Honest question: Do you think SNP will lose a large number of seats/votes because of losing the referendum?
Virtually every single political analyst in the country is expecting the SNP to actually gain seats as a result of losing the referendum. They're going to wipe out the Liberal Democrats outside of Skye/Lochaber (that damned Charles Kennedy and his charisma) and the Northern Isles. They'll take Labour seats in Dundee - it's likely that they will wipe out Labour North of the Firth of Forth. As Hector has put it at present the SNP only have 6 seats. If the current polls are correct then it's likely the SNP will have 20+ MPs next year - the best result they've ever had in a Westminster election. They'll probably gain 15+ seats. The big question is over all the Labour heartlands in Strathclyde etc where the electorate actually voted Yes - North Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire and Glasgow all had Yes majorities - yet for Labour they're as safe as houses. For how long? Strange things happen in Scottish politics.
Literally the only strategy Scottish Labour has is to try to frame the next election as a choice between SNP seats and another Tory government, or Labour seats and a Labour victory. If they lose the next election to the Tories they will blame the SNP to no end - but I would say if they even get that close it'll be due to an incredible collapse in their vote next year and terrible, terrible leadership from Ed Miliband. Labour have a history of blaming the SNP for their own mistakes of course, like how they blame the SNP for bringing in Thatcher.
Labour don't seem to have a firm grasp of that strategy though. Their leader, despite having won the referendum (allegedly), has just resigned. That's the "strange events" I was referring to earlier, where we don't really know what's going to come next. Labour are totally embroiled in a bloodbath of epic proportions - Johann Lamont, their outgoing leader, claimed London Labour treat Scottish Labour like a branch office, cast up all sorts of dirt and called Labour MPs in London "dinosaurs". Now they have no leader.
You see, the strategy for Labour was to get rid of the sick joke of a talent vacuum that was Johann Lamont after the 2015/2016 general elections where Labour are going to get thrashed. She was going to take all the blame, and they'd be able to put forward a guy like Jim Murphy MP forward for a Scottish Parliament seat where he could replace her. Lamont has thrown a spanner in their works though - she resigned early, now they have absolutely no talent that can come forward and ask questions at First Minister's Questions. Labour needs leadership in the Scottish Parliament and they need it now. One of their wisest MSPs, Malcolm Chisholm, said that if the leadership goes to an MP right now then it will go from "crisis to catastrophe".
This is probably one of the few situations where a party, having lost a massive campaign like the referendum, has emerged on top in the polls and on track to win a bigger victory than they've ever won before. The only question is how big the victory is going to be. I don't want to claim a massive landslide or anything like that though - I have no idea what will happen next year. First Past The Post voting is our enemy at the moment. The SNP could win the popular vote but still not gain a majority of seats because of that. According to
this website the SNP are going to take Dundee West, Edinburgh North, Livingstone, Edinburgh East, Falkirk West, Aberdeen North, Aberdeen South, Ayrshire North, Ochil and South Perthshire and Stirling from Labour (10 seats). They will also take Argyll and Bute, Caithness and Easter Ross, Dumbartonshire East, Edinburgh West, Fife North East, Gordon and finally Inverness/Nairn/Badenoch and Strathspey from the Liberal Democrats (7 seats).
But yeah, the SNP aren't in danger of losing ground. The only places that they'd probably lose ground in would be somewhere like my county which has one of the six SNP MPs, despite being very Conservative and voting No by a significant majority. Amazingly, despite the Tory vote increasing, the constituency's SNP majority looks like it's about to
increase because the Lib Dem vote has collapsed completely here and so has Labour.
Also - we can pretty much guarantee that whatever "substantial powers" Scotland gets will most emphatically not come from Labour. Their proposals are the weakest of all party proposals:
The above graph is actually wrong because they don't even propose corporation tax devolution. Their only tax devolution was the ability to raise income tax, not lower it (I'm not joking), and even then only raise it in a really specific way that I can't remember. Labour have the most to lose from any devolution of power because they want to control and rule us from Westminster, and they've had their hands turned through devolution. They're terrible, they really are.
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