SCOTLAND:THE SCOTTISH National Party, which has won a comfortable majority in parliamentary elections, will hold a referendum on independence, leader Alex Salmond said.
The SNP, with 69 seats, can seek a referendum without the agreement of any other party in Holyrood. This was not possible over the last four years when it was a minority government.
In what has been described as Scotland’s “most dramatic election”, the SNP defeated major Labour figures and ousted Conservatives and Liberal Democrats from previously safe seats on its way to a majority for the first time since the first parliament in 1999.
Despite Labour leader Ed Miliband’s claims that the election would mark Labour’s “rebirth”, the party lost nine seats in the Scottish parliament, leading to leader Iain Gray announcing he would resign in the autumn.
Labour will be deeply concerned over SNP gains in Glasgow. It lost four seats in heartland areas, along with two more on the city’s regional list. Such results, if replicated in a Westminster election, would scupper Mr Miliband’s No 10 ambitions. Recriminations have already begun within Labour, with Mr Gray forced to defend his decision to focus on the Westminster coalition, rather than the SNP’s Holyrood performance.
Under the complicated voting system used in Scotland, 73 of the 129 MSPs are elected under first-past-the-post rules, while 56 more are elected from eight regional lists, and seats allocated according to the share each party gets.
Some of Labour’s difficulties were caused because, unlike other parties, it did not put some of its candidates running in constituencies on the regional lists as well. This is to be reconsidered for future elections.
The SNP’s share of the vote increased by an extraordinary 12 per cent on the 2007 election, while the Liberal Democrats suffered most, down 7.6 per cent, the Conservatives fell by 2.6 per cent and Labour, despite heavy seat losses, dropped marginally, by 0.6 per cent.
The SNP made advances in areas where they had struggled for years, taking five of Edinburgh’s six seats – all bar one a gain from either Labour, Conservatives, or the Liberal Democrats.
Mr Salmond said: “The SNP has been bestowed trust in a way that no party ever has before in a Scottish election. We will take that mandate and that trust forward. We’ll take it forward to increase the powers of our parliament.”
However, British prime minister David Cameron said he would fight “with every single fibre I have” to defeat an SNP independence referendum.
During the campaign, the SNP said it would hold such a poll before 2015. Now, however, the issue is when Mr Salmond will move on it, since a succession of polls show that while Scots favour the holding of a referendum, the majority do not want to break away from the United Kingdom.
Despite his bullish defence of public spending, Mr Salmond will lead an administration that will have to cut its budget by 4 percentage points for each of the next four years. This is bound to dent his popularity.
Vowing to oppose an independence referendum, Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman said: “I hope that the price won’t be paid of people being pushed into independence in Scotland when clearly that is not actually what they want.”
However, the SNP leader in Westminster, Angus Robertson, said the party is steering Scotland “through a transitional period”, where it has moved from “having no domestic decision-making to having some decision-making.”
Rejecting charges that the SNP is exploiting budget cuts to persuade Scottish voters to back independence, Mr Robertson said: “This is no Trojan Horse, this is front and centre, this is what we want. We want a new relationship on these islands, with our neighbours and friends.” The Liberal Democrats, whose support drifted en masse, it seems, to the SNP, had an appalling election, losing 30 deposits in the first 54 results declared, though the party’s Scottish leader Tavish Scott did survive in the Shetland Isles.
