The real result mirrors the exit poll but feels worse somehow - and there are good reasons for that, although the scale of Labour's victory is still being wildly overstated

The exit poll showed the SNP on 10 seats, and the real result will be very similar to that - it'll be 9, or in theory it could still be 10, but the mood music suggests that the Lib Dems will very narrowly win the final seat after a recount tomorrow.  And yet somehow the reality of 9 seats feels much worse than the anticipation of 10.  Why is that?  

It's partly because living through the individual results drives the reality of them home, but I think it's more because the exit poll was actually wrong in a couple of key respects. It predicted that the SNP would do worse than they did against the Tories in rural and coastal seats, but better than they did against Labour in the central belt.  The battle against Labour in the central belt is always considered the meat in the sandwich, and suffering the losses there makes the situation seem a lot graver.  It would have been easier to dismiss the predicted Tory gains in Perth and Argyll (which didn't happen) as irrelevant results caused by unionist voters ganging up on the SNP.

The paradox is, though, that Labour haven't done any better in popular vote terms than the opinion polls predicted.  They have a lead of less than six points over the SNP, in line with several of the polls - the only thing that wasn't expected was the exact geographical distribution of their support which made their vote more efficient.  But in terms of number of seats, vote share, lead over the second-placed party, etc, etc, Labour's result is strikingly similar to the SNP's in 2017.  The media refused to accept 2017 as a good result for the SNP, let alone as a landslide or as a mandate for anything, and yet basically the same result for Labour in 2024 is being painted as an astonishing triumph. Once the dust has settled, it may be worth drawing attention to that blatant contradiction.

But the consequences of this result may hinge on whether the SNP themselves interpret it as "disappointing" or "disastrous", and in spite of all the caveats I've listed above, they seem to be veering more towards the "disastrous" interpretation.  That could yet lead to another change of leader, which I thought was unlikely last night. That would be no bad thing as long as the successor is Kate Forbes.  But what would be a very bad thing is if the SNP convince themselves, as Stephen Flynn seemed to be hinting at last night, that the solution to their problems is to backpedal on independence even more furiously.  Nicola Sturgeon herself seems to understand that if you run away from your unique selling point, you're not going to win elections, and hopefully her voice will carry more sway than Flynn's on that subject.

If it doesn't though, and if the SNP cease to be a genuine party of independence, the only hope for advancing the cause at the 2026 Holyrood election will lie with Alba and other similar parties. That makes Alba's strategic mis-steps in this election all the more frustrating.  A lot of what I've been saying about how Alba stood in too many seats and spread their resources too thin has been borne out by the results.  However in one sense they've got out of jail, because having quickly scrolled through the results I can't find any examples of Alba costing the SNP a seat.  It came very close to happening in both Aberdeen North and Dundee Central, but in both cases the SNP narrowly clung on.  So through sheer luck Alba may have avoided the worst of any recriminations about contributing to the scale of a unionist victory - and believe me, that will matter a lot.

How bad was Alba's result?  Gerry Hassan will of course post a million tweets pointing out that Alba took only 1 in 200 votes in Scotland, but that will be misleading - their real vote share in the seats they contested was around 1.5%.  That's in line with the 2021 Holyrood election and 2022 local elections, and might suggest their support has remained static.  However it's generally harder to win votes in first-past-the-post elections than on the Holyrood list, so pound-for-pound this might be a slightly better result than it appears - but I do think if a Holyrood election was held right now, Alba would probably fall short of winning list seats, so a hard-headed think about the way forward is required. In my opinion Alba needs to become a broader church, which means moving in pretty much the opposite direction of the last few months.  Being an exclusive sect and trying to impose suffocating discipline on rank and file members simply doesn't work, in my view, for a small party with the stated aim of getting up to 15% support.

Incidentally, the real result is better for the SNP than the exit poll in one respect - they're the fourth largest party in the UK in terms of seats, rather than fifth behind Reform UK.  That's cold comfort at the moment, but may make it marginally easier to win arguments for a fair share of broadcast coverage over the coming years.

And it's going to be slightly comical when the media eventually remember that the Scottish Parliament still exists, the SNP are still dominant there, and their hero Anas Sarwar is still but a mere opposition leader.