By Rodney Jefferson May 6 (Bloomberg) -- First Minister Alex Salmond’s pro-independence party won an unprecedented majority in elections to the Scottish Parliament, handing him a second-term and a mandate to push for greater autonomy for Scotland.
British Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to defend the U.K. from potential breakup even as he congratulated Salmond on an “emphatic win” in yesterday’s elections. Salmond’s Scottish National Party crossed the 65-seat threshold for the first overall majority since the 129-member parliament in Edinburgh was established in 1999.
“It’s pretty spectacular, little short of a revolution,” John Curtice, a professor of politics at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, said by phone today. “It leaves whoever is running the U.K. government with an unpleasant headache.”
Victory for a resurgent SNP raises the prospect of constitutional upheaval, posing a further challenge to Cameron’s coalition in London as it presses the deepest U.K. budget cuts since World War II. Salmond has said he will bring in an independence referendum in the second half of a five-year term.
Cameron pledged to “treat the Scottish people and the Scottish government with the respect they deserve,” he told reporters in London today. “But on the issue of the United Kingdom, if they want to hold a referendum, I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every fiber that I have.”
‘Done No Harm’
Polls before the election suggested that support for the SNP hasn’t translated into a greater appetite for Scotland to become independent from the U.K. In a YouGov Plc poll conducted on April 26-29, 57 percent of respondents said that they rejected independence, while 28 percent said they were in favor.
“There is a big difference between electing someone to run the country competently and independence,” said Colin McLean, chief executive officer of Edinburgh-based SVM Asset Management Ltd. “A lot of businesses are happy with their record, certainly they have done no harm to the Scottish economy.”
The SNP capitalized on its four-year record in office to complete the rout of Labour that it began at the last Scottish election in 2007, when it ended a half-century of Labour domination.
Eating into traditional Labour territory, the SNP also picked up seats from Cameron’s Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, his U.K. coalition partner, in a result Curtice said was “utterly unprecedented.” Labour’s finance spokesman, Andy Kerr, was among four former ministers to lose out to the SNP, while the Nationalists also wrested overall control of Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, for the first time. Labour’s leader in Scotland, Iain Gray, held off an SNP challenge in his Edinburgh district by just 151 votes.
Conservative Loss
David McLetchie, the former leader of the Conservative Party in Scotland, lost his seat to the SNP candidate. Annabel Goldie, the present leader, was re-elected.
The Nationalist share of the vote increased by more than 12 percentage points to about 45 percent, giving the SNP 65 seats to 29 for Labour as of 2:55 p.m. With counting on 21 seats still under way, the Conservatives had nine seats, the Liberal Democrats four and the Greens one.
“We have reached out to every community across the country,” Salmond said in his victory speech in Aberdeen. “It’s clear from the indications we’ve had so far that the SNP has restored trust, and we’ll take that mandate and that trust to increase the powers of the Scottish Parliament.”
The Parliament was re-established in 1999 by the Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair after a near 300-year hiatus following the formation of the U.K. in 1707.
Scotland Bill
The legislature, with 73 electoral districts and 56 regional seats, has power over policy areas including education, health and justice, with foreign and defense policy plus broader economic matters controlled by ministers at Westminster in London. A Scotland Bill currently going through the U.K. Parliament includes measures for Scotland to raise more of its own revenue and gain borrowing powers.
Local elections also took place yesterday across England and assembly voting in Wales and Northern Ireland as the coalition faced the first test of its program to eliminate the bulk of the budget deficit in five years. Initial results suggested the Liberal Democrats bore the brunt of voter anger over the spending cuts, with Labour picking up seats.
In Scotland, many of the campaign clashes between Salmond, 56, and Labour’s Gray, 53, focused on who could better defend public services in the face of the U.K. government’s cuts.
Gray blamed the swing to the SNP on a “complete collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote moving across to the SNP,” he told BBC Scotland. “These are very bad results and I’m not going to hide that from you.”
Labour Denial
The Scottish Labour Party was later forced to deny that Gray was standing down after witnessing a margin of support as wide as 16 percentage points crumble as the SNP gathered momentum in the months before the vote. In a statement, Gray pledged to “work constructively with the new Scottish government.”
The next parliament will run for five years instead of four to avoid clashing with Westminster elections in 2015.
Scottish newspapers including the Herald, the Daily Record and the Scottish Sun all declared victory for Salmond on the front pages of today’s editions.
“Shock and Awesome,” said the Scottish Sun above a picture of Salmond.
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--With assistance from Peter Woodifield and Tim Farrand in Edinburgh: Editors: Alan Crawford, Tim Farrand.
To contact the reporter on this story: Rodney Jefferson in Edinburgh at r.jefferson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net