It was the most remarkable election result in Scottish history in which Labour lost 40 of its 41 seats. Tsunami – Scotland’s democratic revolution, published by Freight Books, is Sunday Herald columnist Iain Macwhirter’s vivid account of the SNP’s epic landslide in the 2015 General Election. It follows his best-selling account of the 2014 independence referendum, Disunited Kingdom – how Westminster won a referendum but lost Scotland. Macwhirter argues that during these epic events, Scotland has turned a corner in history and that independence is now all but inevitable. In this extract he recounts the night that political Scotland discovered that Labour’s half century-long dominance was finally over.


THE election night Green Room at BBC’s Pacific Quay HQ in Glasgow didn’t look so much like a room as a small cinema with the seats removed. Three large screens, each surrounded by a litter of armchairs, showed the election night programme presented by Glen Campbell and the BBC’s mountainous political editor Brian Taylor.

The guests – politicians, academics and journalists – mostly ignored the screens and used their smartphones to keep track of developments. They stood around in partisan bunches munching tapas but mostly avoiding the complimentary wine as they waited to be plucked from the crowd by production assistants dressed in black and taken to the studio to chat.

I had been here most of the night back on the 18th of September 2014 as the results of the Scottish independence referendum were coming in. I remember the misery on the faces of SNP politicians and Yes campaign luminaries like Pat Kane, the musician postmodernist, and Tommy Sheridan, the leader of Hope over Fear. General Election night 2015 was a very different affair. SNP MSPs and political advisers were walking around with huge grins even before the first result was declared. Sheridan was wearing a yellow SNP badge – he’s not a member of the party – and taking beaming selfies with attendees. The Liberal Democrat former Deputy First Minister Lord Wallace had his brave face on. Labour politicians came and went like ghosts.

At first, no one believed the BBC’s election night exit poll which forecast that the SNP would win all but one of Scotland’s 59 seats. SNP contacts were warning me not to take this seriously. Nicola Sturgeon urged her supporters on Twitter: “don’t believe the exit poll, we’re not going to do that”.

The SNP were worried that a mere landslide of 35 or 40 seats might look like a set-back if it didn’t match the truly outlandish forecasts of Professor John Curtice’s number crunchers. They needn’t have worried.

From the moment the first result was declared at 2.15am for Kilmarnock and Louden showing an SNP victory on a 25.3% swing from Labour, the temperature of the Green Room rose rapidly. The BBC’s variegated guests realised they were about to witness real history. The excitement was palpable. After so long insisting that, nah, the SNP could never, ever, win that many seats, suddenly, they were.

What to say about it? Journalists grasped for appropriate clichés: Labour’s last stand? A hammer blow to the Union? A constitutional Rubicon? Defcon Fucked for Labour? Was ‘tsunami’ disrespectful of the victims of the 2004 Asian tidal wave? “At least Douglas is safe,” said a Labour party researcher. There were early reports that the former Labour shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander had scraped home. He hadn’t and he fell within minutes. Neither had the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Jim Murphy in East Renfrewshire. Then the safest Labour seat in Scotland, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, fell to the SNP. Until his retiral last year, this had been held by the former Labour Prime Minster Gordon Brown with a majority of 23,000.

The former Labour First Minister Henry McLeish worked the room telling everyone how he’d been expecting this; that Labour’s problems go back at least a decade; and that only an autonomous, ‘federal’ Scottish Labour Party could survive this massacre. The former leader of the Scottish National Party, Gordon Wilson, reminded me that under the old SNP constitution, a simple majority of seats in a UK general election would have been regarded as a mandate for independence. This would’ve been a super mandate. “The people who abandoned that policy may be wondering now if it was entirely wise to do so,” he said with a mischievous grin. He has never quite come to terms with the SNP’s gradualist approach to national liberation.

As the night wore on it became clear that the SNP had indeed won the most remarkable landslide in Scottish electoral history: 56 out of 59 Scottish seats. Only nine months previously the Nationalists had lost the independence referendum by a significant margin of 55% to 45%; now the losers were winning it all. Alex Salmond announced that there hadn’t been a general election swing on this scale – 30% – since 1835. But since only about 40,000 people in Scotland had the vote back then it was hardly a relevant comparison.

Certainly, nothing like this has ever happened in modern times. Swings of 34% and 35% are unprecedented in general elections. The swing to the SNP in Willie Bain’s Glasgow North East, a seat the opinion pollsters had suggested Labour might hold, reached 39.3% and broke the BBC’s swingometer. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the night was that the swing appeared to be nationwide and irrespective of party incumbency. The SNP won every seat in Tayside, all six seats in the North East of Scotland, all but one seat in Edinburgh and Fife, and wiped out the LibDems in the Highlands. The SNP had never won a Glasgow seat at a general election before, now every one of them had fallen to the SNP in the ‘tsunami’, as everyone started calling it. The former SNP minister, Mike Russell, tweeted that this wasn’t a ‘tsunami’, it was an ‘extinction level event’.

IN the final stages of the campaign, Labour was reduced to appealing to the older Conservative and middle class voters who had voted No in the referendum. This ‘core vote’ strategy was anything but, since Labour’s working class core vote in the cities of Scotland had defected en masse to the SNP. Labour’s lapse into the negative rhetoric of Better Together only accelerated this meltdown of Labour’s true core. The unionist newspapers believed that only tactical voting could stop the SNP now. But the warnings about fiscal autonomy weren’t working any more. Labour’s campaign simply failed to connect with what had been happening in Scotland since the referendum, which it is now clear was a crucible in which attitudes to the Union were transformed and a new Scottish polity emerged.

The civic engagement that fuelled the referendum campaign and motivated 97% of Scots to register to vote was still there. Scottish voters had been told after the No vote that they had to get back in their box, pack away the festival of democracy, and return to the normality of boring responsible politics. But the people refused to get back in their box, or to seek consolation in negativity and cynicism. They looked around themselves, found that the world hadn’t come to an end, and went right on keeping on. People are still coming out in their thousands to talk politics in pubs, town halls, theatres, and book festivals. I’ve spoken to many of them myself, and it is difficult not to be infected with their enthusiasm. Armed with the Internet, seized by a sense of communal purpose, the people of Scotland refuse to believe that a better society is impossible.

Scots were enjoying themselves too. They’ve taken to politics in the way people used to follow football. Indeed, there is something of the Tartan Army in the legions of raucously partisan SNP followers on the Internet, only the discourse is rather less male dominated. This, of course, horrifies the political establishment and its scribes, who regarded nationalism as a dangerous lapse into emotion and unreason. “The Scots have gone mad,” said columnists like Chris Deerin and Iain Martin. The establishment always rings the alarm when the people start to take history into their own hands. But this civic madness is surely no more irrational than the civic activism of the past – of the Chartists, the Suffragettes, the Civil Rights Movement.

Labour insisted that it was Scottish voters’ duty to remain in the Union for the sake of those less fortunate than them- selves. This was a familiar refrain of metropolitan left-wing commentary on the rise of the SNP. “Shared values are more important than borders,” said the Guardian’s columnist Polly Toynbee, “social democrats are better together, confronting a common enemy.”

But Scottish voters were tired of being told that it is somehow indecent to support a nationalist party, even though it seemed more socialist than anything else on offer. They were fed up being scolded by Labour politicians like Gordon Brown for abandoning the poor and dispossessed of northern England, as if Scottish voters were in some way responsible for Westminster policies since Thatcherism.

Above all, they were tired of being told that they should unthinkingly support a Labour Party, which had for many years been a hollow and even corrupt shell in Scotland, and in England was a playground for special interests and commercial lobby groups.

Nicola Sturgeon speaks with confidence about her party’s commitment to progressive change because she believes it, but mainly because she is leading hundreds of thousands of Scottish voters who refuse to give up on the possibility of change. Who will not willingly lapse back into apathy and retail politics, which is handed to them by the press and the Westminster establishment. ‘Nicola’ has become the figurehead and the personification of a civic renewal movement that has been sweeping Scotland during the crucial years of 2014/15. As the new SNP MP Tommy Sheppard put it, the tsunami was ‘not a political swing in the normal sense but a structural shift in political alignments across Scotland’.

Historians will marvel, not only at the unprecedented scale of the SNP’s tidal 30% swing, but that it was so uniform. There has never been an electoral shift quite like this before in the British Isles, not even in Ireland which was riven with a sectarian religious divide. The SNP swept the board almost everywhere in Scotland: from snooty middle class Edinburgh to streetwise Glasgow; from wealthy landed estates of Perth- shire to the impoverished housing estates of the inner cities; from the echoing Highlands in the far north to Walter Scott’s rolling Scottish Borders; from oil-rich Aberdeen in the East to the lonely islands off Scotland’s West coast. The 2015 General Election seemed to unify Scotland by wiping away political, religious, class, and geographical divisions, in one extraordinary electoral moment. It was, by any definition, a revolutionary event, even though no one was harmed in the course of it.

Well, except perhaps for the Labour leader Jim Murphy. It was his misfortune to have been the wrong politician in the wrong place at the wrong time, as Labour’s fifty-year hegemony came crashing to an end.

As I wrote in The Herald on the weekend before the ground shifted: “Nelson Mandela himself could not have turned around Labour’s fortunes in these few short months. We are seeing a political sea change, a generational transformation and a national awakening all at the same time. In this election, unlike any before, it’s all about Scotland.”

Tsunami – Scotland’s democratic revolution, by Iain Macwhirter, published by Freight Books, is released today priced £8.99