IT’S OFTEN said that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. It’s a measure of how bad Thursday night was for the SNP that John Swinney’s administration did just that, without even being on the ballot paper.  

It’s a stunning reversal for a party that has been completely hegemonic in Scottish politics for a decade.

And it is, despite Labour cleaning up in the Central Belt, more of a tale of nationalist decline than Labour advance.

The Labour increase in seats far outstrips the increase in vote share, and the increase in vote share is against the background of a drop in turnout.

Scottish Labour’s vote is up by 383,000 across Scotland, no small achievement. Some of the shine, though, comes off when it is realised that the SNP vote dropped by over 730,000. 

There are a number of factors that can be pointed to as the reason so many SNP MPs have been returned to the private sector, but a drop in support for independence isn’t one of them.

All polling shows that opinions on that issue have hardly changed in recent years. Both pro- and anti-independence sides score forty-something per cent with a small number of “don’t knows” denying either side a majority. 

What may well have had an impact on fortunes is that any prospect of independence has receded. The SNP has at every parliamentary election since 2015 promised that a vote for them will deliver another indyref. Then, having won, made little to no effort to fulfil this promise.

Sometimes indeed they went out of their way to erect barriers — take, for example, Nicola Sturgeon’s January 2020 speech declaring the need for (among other things) a constitutional convention to draw up “a new claim of right.”

This Grand Old Duke of MacYork tactic of marching people up the indyref hill before an election and then down afterwards had clearly run its course after the 2021 Scottish Parliament election.

Since then the SNP has flailed about trying to come up with an independence strategy. There was talk of making (what turned out to be) this election “a de facto referendum.” This was first obfuscated and then abandoned.

The formal stance to achieve indy in this election was that a majority of seats (nb: not votes) would provide a mandate to begin negotiations to indy.

A measure of the coherence of this plan can be gathered by the fact that at the time this policy was adopted the SNP already had a majority of seats.

Given this confusion it’s little surprise that during the campaign the SNP would mention independence, but to get into discussions about it was to be obtained only with great reluctance. 

Nor is it the case that even if they had come up with one, a more sharply focused indy offer would have provided a quick fix.

Issue-based polling was absolutely clear that the salience of independence as an issue has also dropped significantly. Independence supporters haven’t changed their minds but they are prepared to put other issues ahead of that — things like tackling the cost-of-living crisis or getting rid of the Tories.

Put bluntly, independence, the rock upon which SNP dominance was built is now “an” issue rather than “the” issue.

This demotion of constitutional axe-grinding to the background in no way aligned the contest in Scotland with the rest of the UK.

Instead of the campaign being dominated by “the national question” all of the parties focused on issues devolved to Holyrood. 

This leant a slightly surreal air to the proceedings, as in the case of the first televised debate on STV. Four party leaders (all male btw), none of them candidates (at that point, Tory Douglas Ross later decided to stand. That ended badly. Contain your grief), all of them MSPs talking almost entirely about matters decided at Holyrood. 

This emphasis gave rise to promises that collapsed at the first application of reality. Scottish Labour promised 160,000 more NHS appointments, based on extra funding from the UK government.

The NHS is completely devolved to Scotland, and the UK government can’t direct how Scottish government spends money.   Extra cash could be spent on the NHS, but if the Scottish government decided they could spend it on reintroducing wolves to the Highlands. 

Similarly the SNP promised to introduce a Bill into Westminster to prevent privatisation of the NHS. This flummoxed a number of people as the Westminster Parliament can’t privatise the NHS in Scotland — and the SNP abstain on non-Scottish matters.

Meanwhile electing Lib Dem MPs would somehow improve the quality of the wholly Holyrood responsibilities of dentistry and mental health. 

Incoherent as all this was, for the first time for a decade it did mean that the SNP’s track record in office was a significant part of an election campaign.

This, it’s fair to say, is mixed. While not without its successes over the years, is hardly lacking in failures either. There are currently overlapping crises in any number of public services and the government has been behind any number of pieces of legislation which have been inadequate or inoperable. 

It is the extent to which the results reflect a verdict on the Holyrood administration that will be concentrating minds at the top of the SNP rather than the diminishing prospect of “freeeedom.”

In this they are not alone. The last SNP MP hadn’t even been handed their P45 before Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar was on TV talking about change being a two stage process. Stage two being the installation of himself in Bute House.

Labour too will being assessing to what extent their progress represents people “coming home to Labour,” as some of the more lachrymose patronising sloganeering has it, or simply the necessity of evicting the Tories. 

For those of us less concerned with “pelf and place” — as a verse of the Red Flag Labour never sings has it — the question is how can these new circumstances best be used for the benefit of working people.

That will be a task best undertaken when the dust has settled and tears have dried, but a few things seem obvious even now. 

The SNP government can, it seems, no longer wave its magic indyref wand to evade issues, and it looks like it needs to build bridges with a significant part of the population.

It is also going to want to look better than a Labour government that no-one is expecting to be the last word in radicalism. 

The scope to exert pressure the Scottish government to deliver on its anti-austerity rhetoric has increased substantially. Particularly to make greater use of its existing tax-raising powers in the way that the Scottish trade union movement has been urging them to.

More widely, a political environment that isn’t primarily a fight about flags gives us a chance to look more closely at what is and what ought to be happening with present remits and powers; the extent to which current powers have and frequently haven’t been used; and, crucially, what we can do with what we’ve got.