After the local elections back in May it was clear that there was a small but significant upswelling of anti-snp votes that were favouring the Conservatives, but local elections have a very different dynamic to national ones, and that, combined with the typically abysmal turnout and the alternative vote system means that trying to extrapolate the results to a Holyrood or UK general election is pretty difficult.
As much as I hoped that this general election would see SNP votes and seats significantly reduced Neither I nor anyone else seriously expected to see more than a handful of seats change hands. Mind you, a number of predictions based on opinion polls had suggested that a fair number of SNP seats were at risk, but hey opinion polls are all nonsense these days right?
At 10pm on election night the exit poll rolled in, indicating a Tory result just short of total disaster for them and a Labour result way in excess of what almost everyone expected. However for many Scots it was the size of that yellow column on the graph that generated the most interest, 'SNP down 22 seats' the presenter declared. At that point I knew the poll was nonsense, no way they'd lose that many. But by 6am the following morning it was clear just how accurate the exit poll had been when 21 of Sturgeon's stooges were missing from the line up. For the Tories a difficult night in England and Wales was tempered by an astounding result in Scotland. Labour also impressively clawing their way back from that single MP, with fewer seats than the Tories but not really so far behind in vote share, and even the Lib Dems recovering to a degree that Scottish MPs now make up one third of their Westminster contingent (not much admittedly, but good to see).
Frankly, no matter what your politics you should be glad that Scotland is now represented by a much more varied group of MPs reflecting a range of political opinion rather than having 96% of MPs representing just half the electorate, single-mindedly focused on one narrow aim and afraid to disagree with head office on almost any issue. The SNP still have the majority of seats, but no longer do they have anywhere near approaching the majority of votes, and that has to be healthy.
Of course this also has the pleasant upside of skewering Sturgeon's second independence referendum demands, after all she was the one who claimed that it was her opponents who were putting independence (i.e. opposition to it) at the heart of their campaigns, and you know what... those three parties took 62% of the vote compared to SNP's 37%. If the SNP's claims that the others were campaigning on an anti-independence ticket was accurate then it's pretty clear how voters view 'indyref2'.
