Last week’s Holyrood constituency vote shows the SNP centre of gravity is shifting, making Labour’s life far harder and giving the Tories an opening. But that poses challenges for the SNP too.

Thursday’s Holyrood elections offered several clear-cut stories: a resurgent Conservative party; Scottish Labour in freefall and the Scottish National party winning a third successive victory, just inches away from a second successive majority.

But behind those headlines are other significant trends which show how Scottish politics is now evolving. There is continuing backwash from the 2014 independence referendum, churned up the newly emerging questions about new taxation and welfare powers, and nagging questions about the SNP’s dominance.

Those trends point in significant directions for those three parties. For Labour in particular and the SNP, there are downsides. The challenges for Labour are profound and central to its survival; the SNP’s challenges more subtle but central too to its future direction.

The Tories claim they succeeded in part by targeting blue-collar unionists, Labour voters who put defending the UK first. There is scant evidence for that – although the latest phase of a mass study of voters behaviour (including new 16 and 17 year old voters) by the Scottish Election Survey starting this week will help test its truth.

Professor Michael Keating, of the Centre for Constitutional Change at the University of Edinburgh and with the University of Aberdeen, said jumping straight from red to blue was an unlikely transition for a Scottish voter.

While in some seats the 10% fall in the Labour vote and a 10% rise in the Tories suggests a direct link, it would be wrong to assume so, says Keating. There is differential turnout amongst the parties (or “differential abstention”) to consider, or a more natural transition from non-nationalist SNP voters and Liberal Democrat voters to the Tories:

This churn is a lot more complicated than simply moving from Labour to the Tories. That’s the most difficult one: it’s much easier to move [to the Tories] from one of the other parties.

Voting patterns suggest instead that Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, triumphed by attracting centre-right voters who once backed the Liberal Democrats – particularly in Aberdeenshire and southern Scotland, and by re-energising slumbering Conservatives who were never interested in Holyrood elections (until the tax powers came along).

Keating believes demographic change played its part - more English retirees are moving into southern Scotland; Perthshire is now more middle class, but the key point is that the Tories have rebuilt their Scottish brand:

Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives aren’t the Bullingdon Club; they’re kind of Liberal Conservatives; they would appeal to the centre right vote in that part of Scotland much more easily than the conservatism that comes from London.

And the trends for all three parties seem closely interwoven. Labour’s core constituencies are now almost entirely captured by the SNP, but the territories once crucial to the SNP’s climb to dominance – the rural shire constituencies won by Alex Salmond’s generation, are now in turn under attack by the Tories.

There is now a shift in the centre of gravity in the SNP vote, away from rural, small town Scotland into the urban, post-industrial west and central belt. That allows the Tories to nibble away at the SNP across rural Scotland. Sturgeon’s carefully-calibrated centrist stance on income tax – rebuffing demands for higher taxes on the rich, appears not to have worked on centre right voters.

How Scotland’s political geography changed, seat by seat

How support for the five main parties rose and fell in the 2016 Holyrood election How support for the five main parties rose and fell in the 2016 Holyrood election

The constituency data on party share shows there were swings away from the SNP to the Tories in 19 SNP seats – including the Perthshire seats of two of the most senior figures from the Salmond generation: Scottish finance secretary John Swinney and Roseanna Cunningham.



There was a 12.38% swing to the Tories in Swinney’s seat of Perthshire North, and his majority fell by nearly 1,700. Cunningham’s vote in Perthshire South & Kinross-shire fell by just over 9% after a 9.51% swing to the Tories. And the SNP lost one of those 19 to the Tories, in Aberdeenshire West.



Those two Perthshire seats are an integral part of that yellow arc of SNP seats which (before it came to dominate the country in 2011) curved round from Salmond’s territory north of Aberdeen, south through Angus, and then west through Tayside to the Trossachs and on which Salmond’s march to power at Holyrood was built.

Richard Parry, an honorary fellow at the Centre on Constitutional Change, said there were clear trends in Thursday’s voting:

The SNP vote weakened in the heartlands they took over from the Conservatives in the 1980s and1990s. That party, from a very low base in the Holyrood system, has started to look more like a normal European centre-right party. They have crossed from the other direction with Labour, stranded like many once-formidable European socialist machines.

The same trend is seen in the SNP’s loss to the Liberal Democrats of two relatively affluent constituencies in Edinburgh Western and North East Fife, against the grain of the polls which spelt doom for the party. Tory voters may be acting tactically in both, with Lib Dems switching to the Tories elsewhere.

And those swings in traditional Labour areas to the SNP on Thursday shows how significant the challenge for Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale will be over the next five years, after her party came third behind the Tories with just 24 seats – less than half its holding in 1999.

Her party was defending 15 constituencies last week: it held only two of those and won a third (East Lothian, Dumbarton and Edinburgh Southern respectively), and those were all won in contests with the SNP.

And that is the limit to the solace for Labour. It suffered swings away to the SNP in 39 of Scotland’s 73 constituencies – nearly everywhere it might think winnable. There were only four swings from the SNP to Labour and in only one of those, Edinburgh Southern, did that lead to outright victory for Daniel Johnson. In East Lothian, Iain Gray, Scottish Labour’s former leader, increased his majority to 1,127.

In fact, those four were the only constituency swings to Labour last week: in two places, Dumfriesshire and Eastwood – taken in 1999 as a great prize for Tony Blair’s New Labour, it lost seats to the Tories too.

So Labour lost seats in places synonymous with the heavy industries which once helped build its century-old powerbase: Motherwell and Wishaw; Rutherglen; Coatbridge & Chryston; Cowdenbeath; Edinburgh Northern & Leith; Glasgow Provan; Glasgow Maryhill & Springburn, as well as Greenock & Inverclyde. Jackie Baillie only saved her seat of Dumbarton against the SNP with a wafer-thin 109 votes. Her majority is now just 0.32%.



And the SNP challenge is likely worsen in next May’s council elections if the SNP matches the clean sweep it enjoyed in Glasgow last week and the near domination of Fife (a feat stopped only by Willie Rennie’s victory in North East Fife) by also winning control of both local authorities from Labour.



Dugdale lost so badly because faith in Labour has been ruined by its dysfuctional leadership and its often incoherent policy-making, as much by its alliance with the Tories in the referendum.

Labour is now being hollowed out by defeat: it has now lost 13 Holyrood seats on top of the 40 Westminster seats last year; with those go the output, constituency work and public profiles of those MPs and MSPs, and their incomes and their staff. All those flow to their opponents.



But last week’s votes threw up more difficult questions for the SNP too. It looks likely its centrist stance saw SNP support in urban areas being nibbled away from the left too – one key reason why Sturgeon failed to get a majority. The SNP vote fell by 5 points between its constituency and regional list votes, a large bulk of it going to the more radical Scottish Green party, which had specifically targeted the SNP’s urban, left wing electorate.

Keating believes this exposes a tension for Sturgeon: she has to balance her increasingly reliance on urban, centre-left and ex-Labour voters with a moderate, centrist stance on areas like taxation or education reform designed to preserve her wide appeal:

“I think that’s going to cause problems [for the SNP] because they have been positioning themselves in this election closer to the Conservatives on many issues. They were hardly competing with Labour at all in this election; they took the working class Labour vote for granted that they’ve got in Glasgow, Dundee and North Lanarkshire.”



Professor James Mitchell, director of the Academy of Government at the University of Edinburgh, is about to publish a book with his colleague at Essex, Rob Johns, on the rise of the SNP. Mitchell believes that Sturgeon could have avoided that middle class centre right revolt if she had played down her quest for independence (despite the risk that this would alienate her core nationalist vote).

In a blog on Thursday’s results, Where next for the SNP, he concludes:

