This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Scottish Labour facing third place after collapse in vote
SNP win stops short of majority as Scottish Labour finishes third
(about 4 hours later)
Scottish Labour is facing a miserable night in the Holyrood elections after a collapse in the party’s vote left it on the brink of coming third behind the Conservatives.
Nicola Sturgeon has claimed an “historic” third successive victory in the Holyrood election after a night on which her party’s majority was cut and Labour was forced into a humiliating third place by the Scottish Tories.
With the first 29 of Scotland’s 73 constituency seats declared, Labour lost a series of constituencies including the prized seat of Eastwood near Glasgow, which fell to the Tories after 17 years in Labour’s hands.
The Scottish National party leader declared “we have made history” after voters again gave her party a substantial lead over the other parties but the final result, with the SNP taking 63 of Holyrood’s 129 places, left it without an absolute majority.
Related: UK elections 2016: Labour on course for third place in Scotland – live updates
Related: UK elections 2016: Labour on course for third place in Scotland – live updates
Ken Macintosh’s defeat in Eastwood to Jackson Carlaw, the Scottish Tory deputy leader, was attributed by Labour sources partly to a backlash by the constituency’s Jewish community against Labour following the bitter, public feud over alleged anti-Semitism in the party in London.
For the first time in more than a century, and after decades of dominance in Scotland, Labour found itself trailing behind the Conservative party, which had its best result in a Holyrood election and out-performed the opinion polls, taking 27 seats against 22 for Labour.
Labour endured its worst night ever in a Scottish parliamentary election. Its share of the vote was down by 9% across the 16 seats declared by 3.30am, with the Tories enjoying an 8% boost in support, leaving Labour heavily reliant on winning a substantial number of Scotland’s 56 regional list seats to ensure it remains Holyrood’s second largest party.
Ruth Davidson, the party’s leader, won an unexpected victory in the contest for Edinburgh Central – a seat previously held by the SNP – after campaigning vigorously against tax rises and any further independence referendums.
The SNP’s Clare Haughey won Rutherglen from Labour’s James Kelly, while Stewart McMillan took Greenock and Inverclyde, again from Labour.
But after ballots in the final seven list seats in north-east Scotland were counted, Sturgeon was still denied the 65-seat majority the polls had said she would win, with voters across the country instead boosting the Conservatives, Scottish Greens and Scottish Liberal Democrats.
The only early highlight in a dire night was victory in East Lothian, which was held by former Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray, and a forecast victory for Labour in Edinburgh Southern, in a rare defeat for the SNP.
With Sturgeon’s party unable to get the necessary majority, compared with the 69 won by her predecessor, Alex Salmond, in his 2011 landslide victory, Sturgeon will now be dependent on deals with her opponents. She will also consider forming a formal coalition with her ally in the 2014 independence referendum, the Scottish Green party, which won four new places to take six seats.
Lord Jack McConnell, the former Labour first minister, appeared to concede that his party faced coming third behind the Tories, by predicting only that Labour would get an larger overall popular vote – but not win more seats.
Related: UK election results tracker 2016
“I would be surprised if the Conservatives are in second place in terms of overall percentage of the vote,” he said carefully, in a BBC Scotland interview.
A bruising night for Scottish Labour confirmed a series of polls that had put them neck and neck with the Tories. Despite winning several significant constituency battles in Edinburgh Southern, Dumbarton and East Lothian, the party’s poor performance left it with 22 seats, 15 down on its result in 2011.
With the SNP retaining a host of seats, beating Labour several times including losing the seat held by the deputy Labour leader, Alex Rowley, in Cowdenbeath, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the SNP, arrived at the Glasgow count to loud cheers from activists in the expectation her party would win a clear victory overall.
The results will leave Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader who had hoped her call for a new 50p income tax rate would boost the party’s popularity, facing calls to consider her future. The only leader of the four traditional parties not to win a constituency seat, Dugdale said before the elections that she had no intention of standing down if Labour came third and needed five years to rebuild Scottish Labour after a series of poor election results. But critics will now argue that the scale of her defeat by the Tories makes her position untenable.
She insisted she was not prejudging the result, but said: “I’m enthusiastic about the challenges and massive opportunities which lie ahead.”
Yet despite seeing its vote hold up at 49%, the SNP also had significant losses. It lost North East Fife to the Scottish Lib Dems leader, Willie Rennie. The seat has been previously held by the party and was represented for 27 years at Westminster by former UK party leader Lord Menzies Campbell. “It feels fantastic to have won North East Fife back for the Liberal Democrats,” Rennie said.
Related: Conservatives will beat Labour in Scotland, says Ruth Davidson
The SNP is forecast to lose Edinburgh Western to the Liberal Democrats, a consequence in part of the controversy facing the suspension of SNP MP Michelle Thomson, who is under investigation for alleged financial impropriety.
The SNP failed to win Orkney, which was held with a greatly increased majority by the defending Liberal Democrat MSP, Liam McArthur, who retained the seat despite a potential backlash against the sitting Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael, for his role in the leak of a memo that wrongly alleged Sturgeon had preferred a Conservative general election victory.
The early results were also good for the Scottish Tories, who held Ayr, and are on course to winning seats in the Scottish Borders.
Carlaw said his win was down chiefly to the wide appeal of the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, who had attracted back the “meritocratic blue collar” voter who used to back the Conservatives. “I think Ruth reaches way beyond the vote that the Conservatives have been appealing to for too long,” he said.
With Labour now facing the loss of its 15 Holyrood constituency seats, the recriminations began when Thomas Docherty, the Blairite former MP for Dunfermline and West Fife, attacked Dugdale’s campaign, accusing her of taking the party too far to the left.
Docherty, who is expected to win a Holyrood seat on the Mid Scotland and Fife regional list, told BBC Scotland there was “a direct correlation” between Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and Scottish Labour’s dire performance, which he predicted could leave the party at under 20% overall.
“Someone once said that the 1983 Labour manifesto was the longest suicide note in history; well if you bring that up to date, the manifesto we stood on is self-immolation,” Docherty said.
That was rebutted by Gray. “I completely disagree with him,” Gray said. “I think Kezia Dugdale has run a courageous campaign.”
In Glasgow, there were jubilant scenes as co-conveyor of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, and candidate Zara Kitson, both believed to have a very strong chance of winning two Glasgow list seats, arrived at the Emirates.
It was also believed that Harvie had come second in the Glasgow Kelvin constituency, where he was standing for the first time, beating Labour into third place.
The Greens, who enjoyed a fivefold increase in membership after the independence referendum, during which they campaigned for a yes vote alongside the SNP, hoped to consolidate this rise in profile and the early signs are good. Harvie said that the influx of new activists had allowed the party to reach voters in a way that was previously impossible. “It’s given us the ability to run a campaign on a scale we’ve been lacking previously. There have always been people willing to vote Green but we weren’t getting our message to them. This time we did and if the indications are correct we’ve had our strongest ever showing.”
