Now that I have  had some sleep, and before I have some more,  I’m going to just quickly jot down a few thoughts about yesterday’s elections, what happens next and what I think our party needs to do going forward.

Scotland

Going up from 4 MSPs elected in 2021 to 10 in 2026 is undeniably a good result. The journey uphill is always slower and more laborious than the rapid descent downhill that we experienced in 2011.

We are on our way back, though, and the Highlands are coloured gold again in their entirety. Not so the islands, though. The loss of Shetland is a blow and we will need to look at what we can do to win it back.

What worked?

People liked Alex and the way he came over on the tv. Even if they didn’t watch the leaders’ debates, they might have seen him on Reporting Scotland and I know many of us had conversations in gardens with people who agreed with his comments on education, health, social care and transport. He managed to the entirety of our core message every time and make it feel fresh.

His social media was clever. The stunts were within acceptable bounds of seriousness with the occasional bit of flash because that’s Alex. He played the peach ballot theme very well with lots of funny overacting.

Lots of capacity building and centralised literature production for the target seats with bulk literature and election address options for local parties in other areas.

A good core message that encapsulated a lot of the things that are on people’s minds.

What didn’t work?

Well, we didn’t win some of our key seats and we have to look at what we can learn form that. We won three list seats but we need to build capacity in a way that allows us to win in places like Central and West Scotland. In Mid Scotland and Fife, we have had constituency MSPs and a regional MSP before and we need to work out how we can make that happen.

What next?

SNP Leader John Swinney held a press conference today. He talked about his landslide victory. Now he is generally a mild mannered and clever man, so you don’t usually expect to hear such Trumpian hyperbole come out of his mouth. I mean, I thought landslide meant something like Labour had in 2024 where they have a stonking majority at least in terms of seats if not share of the vote. Have I missed some other definition of the term that involves your government losing 6 seats and becoming even more of a minority than it was before and also losing 10% of vote share?

Swinney might be the largest party by quite a long way but there are another 5 relatively evenly sized parties that he needs to work with.  He’s said that apart from due parliamentary duties, he’s having nothing to do with Reform. I get that.  I can’t imagine them coming up with anything that most of us want to take seriously. They represent a party that said this week that they’d put immigration detention centres in areas which vote Green.  When they say things that are so disgusting and divisive, they don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

The Scottish Greens are a completely different organisation to the Green Party of England and Wales, though Zack Polanski did come up to visit at one point during the campaign. Their leaders are young and likeable. Their manifesto promised loads of freebies – like free bus travel for all and a complete expansion of childcare from the age of 6 months. These are not terrible ideas by any stretch of the imagination, but they are expensive and the Institute of Fiscal Studies said:

However, delivering the full set of spending increases planned by the Scottish Greens would require even more revenue than would be generated by the increases in taxes that the party seems to have assumed. That means a government implementing its plans would likely need to seek to raise even more revenue, or make cutbacks to spending deemed lower priority – on top of the cuts already inherent in the current Scottish Government’s plans.

A polite way of saying their sums don’t add up. But the thing is their ideas are popular.

We, on the other hand, are very careful to make sure that every single penny is accounted for. Maybe we could be a bit more aspirational in our own policy making and set out a route map to delivering popular things that might take a bit longer but would take more fiscally cautious people with us.

The Greens, like the SNP, are in favour of Scottish independence.

Also in his press conference, Swinney today talked about pushing for indyref 2 which he promised to do on day 1. If he thinks he can spend the next five years whinging about not getting to hold something he believes he has a mandate for, then he needs to be stopped in his tracks now. We need to be careful, though, that we have our own distinctive voice on this. We don’t want to be the last of four parties saying “no’ like we were a bit during the first term of SNP Government.  Put simply, we were elected on a platform of opposing another referendum and that is part of our mandate and we can say that we want to maintain the trust of the people and make it about our integrity before switching back to what people do care about. People waiting in pain for operations deserve better from their MSPs than bickering over independence.

We will need to find our own unique voice in the Parliament and use it. With the talented bunch of MSPs we have, I am sure we can manage that.

That will have to be enough for now and I haven’t even started on England and Wales yet.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social