By Fraser McMillan,  Career Launch Fellow (Territorial Politics), University of Edinburgh

In some quarters, last year’s general election result in Scotland was considered the death knell for the independence movement. To those of a pro-union persuasion, Middle Scotland’s swing against the SNP felt like a long-overdue repudiation. And while it’s true that the political winds finally turned against the nationalists, it would be a mistake to write off their founding political project - even as the world plunges into its most uncertain geopolitical era since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

With the SNP enduring two changes of leader, a succession of scandals and attracting increasing blame from Scottish voters over the state of the country’s ailing public services, the party suffered their first defeat at a nationwide contest since 2010 in July 2024. Scottish Labour swept to victory across much of the Lowlands, attracting support from the SNP and Scottish Conservatives as the acceptable alternative to unhappy Scots on both sides of the constitutional divide. But the electoral system exaggerated the scale of the shift, punishing the geographic uniformity of the rump SNP vote, to give Labour 65% of total seats with just a five percentage point lead in overall vote share.

The drift of independence supporters from the SNP, with the share of these voters backing the party falling from between 80% and 90% at previous elections to around 65%, was doubtless a short-term boon for Labour. But the stickiness of support for separation may prove ominous. According to Scottish Election Study (SES) data, 42% of those who shifted from the SNP to Labour between 2019 and 2024 did so while remaining in favour of independence (with a further 18% undecided). Although support for the union is still slightly more entrenched overall, age polarisation on the constitutional question is so extreme that churn in the electorate favours the nationalists even if support for independence and the SNP continues to diverge.

Support for independence by generation, 2007-2024
Based on Scottish Election Study data

The Conservatives, meanwhile, are poorly positioned to save the union. The party burned its credibility among many anti-independence Scots with its stewardship of the British government and economy during and after covid. At UK level, successive Conservative Prime Ministers showed little interest in engaging with devolved administrations and the party under Kemi Badenoch is preoccupied with the threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. However it responds to domestic and global developments, its moves are unlikely to repair its reputation among the wider Scottish electorate. 

While Scottish Tory MSPs tend toward the moderate side of UK-wide Conservative debates, their resurgence at Holyrood in the 2010s looks increasingly like a post-referendum flash-in-the-pan and the party north of the border is also losing support to Reform. Despite being leaderless in Scotland, Farage’s party has rapidly caught up with the Tories in 2026 Holyrood vote intention. Although Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay has criticised Holyrood’s “cosy left-wing consensus”, there’s little he can do to disrupt it. In October 2024 (based on SES Scoop Monitor data), among Scots who identified themselves as “belonging to the No side”, just 38% indicated they are more likely than not to vote for the party in future. The Scottish Conservatives were already fishing for votes in a small pond, but even that is shrinking.

The task must therefore fall to Labour. It is difficult to overstate the importance of public attitudes to independence in the second half of the decade. This is the first time since the Scottish electorate polarised on the constitutional question during and after 2014 that SNP and Labour governments have cohabited at Holyrood and Westminster. If attitudes to independence do not sour substantially with a Labour Prime Minister in Downing Street, it is almost inevitable that the question will return to the top of the agenda in future.

Support for independence tends to vary in a very narrow range, because most Scots are quite heavily entrenched on one side or the other. But the smaller group of “persuadables” in the middle are ultimately the ones who will decide the country’s constitutional destiny. The only period the Yes side held a sustained lead in independence vote intention was during the year or so of lockdown in 2020-21, when the general public believed the Scottish Government had done a much better job of handling the pandemic than the UK administration. A similarly sized but short-lived bump in Yes vote intention occurred in response to the Truss mini-budget in late 2022. Swings in favour of independence are clearly linked to assessments of comparative government performance between the two levels.

After a chaotic couple of years for the SNP, First Minister John Swinney has stabilised the party and taken whatever opportunities he can to use his government as a bulwark against unpopular Labour policies such as a cut in pensioner Winter Fuel Allowance. He has also committed to playing the long game on independence, de-emphasising the issue for now and describing it as a task of “persuasion”. Whatever the merits of any individual policy, Swinney seems to be aware that positioning the SNP as defenders of Scottish social democracy against Westminster is helpful to his electoral prospects as well as the wider Yes movement. Perceived competence and the ability to stand up for Scotland’s interests were what propelled the SNP to power in the first place, and the party appears to recognise this.

This leaves Labour in a difficult position. The party received no honeymoon on either side of the River Tweed, and the new UK government’s early challenges have seriously dented Scottish Labour’s chances of entering government at Holyrood next year. However, if the Starmer’s administration can deliver on its growth agenda, giving younger people all over the UK opportunities they feel they’ve been denied and improving creaking public services, it will be good for his own re-election prospects as well as the union itself. Persuading Scots the United Kingdom is a project worth committing to for a fourth century, rather than tinkering around the edges of the devolution settlement, is key to resolving the constitutional question.

If the developing European security situation does not do that by itself, differentiation from the SNP on issues such as nuclear power, North Sea oil and gas and serious planning reform are the levers with which to accomplish this in Scotland, but time is not on Labour’s side. And, even if the nationalists cannot ultimately escape blame for widespread disillusionment with Scottish governance, independence will remain an appealing escape-hatch for many.