More Scots – 1,018,322 – voted Leave in June 2016 than turned out for the SNP in the general election a year later. Those 977,569 souls still secured the Nationalists a majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats – thirty-five out of fifty-nine – and, at 37% of the poll, a plurality of Scotland’s votes. But it was an unsettling and universally unexpected reverse for Nicola Sturgeon. She lost over twenty of her MPs; not one of the survivors secured more than 40% of the poll in their constituency.
On, admittedly, a much lower turn-out at the recent European Parliament elections – in the last damned days of Theresa May’s pitiable premiership – the Nationalists took a similar share, 37.7% of the vote. But, given their sweep in the 2015 general election, when they won half the overall vote and all but three of the seats, these numbers overall attest that the party which daily shrills “to be speaking for the people of Scotland” has shed, permanently, a significant tranche of support.
