SCOTLAND:IF GORDON Brown's last-minute appeal for wavering voters to return to Labour worked anywhere, it appears to have been in his own turf of Scotland, where the party put in one of its strongest showings in decades and regained two seats previously lost in byelections.
After a turbulent election campaign, and all the talk of Lib Dem surges and Tory surprises, Scotland’s political landscape remained largely unchanged after Thursday’s ballot.
The four main parties secured exactly the same number of seats as in the 2005 general election. Labour retains 41 of Westminster’s 59 Scottish seats; the Lib Dems hold 11, the Scottish National Party (SNP) six and the Conservatives, while slightly increasing their vote share, maintain their solitary MP in David Mundell, shadow Scottish secretary, who defended his seat in the Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale.
In a result Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election co-ordinator, described as “spectacular”, the party overcame challenges in all key battleground seats. Its share of the vote in Scotland came to 42.4 per cent, one of its biggest since it secured nearly 50 per cent in 1966. In most constituencies, the party’s share of the vote rose, suggesting substantial numbers switched allegiances for tactical purposes to counter the Tories.
In the Tory target seat of East Renfrewshire, one of David Cameron’s stops on his 24-hour final campaign blitz earlier this week, Scottish secretary Jim Murphy not only saw off his Conservative rival but also increased his majority to 10,420.
In the much anticipated Edinburgh South contest, Labour faced down the prospect of a Lib Dem surge to hold the seat by the skin of their teeth – finishing with a 316 majority. The party also fended off Lib Dem challenges in Aberdeen South and Edinburgh North and Leith, and from the SNP in Dundee West and Ochil and South Perthshire.
In Edinburgh South West, where he increased his majority by 1,205 votes, chancellor Alistair Darling mocked the Tories’ dashed ambitions for Scotland, dismissing the party’s showing north of the border as “pathetic”.
But the charge of hubris in Scotland applies to more than just the Conservatives. Despite widespread expectations, the Lib Dems failed to translate a polling surge into results.
Also left disappointed were the SNP. Party leader Alex Salmond’s boast last year that the party could more than treble its number of seats and “hang Westminster by a Scottish rope” had been considered arrogant long before election day dawned. The party lost to Labour the Glasgow East seat it had taken in a 2008 by-election.
The SNP sought to put a positive gloss on their poor showing, pointing to increased majorities in all six constituencies they managed to hold.
The party’s Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, said the overall UK result put the SNP and Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, both of which formed a “Celtic alliance” to buttress themselves in the event of a hung parliament, in a “pivotal position” to exert influence on whatever coalition takes shape in Westminister.
Alex Salmond told the BBC yesterday he had accepted Gordon Brown’s offer of “civil service support” to look at the range of possibilities in terms of forming a new government, and he ruled out the prospect of a pact with the Conservatives.
“Fate seems to have dealt us a mighty hand, between ourselves and Plaid Cymru,” Mr Salmond said.
“As I understand it, on the projections we have at the present moment, certainly there would have to be some involvement of the SNP and Plaid Cymru if you were to get and construct an alternative government scenario.”