John Ramsay Swinney is a Scottish politician who has served as the First Minister of Scotland and Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) since May 2024. He previously served as the leader of the SNP from 2000 to 2004 as Leader of the Opposition, and held various roles within the Scottish Cabinet from 2007 to 2023 under First Ministers Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. Swinney was Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for North Tayside from 1999 to 2011 and, following boundary changes, has been MSP for Perthshire North since 2011. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Tayside North from 1997 to 2001.
The politics of Scotland operate within the constitution of the United Kingdom, of which Scotland is a country. Scotland is a democracy, being represented in both the Scottish Parliament and the Parliament of the United Kingdom since the Scotland Act 1998. Most executive power is exercised by the Scottish Government, led by the First Minister of Scotland, the head of government in a multi-party system. The judiciary of Scotland, dealing with Scots law, is independent of the legislature and the Scottish Government. Scots law is primarily determined by the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Government shares some executive powers with the Scotland Office, a British government department led by the Secretary of State for Scotland.
In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP) is a left social democratic political party which campaigns for Scottish independence. The SNP has controlled Scotland's devolved legislature since the 2007 election as a minority government, and were a majority government from the 2011 election and have been a minority government, since the 2016 election.
Dumfries and Galloway is a constituency in Scotland represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament by John Cooper of the Scottish Conservatives since the 2024 general election. It was first contested in the 2005 general election, replacing Galloway and Upper Nithsdale and part of Dumfries. Like all British constituencies, it elects one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first-past-the-post system of election. Despite its name, it does not cover the whole of the Dumfries and Galloway council area.
Dundee East was a constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Created for the 1950 general election, it elected one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first-past-the-post voting system.
The 2005 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 5 May 2005, to elect 646 members to the House of Commons. The governing Labour Party led by the prime minister Tony Blair won its third consecutive victory, with Blair becoming the second Labour leader after Harold Wilson to form three majority governments. However, its majority fell to 66 seats; the majority it won four years earlier had been of 167 seats.
The 2010 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 6 May 2010, to elect Members of Parliament to the House of Commons. The election took place in 650 constituencies across the United Kingdom under the first-past-the-post system. The election resulted in a large swing to the opposition Conservative Party led by David Cameron similar to that seen in 1979, the last time a Conservative opposition had ousted a Labour government. The governing Labour Party led by the prime minister Gordon Brown lost the 66-seat majority it had previously enjoyed, but no party achieved the 326 seats needed for a majority. The Conservatives won the most votes and seats, but still fell 20 seats short. This resulted in a hung parliament where no party was able to command a majority in the House of Commons. This was only the second general election since the Second World War to return a hung parliament, the first being the February 1974 election. This election marked the start of Conservative government for the next 14 years.
Scottish Labour, officially the Scottish Labour Party, is the part of the UK Labour Party active in Scotland. Ideologically social democratic and unionist, it holds 22 of 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament and 37 of 57 Scottish seats in the House of Commons. It is represented by 262 of the 1,227 local councillors across Scotland. The Scottish Labour party has no separate Chief Whip at Westminster.
The Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party is part of the UK Conservative Party active in Scotland. It is a centre-right to conservative political party. It holds 5 of the 57 Scottish seats in the House of Commons, 31 of the 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament, and comprises 209 of Scotland's 1,227 local councillors.
The 2011 Scottish Parliament election was held on Thursday, 5 May 2011 to elect 129 members to the Scottish Parliament.
The 2008 Glasgow East by-election was a by-election for the UK Parliamentary constituency of Glasgow East which was held on 24 July 2008. The election was triggered when, on 30 June 2008, the sitting MP David Marshall stood down due to ill health.
This is the results breakdown of the 2005 general election.
A general election was held in the United Kingdom on 6 May 2010 and all 59 seats in Scotland were contested. The election result in Scotland was unusual in that there wasn't any change of seats from the 2005 general election, although the Labour Party took back two seats that it had lost in by-elections. This was the last general election at which the Labour Party won a majority of seats and plurality of votes in Scotland until 2024.
The 2021 Scottish Parliament election took place on 11 May 2021, under the provisions of the Scotland Act 1998. All 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament were elected in the sixth election since the parliament was re-established in 1999. The election was held alongside the Senedd election in Wales, English local elections, London Assembly and mayoral election and the Hartlepool by-election.
A general election was held in the United Kingdom on 5 May 2005 and all 59 seats in Scotland were contested. This was the first election to occur under the new boundaries which reduced the number of Scottish seats from 72 to 59. Previously, Scotland had a greater number of MPs per person than the rest of the UK to compensate for its distinct political nature and distance from Westminster. With the introduction of the Scottish Parliament, Scottish constituencies were brought into line with those found in the rest of the UK, so that they had similar electorates.
A general election was held in the United Kingdom on Thursday, 7 June 2001 and all 72 seats in Scotland were contested. There was only one Scottish seat which changed parties during the election; that of Galloway and Upper Nithsdale which Peter Duncan of the Conservative Party gained from Alisdair Morgan of the Scottish National Party, by just 74 votes. Apart from the Conservatives increasing their representation to a single seat, the election was essentially a repeat of the previous result four years earlier; with Labour still the largest party in terms of seats won.
The 2015 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 7 May 2015 to elect 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons. It was the first of three general elections to be held under the rules of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 and was the last general election to be held before the United Kingdom voted to end its membership of the European Union (EU) in June 2016. Local elections took place in most areas of England on the same day and is to date the most recent general election to coincide with local elections. The governing Conservative Party led by the prime minister, David Cameron, won an unexpected victory; opinion polls and political commentators had predicted that the results of the election would cause a second consecutive hung parliament whose composition would be similar to the previous Parliament, which was in effect from the previous national election in 2010. However, opinion polls underestimated the Conservatives, as they won 330 of the 650 seats and 36.9 per cent of the votes, giving them a majority of ten seats.
A general election was held in the United Kingdom on 7 May 2015 and all 59 seats in Scotland were contested under the first-past-the-post, single-member district electoral system. Unlike the 2010 general election, where no seats changed party, the Scottish National Party (SNP) won all but three seats in Scotland in an unprecedented landslide victory, gaining a total of 56 seats. The SNP received what remains the largest number of votes gained by a single political party in a United Kingdom general election in Scotland in British history, breaking the previous record set by the Labour Party in 1964 and taking the largest share of the Scottish vote in sixty years, at approximately 50 per cent.
A general election was held in the United Kingdom on Thursday 8 June 2017; all 59 seats in Scotland were contested under the first-past-the-post electoral system.
The 2019 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 12 December 2019, two and a half years after the previous general election in June 2017. The Scottish National Party (SNP) received the most votes and won 48 out of 59 seats—a gain of 13 over those won in 2017, and 81% of the Scottish seats in the House of Commons.
4.2%
