The SNP's result in historical context

I said last night that the SNP would have been hoping to outperform the exit poll just slightly, so that they would do better than in October 1974, when they won 11 seats and 30.4% of the vote.  That would have made it their fourth best general election result in history, and better than any result prior to 2015.  Obviously that didn't happen, and they only took nine seats (barring a turnaround in Inverness tomorrow), and it looks like they'll be just a smidgeon short of 30.4% too.  

But I've been doing some sums and found to my surprise than in one specific sense the SNP did actually outperform October 1974 and get their fourth best result.  Because there were 71 Scottish seats in 1974, winning 11 only gave the SNP 15.5% of the seats, whereas winning 9 out of 57 last night gives them 15.8% of the seats.

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From an Alba point of view, I think it's worth drawing attention to the Alloa & Grangemouth result - 

Labour 43.8%

SNP 28.9%

Reform UK 9.2%

Conservatives 7.6%

Greens 3.4%

Liberal Democrats 2.8%

Independent - Comrie 2.1%

Alba 1.5%

Workers Party 0.5%

The big controversy for Alba in the run up to the general election was the departure from the party of Eva Comrie, who had been Equalities Convener and would have been an obvious possibility to stand in Alloa & Grangemouth, because it's her home constituency.  Not long after she left, she announced that she would be standing as an independent instead, and many Alba members felt that the party should have got behind her on a 'Scotland United' basis in the same way they had done with Angus MacNeil in the Western Isles.  Instead, the opposite happened, and Alba not only stood against her but put up just about the most prominent candidate possible in the former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.  That led to the sub-optimal scenario of no fewer than four pro-independence candidates standing against each other in a winnable seat for Labour.

To be perfectly honest, with Mr MacAskill's greater national profile and with more resources behind him, I had expected him to outpoll Eva Comrie, but as you can see he didn't.  He finished eighth, and ironically the only candidate he was ahead of came from Craig Murray's 'other' party, the anti-independence Workers Party.  You'd have to say that Ms Comrie has proved her point, and that if Alba were going to target Alloa and Grangemouth it looks like they'd have been better off doing it with the local advantages she would have brought to the table.

Even though a number of Alba's nineteen candidates were very well known for one reason or another, the only one who showed any real sign of receiving a personal vote was Neale Hanvey, and even in his case it was limited (he took 2.8% of the vote in Cowdenbeath & Kirkcaldy and finished seventh).