The full results of the 2026 Scottish Parliament election: and how the biggest pro-independence majority in history was won

For those of you who were asking, here is the final result of the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, both in terms of vote shares and seats.

Seats:

SNP 58

Reform UK 17

Labour 17

Greens 15

Conservatives 12

Liberal Democrats 10

PRO-INDEPENDENCE PARTIES: 73 seats

ANTI-INDEPENDENCE PARTIES: 56 seats

PRO-INDEPENDENCE MAJORITY OF 17 SEATS

Constituency ballot:

SNP 38.2%

Labour 19.2%

Reform UK 15.8%
Conservatives 11.8%

Liberal Democrats 11.4%

Greens 2.3%

Regional list ballot:

SNP 27.4%

Reform UK 16.8%

Labour 16.7%

Greens 14.3%

Conservatives 12.1%

Liberal Democrats 8.5%

As we hoped would be the case, this is the biggest pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament's history, albeit only just.  The 73 seats for the SNP and Greens in combination exceeds the 72 for the SNP, Greens and Margo MacDonald in 2011, the 69 for the SNP and the Greens in 2016, and the 72 for the SNP and the Greens in 2021.  

I have to say I am completely and utterly baffled and bewildered by the people this morning who are continuing to moan about what they call "the SNP 1&2 strategy", because for the first time in history those people got what they claimed to want.  "Pro-indy tactical voting on the list" ceased to be simply a social media bubble obsession of activists, and was adopted wholesale by the general public in far bigger numbers than ever before.  The SNP vote slumped much more on the list ballot than it did on the constituency ballot, and the only plausible explanation is that tens of thousands of SNP-supporting voters tactically switched to the Greens on the list because they'd heard the argument that it would bolster the pro-independence majority.  That is precisely why we ended up slightly increasing the pro-independence majority compared to 2021 even though the combined vote share for pro-independence parties on the list ballot actually dropped by several percentage points.  As Ailsa Henderson pointed out on the BBC results programme, although the strategy worked a treat this time, the tactical voters were taking an enormous risk because they were making an assumption of how the constituency results would work out, and they could easily have been wrong.

Mark my words: this may come back to bite us in the future.  People have a nasty habit of learning the wrong lessons from history, and if there's a kind of 'folk memory' in five years' time that voting SNP constituency, Green list produces a good result for independence, many voters may try to replicate the strategy in an even more risky scenario where the SNP are being seriously challenged in the constituencies.  You could easily end up with a dreadful result for the SNP where they finish with ten or fifteen seats fewer than they should have received on a proportional basis, because one-third of their supporters have abandoned them on the list.

Incidentally, don't allow anyone to get away with offering the combined SNP-Green vote share on the list as the definitive vote for pro-indy parties.  Although the fringe pro-indy parties such as Atlas had dreadful results in isolation, they did in combination with each other manage to take around 2% of the list vote, and of course there were also pro-indy independent candidates on the list such as Sean Davis, Denise Somerville and Ash Regan.  The biggest vote for a pro-indy fringe party was the 0.8% for Atlas, in part due to Tommy Sheridan's name recognition in Glasgow, although Sheridan's own result on the Glasgow list was still relatively poor compared to his previous efforts with Solidarity.  The ISP and the SSP (the latter of which most people have probably forgotten even exists anymore) took 0.4% each.

The weirdest quirk of the result is that Labour, in spite of their disastrous reverses, still ended up moving from third place in 2021 to joint second this year.  However, they were pipped by a tiny margin in the popular vote on the list ballot by Reform UK.  The Greens are now a larger party than the Conservatives, which in historical terms is a mind-boggling thought.

Although the SNP had some wonderful constituency results (Shetland was the stuff that dreams are made of), the two results I found most painful were Na h-Eileanan an Iar and Skye, Lochaber & Badenoch.  That is why the SNP list seat on the Highlands & Islands is so soothing - it directly compensates for one of those two defeats and means that one of them doesn't actually matter (take your pick as to which one).

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