Nicola Sturgeon hails ’emphatic’ SNP election results

The full results of last week’s council elections have been published by the Electoral Management Board for Scotland.

“The local elections are now behind us”.

The local government results will be added to data gathered by the party through months of canvassing, with Ms Davidson admitting activists will now be “fighting hard in places that we perhaps hadn’t targeted before at a General Election”.

Nevertheless, the local government elections confirm that political momentum, remarkably, is with the Scottish Conservatives.

Following the local elections which saw the SNP come out as the largest party across Scotland’s local authorities, the SNP leader warned Prime Minister Theresa May that her flirtation with Ukip voters in England to pursue a hard negotiating stance with the European Union will result in the “sacrifice of thousands of Scottish jobs”.

That would suggest every good reason to think the SNP’s share of the vote would also have gone up this time around.

Councillors Stocks said: “As far I’m concerned we won the election in North Lanarkshire and it is our right to try to form the next administration”.

Tony Blair’s landslide victory 20 years ago all but wiped out Scottish Conservatism, with the party failing to win a Westminster seat in 1997 and never holding more than a single constituency since. Scottish Conservatives even have their first ever councillor in the Western Isles.

It did not, though it did become the largest party in each, as it now is in half of Scotland’s 32 councils.

Conservative councillors are now the largest grouping in six local authorities.

Her bullish stance was echoed by SNP number-crunchers who last night claimed they had attracted 105,000 more votes than at the last council elections in 2012.

May’s opponents have criticized her for refusing to take part in television debates with other party leaders, while her own media campaign has been tightly controlled, with few on-camera events involving unplanned encounters with the public.

We should be careful, then, about using last week’s figures to predict how the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster will carve up.

The general election “phoney war” is expected to end today, with both Ms Davidson and Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, launching their campaigns.

Lib Dem leader Tim Farron is bringing his campaign bus to Scotland as the party target constituencies such as East Dunbartonshire and Edinburgh West.

That compares to the 394 seats the party won in 2012.

Rennie said these local results were a “springboard” for June’s general election campaign. Ukip lost 145 council seats – all but one.

This is the third local government election in a row that the party has made losses. “A vote for any other party simply risks letting the SNP back in, and increases the risk of another unwanted referendum”.

“It was a remarkable result and the lesson I take from it is clear”.