The Scottish National Party went from 48 Westminster seats to nine on 4 July 2024, the worst result since 2010. Vote share collapsed from 45 percent to 30 percent. Labour won 37 Scottish seats on 35 percent, taking every seat in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The SNP lost every seat in the Central Belt except those won by the Liberal Democrats. Three former SNP MPs who had defected, Kenny MacAskill and Neale Hanvey to Alba and Angus MacNeil as an independent, all lost their seats too. Turnout in Scotland dropped to 59 percent. John Swinney took full responsibility but did not resign. He said there would have to be "a lot of soul searching" and admitted the party was not "winning the argument" on independence. In November 2024 the SNP announced it would cut permanent headquarters staff from 26 to 16, a reduction of more than a third, to "protect the long term finances of the party." The party that had dominated Scottish politics for a decade was cutting staff to stay solvent.
The 2024 manifesto had staked everything on independence. Page one, line one was the constitutional question. The strategy was that an SNP majority of Scottish seats would trigger immediate section 30 negotiations with Westminster. The election destroyed the route. Nine seats is not a mandate for anything. Swinney redefined the independence ask as contingent on an SNP outright majority at the May 2026 Holyrood election, with a constitutional convention to follow. The 2024 strategy was Westminster. The 2026 strategy was Holyrood. The Supreme Court had already ruled in November 2022 that Holyrood could not legislate for a referendum without Westminster's consent. The route to independence through the ballot box was blocked at Westminster by the voters and blocked at Holyrood by the courts. The strategy had nowhere legal to go.
On 7 May 2026, Scotland voted. The SNP won 57 seats, the most of any party, securing a fifth consecutive term in government. Labour and Reform UK tied for second on 17 seats each. The Conservatives collapsed from 31 seats in 2021 to nine, losing official opposition status. The Greens won 14 seats. Reform UK, from a baseline of effectively zero at the previous Holyrood election, won 17 MSPs on approximately 18 percent of the regional vote. The result was a Scottish parliament more fragmented than at any point since devolution began in 1999.
Swinney had said an outright majority would be treated as a mandate to pursue a second independence referendum. He did not get one. Fifty seven seats is seven short of the 65 needed. The SNP and Greens combined hold enough seats to govern, and both are pro independence parties, but a coalition mandate is not the outright mandate Swinney defined as the trigger. The independence question has been deferred again. Not by Westminster refusing a section 30 order. Not by the Supreme Court blocking legislation. By the Scottish electorate declining to give the SNP the majority it asked for.
On the economy the 2024 manifesto demanded full devolution of income tax, National Insurance, VAT and windfall powers, and assumed a £30 billion annual revenue uplift from an independent Scotland rejoining the EU. The SNP's position on new North Sea licences was "rigorously evidence led, case by case basis," materially softer than Labour's no new licences pledge. The economic case for independence cannot work if the SNP will not commit to climate policy as strong as Labour's. The constitutional economic argument remains in the manifesto and nowhere else.
On welfare the manifesto's central demand was Westminster scrapping the two child benefit cap. Labour scrapped the cap at the November 2025 Budget. The defining welfare distinction the SNP took into the 2024 election has been delivered by the party that took most of the SNP's Westminster seats.
On the NHS the manifesto pledged £10 billion over ten years for Scottish NHS capital investment. NHS delivery has been devolved to the Scottish Government since 2007. Waiting times, A&E performance and recruitment difficulties have been the dominant Scottish political questions through 2025 and 2026. The SNP controls the file on which it is most directly judged and cannot blame Westminster for the outcomes.
Operation Branchform, the police investigation into the SNP's finances and whether donations were misused, remains ongoing. Former chief executive Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon's husband, was charged with embezzlement of party funds. The investigation has hung over the party since 2021 and has not concluded. The party that asks voters to trust it with national independence has not resolved questions about whether it can be trusted with its own accounts.
The nine MP Westminster group has limited speaking time and limited strategic role. At Holyrood the SNP governs but without a majority. The party that dominated Scottish politics from 2015 to 2024, providing the third largest Westminster group and running Holyrood continuously since 2007, is now a minority government that fell short of its own independence mandate, lost four fifths of its Westminster seats, cut its own headquarters staff to stay financially viable, and faces an ongoing police investigation into its finances. Independence remains the party's purpose. The voters have not removed it from government. They have removed the mandate the party said it needed to pursue it. Whether the SNP can rebuild that mandate or whether Scottish politics has moved permanently into the fragmented landscape the 2026 result produced is the question Swinney has a parliamentary term to answer. The 2024 manifesto asked for independence through Westminster. The 2026 election denied independence through Holyrood. The SNP has run out of institutions to ask.