Scottish Labour leader says Holyrood is next after inflicting heavy losses on SNP

The leader of Scottish Labour has said he will redouble efforts to get his party into government at Holyrood in 2026 after it inflicted heavy losses on the Scottish National party in Glasgow, Edinburgh and the central belt.

Surrounded by Scottish Labour MPs at a media call in Glasgow, Anas Sarwar said: “People across our country will be waking up to the news that after 14 years of Conservative government, after 14 years of chaos and division, that has now come to an end and Scotland and the UK has elected a Labour government.

“I want to say thank you to the people of Scotland. You have put your faith and trust in us and we will work day and night build on that.”

With all but one of the 57 Scottish seats declared on Friday morning, Labour held 37, the SNP nine and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats each had five.

In the last UK general election, in 2019, Labour returned just one MP to the SNP’s 48.

A recount in the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire seat will not restart until 10.30am on Saturday, delaying the final election result.

Sarwar said his party has ended “14 years of Tory chaos but there have been 17 years of SNP failure and incompetence too … so today we also redouble our efforts so we together can deliver change in 2026 with a Scottish Labour government, too.”

The first knockout was in Kilmarnock and Loudoun, where Labour’s Lillian Jones won 19,055 votes, beating the SNP’s Alan Brown on 13,936.

In a bruising night for the SNP, Labour had a clean sweep in Glasgow, flipping all six seats, all of which had been held by SNP, and took four of five seats in Edinburgh. In Edinburgh West, Christine Jardine of the Liberal Democrats returned with a whopping majority of about 16,000.

The SNP received a morale boost in Aberdeen South with an easy victory for Stephen Flynn, the party’s leader in Westminster. And the outgoing Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, lost to Seamus Logan in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. Ross had stood in place of David Duguid, who was barred from standing by party officials due to ill health.

The SNP leader, John Swinney, who is two months into the job, apologised to his party colleagues who did not retain their seats, describing the night as “very damaging and tough”.

He said: “You don’t recover from those tough times in an instant, and we’ve not managed to recover from them during this election campaign and I’m deeply sorry that that’s the situation that we face.”

Scotland’s former first minister Nicola Sturgeon earlier told ITV that if the exit poll projection proved accurate it would be a “seismic” result. She said: “This is not a good night for the SNP on those numbers … This is at the grimmer end of the expectations for the SNP if the exit poll is right.”

The former Scottish Conservative party leader Ruth Davidson described the exit poll results as a potential “massacre” for her party across the UK.

Privately, the SNP had been hoping for about 20 seats, and the projected 10 would be the worst result since 2010 – before the independence referendum.

It has been a turbulent two years for the SNP, during which time it has had three leaders. Sturgeon quit her post in February 2023, saying she was burnt out, weeks before her husband, Peter Murrell, was questioned in connection with alleged embezzlement of party funds. He was charged earlier this year. Sturgeon was also arrested but was released without charge.

Humza Yousaf, Sturgeon’s apprentice, stepped down in May after ending his power-sharing deal with the Scottish Greens in Holyrood, with Swinney then taking the reins.

Labour, on the other hand, was expecting a Lazarus-style recovery from 2019, when it returned only one MP. Polls before Thursday predicted Labour would take 25 or 26 seats, winning in the central belt of Edinburgh, Glasgow and their surrounding constituencies.

Sturgeon said: “This is seismic for Labour. There’s no getting away from that, it’s a massive achievement for Keir Starmer. I think it will be interesting as the night progresses to see the extent that this is driven by the Tory collapse as opposed to a Labour surge.”

Related: Anatomy of an earthquake: how the 2024 election shocks unfolded

The election comes after a decade-long attempt by Labour to recover support in Scotland after big losses in 2015 and 2019. Buoyed up by the previous year’s independence referendum, the SNP left all the competition in the dust in 2015, taking 56 of the then 59 seats.

In 2017, Labour staged a slight recovery by winning seven seats, only to lose six of them in 2019.

With the SNP’s iron grip on Scottish politics weakening, questions will be asked about its political strategy centring on independence and the constitutional place of Scotland.

The party’s independence strategy has held up on the back of the Conservative party’s unpopularity in Scotland, which voted to remain in the EU in 2016.

But with worsening NHS waiting lists, a cost of living crisis and a resurgent Labour party, voters may have decoupled their own desire for stability from the constitutional question of independence that was at the centre of the SNP’s manifesto in 2024.