:18not even going to go off and sleep. David, you're going to an event in Glasgow with Labour. I'm
22:22going to an SNP thing in Edinburgh. Rachel, you've probably got loads of stuff to do as well.
22:27So sadly, the day drags on. But it's been a lot of fun. It's been an incredible night.
22:34Thank you very much for listening. And we'll be back at the same time next week. In the meantime,
22:40stay tuned to the Scotsman's website for all the latest news, analysis, video. There's so
22:45much stuff on the website about the election. It's literally jam-packed.
22:49But thank you very much for listening.