Labour wiped out in Scotland amid SNP surge

Scottish Labour has failed to win a single European seat after more than 200,000 voters deserted the party over Brexit and it suffered its worst election in modern political history.

After all of Scotland’s 32 councils had declared, Labour finished in fifth place and lost both the Scottish seats it won in 2014. By comparison, the Scottish National party, boosted by an unambiguously pro-remain message from Nicola Sturgeon, secured a record three seats and its highest-ever European parliament vote at 38%.

The Brexit party, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives will each send one MEP to Brussels.

Related: European election latest results 2019: across the UK

Keith Brown, the deputy leader of the SNP, said its message had been unambiguous. “We are against Brexit and Scotland is against Brexit. [The] important message is the very strong signal that Scotland has sent tonight to London: we can no longer be ignored as we have been.

“Scotland’s position, about wanting to remain a member of the EU, must be respected and if not, then of course we have the option of having [an] independence referendum.”

Scotland’s six MEPs will be Alyn Smith, Christian Allard and Aileen McLeod for the SNP; Louis Stedman-Bryce of the Brexit party; Sheila Ritchie for the Lib Dems and the Conservatives’ Nosheena Mobarik.

Before the first results came in, party officials had been soberly predicting they would hold their two current seats but under the complex d’Hondt system used to calculate European parliament seats, they benefited from Labour’s collapse.

Labour lost its longest-serving MEP David Martin, who had sat in the European parliament for 35 years, and failed to return a Scottish Labour MEP for the first time in its history. It won 9.3% of the vote, the worst election result since 1910.

Martin said Jeremy Corbyn and his senior team had failed to listen to the party’s MEPs who had urged them to embrace a much more pro-European message.

He said he was desperately disappointed to lose his seat. The party had run a “magnificent” campaign on the doorsteps, he said, but its message was too confused and was out of step with its supporters.

“The message has been confused at best and just not penetrating at all. You could either see it as riding two horses at once or in fact just not knowing where we wanted to go,” Martin said.

He said Labour needed to embrace the position taken 25 years ago by the then party leader, John Smith, that Labour was the party of Europe. “If we want to regain the votes we have lost, we need to be unequivocal, pro-European and unequivocally for a second [EU] referendum. Not taking a side meant we were just crushed in the middle.”

As predicted by the polls, the Brexit party won a Scottish seat by taking nearly 15% of the vote, supplanting Ukip, which had won its first and only Scottish electoral seat in 2014.

The Scottish Greens failed to live up to hopes from its senior figures that they would win their first European seat in Scotland. The failure came despite a strong showing in Edinburgh, where it came third with 13.8% of the vote and helped push Labour into sixth.