HiddenMysteries: Scottish National Party engineers a historic shift

Startling result seen as a rebuke to outgoing British leader Tony Blair

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON — In a historic reversal, the separatist Scottish National Party emerged Friday as the biggest political grouping in Scotland, ending 50 years of dominance there by the governing Labor Party and redrawing Britain's political landscape.

The result was the most startling among a series of regional votes across Britain on Thursday, as Prime Minister Tony Blair began a long and choreographed farewell to British politics. The outcome represented a sharp rebuke to Blair and a troubled, embarrassing debut for Gordon Brown, a Scot who is expected to become Britain's next prime minister.

Although he was not a candidate, Brown, currently chancellor of the exchequer, had traveled to Scotland to campaign vigorously against the Scottish National Party, staking his prestige on a Labor victory.

As the results were announced — after a chaotic night in which tens of thousands of Scottish ballots were ruled invalid — Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party leader, hailed the "wind of change" in Scottish politics. "Never again will we say Labor has a divine right to rule Scotland," he said. "They have no moral authority left to govern."

With all votes counted in the balloting for the 129-seat Scottish Parliament, the Scottish National Party increased its seats to 47 from 25, while Labor fell to 46, down from 50, according to the BBC's tabulation. The Scottish National Party's other gains were at the expense of smaller parties.

The outcome meant that no single party could dominate the Scottish Parliament without forming a coalition.

In a further setback for Labor, the opposition Conservatives expanded their position significantly at elections for local councils, claiming support outside their traditional heartland in the prosperous south of the country. With votes counted from most of 312 local councils, Conservatives had won about 5,000 of the 10,500 seats up for grabs.

Blair had sought to play down the impact of the vote on Labor's prospects. "Everyone said we were going to get hammered, it was going to be a rout," he told supporters at his party headquarters in London before the outcome in Scotland was publicly announced. "And it's not turned out like that."

"You always take a hit in the midterm, but these results provide a perfectly good springboard to go on and win the next general election," he said.

According to the BBC, Conservatives won 40 percent of the total votes cast, with Labor at 27 percent and the Liberal Democrats at 26 percent. While the vote seemed to be partly a midterm protest against Labor, it also showed other parties — nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales and the Conservatives in England — offering an alternative after 10 years of the Blair era.

But the biggest challenge for Labor is the Scottish vote. The Scottish National Party has promised its followers a referendum on whether Scotland should declare independence and secede from Britain, ending a union that began almost exactly 300 years ago, on May 1, 1707.

While only a quarter of Scotland's 5 million people are said by political analysts to favor independence, the very prospect of a referendum will set the British and Scottish administrations against one another from the beginning of Brown's tenure. During the campaign, Brown, who is deeply opposed to Scottish independence, said he could not cooperate with the Scottish National Party.

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Scottish National Party engineers a historic shift

Saturday, May 05 2007 @ 04:54 AM CDT