British Prime Minister Boris Johnson might be preparing to celebrate a stunning election victory, but another leader is also on course for an emphatic win — and it is one that promises to set up a renewed clash over the UK’s future.
The Scottish National Party (SNP) could take back all but one of the districts it lost two years ago, based on an exit poll and early results. Such a dramatic outcome — winning 55 of the 59 seats available in Scotland — will galvanize the party in its pursuit of the independence referendum that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon says is necessary after her country opposed leaving the EU.
Johnson, like former British prime minister Theresa May, has consistently resisted pressure from the SNP-led administration in Edinburgh for another independence vote.
However, the previous one, when Scots chose to stay in the UK in 2014, was before the vote to leave the EU.
Sturgeon made stopping Brexit and giving Scotland the right to dictate its own future the cornerstone of her party’s campaign.
“Johnson has a mandate for Brexit and Sturgeon has a mandate for Scottish independence,” Simon Hix, professor of political science at the London School of Economics, said after the exit poll. “We are heading towards a new constitutional crisis, which won’t be resolved easily in the next few years.”
SNP officials were playing down the scale of its gains and John Curtice, the UK’s most prominent psephologist, said there are so many marginal districts in Scotland that the final result might look different from the forecast.
The first declarations saw the party take a district near Glasgow from the Labour Party and the Angus constituency from Johnson’s Conservatives. It held two more with increased majorities, suggesting that the exit poll projections would be borne out by results.
“If it’s true, what they’re saying about the situation in Scotland, then it does show that we are living in two very different countries now in Scotland and England,” said Tommy Sheppard, an SNP member of Parliament for Edinburgh.
“We may have a choice to make in the morning about whether we just suck this up and roll over and let Boris do what he wants, or whether we make a stand,” Sheppard said.
The election painted the opposite picture to 2017, when May ended up needing the dozen seats the Conservatives won from the SNP to remain in power. The nationalists lost more districts than they expected as then-Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson rallied opposition to another vote on leaving the UK.
Davidson quit this year.
If the result is broadly correct, more SNP supporters will be agitating for Sturgeon to demand an independence vote regardless of whether the British government acquiesces to one, a legal requirement.
Scottish Minister of Justice Humza Yousaf said after the exit poll that the referendum in 2014 was the “gold standard” and that Scotland would seek the legal agreement for a repeat vote next year.
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