SNP History

The SNP polling trajectory at Westminster elections in Scotland describes a parabola: from 19.9% in 2010 to a staggering 50% in 2015, sustained dominance through 2017 and 2019, and then a dramatic 2024 collapse to 29.9% that destroyed the party parliamentary presence from 48 to 9 seats. The Swinney era since 2024 has seen a modest recovery to 31% in 2026 polls, but the structural challenges that drove the collapse — the independence deadlock, the Sturgeon resignation, the financial police investigation, and the Alba Party split — have not been resolved.

Sources: Electoral Commission, Scottish Government, YouGov Scotland, Ipsos Scotland. Westminster elections show Scotland vote share; Holyrood elections show constituency vote. 2022–2023 are annual averages. 2026 is the poll-of-polls average for Scotland, May 2026.

The 2010 general election was fought during the final months of Alex Salmond first term as First Minister. The SNP had won the Holyrood election in 2007 on a knife-edge plurality, governing Scotland as a minority administration. At Westminster, the party won 19.9% of the Scottish vote and 6 seats — a respectable result but one that placed the party clearly behind Labour in Scotland, which still dominated with 41.0% and 41 seats.

The 2010 result, viewed in retrospect, obscures the depth of the cultural and political transformation already underway in Scotland. The SNP was governing competently and the contrast with a Labour Party associated with the Blair-Brown years — Iraq, financial crisis, expenses scandal — was beginning to erode Labour dominance that had seemed structural. The 2011 Holyrood election, where the SNP won an outright majority under a proportional system never designed to deliver one, was the first signal that something fundamental had shifted.

The Scottish independence referendum of September 2014 produced a No vote of 55.3% to 44.7%. In strict political terms, this was a defeat for Salmond and the SNP. In practice, it was the event that created the conditions for the 2015 tsunami. The campaign had mobilised 1.6 million Yes voters in Scotland — a movement whose political energy needed somewhere to go.

In the weeks after the referendum, SNP membership trebled from approximately 25,000 to 75,000. By early 2015 it had reached over 100,000 — making the SNP the third-largest party by membership in the UK despite being a Scotland-only party. This membership surge translated directly into campaign capacity: the party had activists in virtually every constituency in Scotland for the 2015 general election.

Salmond resigned as First Minister the morning after the referendum and was succeeded by Nicola Sturgeon in November 2014. The handover was seamless. Sturgeon high approval ratings among both Yes and substantial numbers of No voters gave the SNP a coalition of support far broader than the raw referendum numbers might have implied.

The May 2015 general election produced the most dramatic regional transformation in the history of British parliamentary elections. The SNP won 50.0% of the Scottish vote and 56 of 59 Scottish seats — reducing Labour from 41 seats to one, wiping out the Liberal Democrats in Scotland entirely, and reducing the Conservatives to their single Scottish seat. Labour held only Edinburgh South; the Liberal Democrats held only Orkney and Shetland; the Conservatives held only Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale.

The scale of the shift defied almost all pre-election polling expectations, though the polls had indicated a large SNP advance. The wave swept away long-serving MPs with large nominal majorities. Douglas Alexander, Labour shadow Foreign Secretary, lost Paisley and Renfrewshire South to a 20-year-old student. Jim Murphy, Scottish Labour leader, lost East Renfrewshire. Charles Kennedy, respected former Liberal Democrat leader who had first won Inverness in 1983, lost his seat.

The 56 SNP MPs arrived at Westminster as a disciplined bloc, committed to voting for Scotland interests on all issues that affected Scotland, abstaining on English-only legislation, and pressing the case for independence through parliamentary means. The visual of 56 yellow-rosetted MPs filling the third-party benches became one of the defining images of British political change in the 2010s.

Nicola Sturgeon led the SNP from November 2014 to March 2023 — the longest tenure of any SNP leader and a period of remarkable electoral dominance. The party won three consecutive Holyrood elections, maintained over 45% in Scottish Westminster polling for most of this period, and consistently led on leader approval ratings in Scotland by margins that left the other party leaders in the statistical noise.

The 2017 general election saw the SNP win 36.9% and 35 seats — a fall from the 2015 peak but still a position of dominance. The Conservative revival under Ruth Davidson, with 28.6% and 12 seats, was the main story in Scotland in 2017: the first sign that the SNP could be squeezed from the right as well as the left. The 2019 election recovered ground: 45% and 48 seats as Brexit dominated and the SNP offered the clearest anti-Brexit message in Scotland.

Sturgeon resignation in February 2023 was triggered by what she described as an overwhelming desire to leave before her energy and commitment began to decline. The subsequent revelations — police investigation into SNP finances, the arrest of Sturgeon husband Peter Murrell who was SNP chief executive, and the resignation of Humza Yousaf after a vote of no confidence in the Green coalition — created an impression of institutional crisis that the Swinney leadership inherited.

The 2024 general election produced one of the sharpest declines in support for a previously dominant regional party in modern British electoral history. The SNP fell from 45% and 48 seats in 2019 to 29.9% and 9 seats in 2024 — a loss of 39 seats, or 81% of their Westminster representation, in a single election.

Multiple factors converged to produce this collapse. The Sturgeon resignation and subsequent police investigation into SNP finances had severely damaged trust. Humza Yousaf brief and troubled tenure as First Minister, ending in his own resignation in April 2024 — just weeks before the general election was called — left the party fighting a national campaign in a state of visible internal crisis. The national Labour surge under Starmer was particularly powerful in Scotland, where many former SNP voters who had been Labour supporters before 2014–2015 returned to the party as a vehicle for ending Conservative government in Westminster.

The geographical distribution of the losses tells a stark story. The SNP retained seats in areas with the highest support for Scottish independence and the most strongly nationalist cultural identity. It lost the seats it had won from Labour and from moderate voters who had backed independence as a protest or as a positive constitutional project but were not deeply committed to it in the face of a credible Labour alternative.

John Swinney became SNP leader and First Minister in May 2024, taking over one of the most difficult inheritances in Scottish political history. A deeply experienced figure — he had led the SNP previously between 2000 and 2004 and served in every SNP government — Swinney credibility and lack of association with the finance scandal were his key assets.

The immediate priority was stabilisation. By May 2026, the SNP polls at 31% in Scotland — up two percentage points from the 2024 Westminster result but far below the 40–50% of the Sturgeon era peak. The party continues to lead in Scotland but is closer to Labour (at approximately 27%) than at any point since 2014. The independence question polls at around 48% Yes — broadly stable but short of the majority needed to press for a second referendum credibly.

The structural challenge for Swinney is that the conditions that produced the 2015 tsunami — a Labour Party in terminal decline in Scotland, a mass independence movement at peak enthusiasm, a hostile Westminster government — do not currently exist. Labour is governing at Westminster and gradually disappointing Scottish voters; this may benefit the SNP. But the institutional damage from the Sturgeon era remains and the party needs a sustained period of competent government at Holyrood to rebuild the trust it has lost.