Since 2005, the
Scottish National Party had come first in the
2007 Scottish Parliament election as well as the
2009 European Parliament election. In Westminster, however, it was a different story: although in 2008 the party won the
Glasgow East by-election, in what was one of the safest
Labour seats in the UK, by the time of the
2010 general election and even with an increase of 2.3% in the vote, it only managed to retain the seats it had won in the 2005 general election. A year later, in the
2011 Scottish Parliament election, the SNP became the first majority government since the opening of Holyrood – a remarkable feat, for the
mixed-member proportional representation system used to elect
MSPs makes the acquisition of a single-party majority challenging. The SNP gained 32 constituencies, 22 of which came from
Scottish Labour, nine from the
Scottish Liberal Democrats and one from the
Scottish Conservatives. Such was the scale of their gains that, of the 73 constituencies in Scotland, only 20 were represented by
MSPs of other political parties in 2011. The SNP's majority in the Scottish Parliament allowed it to legislate for a
referendum on Scottish independence. This was held in 2014, and the proposal for independence was defeated by 10.6 percentage points. In spite of this, the campaign in favour of independence made a set of significant inroads across the
Central Belt of Scotland, a region which has traditionally had a strong affiliation with the Labour Party. The Yes campaign took 44.7% of the vote in Scotland on a high turnout of 84.6%: well beyond the SNP's 19.9% vote share at the 2010 UK general election. This took form at the 2015 UK general election with a saturation of the SNP vote in areas which had a higher "Yes" vote at the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Scottish Labour had held the majority of seats in Scotland in every general election since the 1960s, and many prominent government officials represented Scottish constituencies, such as the Prime Minister
Gordon Brown and the
Chancellor Alistair Darling. In the 2010 election, the Labour Party in Scotland increased its share of the vote by 2.5% and re-gained the Glasgow East and Dunfermline and West Fife constituencies giving them 41 out of 59 seats in Scotland. At the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, Labour lost out to the SNP across much of the central belt of Scotland, holding on to 15 out of 73 constituency seats in Scotland. In 2015 Labour lost 40 of its 41 Scottish constituencies at the UK Parliament, with
Edinburgh South becoming the only constituency in Scotland to have a Labour MP after the election. The party lost out heavily to the SNP in working-class areas around central Scotland, with Scottish Labour's safest constituency (
Glasgow North East) returning the largest swing in the election at 39.3% from Labour to SNP. The party performed best in its more affluent constituencies, with Scottish Labour's leader Jim Murphy missing out in his former constituency of
East Renfrewshire by just 6.6% of the vote. Labour's next closest constituency result came in
Edinburgh North and Leith, where they missed out to the SNP by 9.6% of the vote, and in
East Lothian, where the SNP polled ahead of Labour by 11.5% of the vote. In the context of a broader collapse in the party's support across Great Britain at the end five years as part of a
coalition UK Government with the conservatives, the Scottish Liberal Democrats lost 10 of its 11 Westminster constituencies from 2010, with its safest constituency in Great Britain -
Orkney and Shetland - becoming the only Liberal Democrat constituency in Scotland. They marginally lost out to the SNP in
East Dunbartonshire, where former Lib Dem MP
Jo Swinson lost out to the SNP by 4% of the vote. Among those to lose their constituency at the election were former Liberal Democrat leader
Charles Kennedy and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury,
Danny Alexander. The Liberal Democrats came third in
Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk and
West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, constituencies which they had held in the previous election. The Scottish Conservatives have not held a majority of Scottish seats in a general election since
1955 and it lost all eleven of its seats in the election of
1997. From 2001 until 2017, the party only held one Westminster seat in Scotland. In 2005, following the re-organisation of Scottish constituencies, that seat was
Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, a mostly rural constituency near the Scottish borders. In 2010 its share of the vote in Scotland increased by roughly 0.9% and it retained the
Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, as its only Scottish constituency. It had been reported the party could gain
Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, a seat which they lost out on to the SNP by 0.6% of the vote. Minor parties such as the
UKIP and the
Scottish Greens announced that they would contest more Scottish seats than they did in the 2010 election. UKIP targeted the sole Conservative seat in Scotland, as well as standing candidates in several others. The
British National Party also announced its intention to contest more seats than in 2010, though in the event did not stand a single candidate in a Scottish constituency. The
Scottish Socialist Party stood in four constituencies. The prospect of an
electoral alliance between pro-independence partiesspecifically the SNP, the Greens, and the
Scottish Socialist Partywas raised after the referendum and supported by elected SNP politicians, but played down by Green co-convenor
Patrick Harvie, who said party members did not want their "distinctive Green perspective" to be lost. The SSP supported negotiations for a formal alliance until late in 2014. ==Campaign events==