Scottish Labour ‘confident of majority’ as SNP faces Westminster wipeout | Scottish National party (SNP)

The Scottish Labour leader has expressed confidence of a full recovery, despite early indications that the party will deal major blows to the Scottish National Party in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Fife.

Anas Sarwar was greeted with rapturous applause as he arrived at the vote counting centre in Glasgow, with fellow candidates eager to declare themselves winners shortly.

“I am confident that we now have a majority in Scotland and can start the process of reform tomorrow,” he said.

“The first step is to defeat 14 years of Conservative government which has done so much damage to our country – a tough job tomorrow. The second step is to look at the Scottish Parliament. [and the] “Parliamentary elections will be held in 2026.”

The first knockout was in Kilmarnock and Loudon, where Labour’s Lilian Jones won with 19,055 votes to the SNP’s Alan Brown, 13,936;

By 6.30am on Friday, Labour was celebrating a dramatic comeback from just one seat in 2019 to 35, with some seat counts still to be completed.

In a bitter night for the SNP, Labour won a landslide victory in Glasgow, recapturing all six seats previously held by the SNP, and in Edinburgh they won four of the five seats except for Edinburgh West, where the Liberal Democrat Christine Jardine was re-elected by an overwhelming majority of around 16,000 votes.

The SNP had won just six seats by 5.45pm and looked set to end the night with fewer than 10. Morale was boosted in Aberdeen South by the comfortable victory of Westminster leader Stephen Flynn.

SNP leader John Swinney, who has been in the position for two months, apologised to party colleagues for failing to hold onto their seats and described the night as “very damaging and harsh”.

“You don’t bounce back from tough times in an instant, and we didn’t bounce back from this election campaign either. I deeply regret that we find ourselves in this situation,” he said.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has dominated Scottish politics for more than a decade but is facing near-annihilation at Westminster, with exit polls predicting it will fall from 48 MPs to just 10.

Former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon told ITV that if predictions that Scotland will lose 38 constituencies are correct, it will be a “tumultuous” night for the Labour party.

She said: “Judging by these figures it’s not a good night for the SNP… If the exit polls are correct then expectations for the SNP are looking bleak.”

Ruth Davidson, a former Scottish Conservative leader, described the exit poll results as a potential “catastrophe” for the party across the UK, but said they suggested the Conservatives could double their number of seats in Scotland to 12.

Ms Sturgeon told ITV she believed the exit poll results would be “broadly right”.

The SNP was expecting a bad night with First Minister John Swinney warning that the vote was close in many constituencies, but an early morale booster was the fact that their Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, retained his Aberdeen South seat.

The party had informally been hoping for around 20 seats, but the predicted 10 would be its worst result since 2010, before the independence referendum.

The SNP has had a tumultuous two years, with the party having had three leaders. Ms Sturgeon resigned as leader in February 2023, citing exhaustion, just weeks after her husband, Peter Murrell, was questioned on suspicion of embezzling party funds. He was charged earlier this year. Ms Sturgeon was also arrested but released without charge.

Humza Yousaf, a protégé of Ms Sturgeon, resigned in May after dissolving a power-sharing arrangement with the Scottish Green Party in the Holyrood Assembly and was subsequently replaced by Mr Swinney.

Labour, meanwhile, is hoping for a Lazarus-type recovery from 2019, when it only managed to produce one MP.

Opinion polls before Thursday had predicted Labour would win in the central constituencies of Edinburgh, Glasgow and the surrounding areas, winning 25 or 26 seats.

“This is a huge moment for the Labour party, there’s no denying that. This is a huge achievement for Keir Starmer,” Ms Sturgeon said. “As the night goes on, I think it will be interesting to see whether this is a collapse of the Conservative party rather than a rise of Labour.”

The election comes after Labour spent a decade trying to regain support in Scotland after suffering heavy defeats in 2015 and 2019. Buoyed by the independence referendum the previous year, the SNP won 56 of the then 59 seats in 2015, beating all other candidates.

Labour made a slight recovery in 2017, gaining seven seats, but lost six in 2019.

As the SNP’s firm grip on Scottish politics weakens, it will call into question the party’s political strategy, which centres around Scottish independence and its constitutional status.

The Conservative Party has been unpopular in Scotland, a country that voted to remain in the EU in 2016, so the party’s independence strategy has been maintained.

But worsening NHS waiting lists, the cost of living crisis and Labour’s resurgence may have caused voters to divorce their desire for stability from the constitutional question of independence that was at the heart of the SNP’s 2024 manifesto.