General election: SNP heading for landslide

The Scottish National party is heading for an unprecedented landslide victory in Scotland, with an official exit poll suggesting it could be on course to take 58 out of 59 parliamentary seats.

The SNP will now take over from Labour as the dominant party north of the border, in what is likely to be the most fundamental change thrown up by Thursday's UK general election.

"I would go so far as to say it's a tsunami," said Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservative party, which the poll suggested was set to lose its only Westminster seat in Scotland.

As counts continued in the early hours of Friday morning, it seemed certain that many once unassailably safe Labour seats would fall to the nationalists. Labour was routed in Kilmarnock. In Paisley, Douglas Alexander, Labour's shadow foreign minister and election chief, lost to a 20-year-old politics undergraduate, the SNP's Mhairi Black.

Jim Murphy, Scottish Labour leader, lost his seat in East Renfrewshire, prompting immediate questions about who should take on the task of rebuilding the party in Scotland.

Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and Scotland's first minister, arrived at the Glasgow count shortly after 2am to rapturous applause and hugs from delighted party candidates and campaigners.

The results represent a crisis for Labour, which has considered Scotland one of its most important heartlands since the 1990s. In Glasgow, once known as "Red Clydeside" for the regularity with which it returned Labour MPs, the SNP looked on course to take most, if not all the constituencies.

Lord Mandelson, the Labour peer, said on Thursday night: "Something akin to an earthquake has taken place in Scotland . . . Politics won't be the same."

Humza Yousaf, the SNP deputy leader, said: "Nicola Sturgeon has been the star of this campaign . . . [This shows] Scottish politics are very much shifting. People trust the SNP to stand up to the Tories as opposed to any other party."

Neil Gray, the SNP candidate in Airdrie and Shotts, said: "Something profound is happening."

The results could end the careers of some of Britain's most high-profile politicians. Liberal Democrat advisers suggested they expected Danny Alexander, the former Treasury chief secretary, to lose his seat in Inverness.

It would also give a Westminster seat to the party's former leader, Alex Salmond, who was running in the Gordon constituency.

Earlier in the evening, Ms Sturgeon had urged caution over the accuracy of the exit poll. Within minutes of the its publication, she tweeted: "I'd treat the exit poll with HUGE caution. I'm hoping for a good night but I think 58 seats is unlikely!"

SNP will have an unprecedented presence in Westminster. The party has in the past argued that winning a majority of Scotland's Westminster seats could be a mandate for independence, but Ms Sturgeon has said that even a clean sweep would now not be considered even grounds for a second independence referendum.

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"What has happened tonight is not about independence, because even a place like East Lothian that voted resoundingly for No in the referendum has come into the SNP camp," Mr Kerevan said.

The result could widen political divisions between Scotland and the rest of the UK, particularly if the Conservatives remain in government.

Ms Davidson said the prospect could challenge UK unity, but that a Labour government dependent on the SNP would be worse.

"This would clearly put stresses and strains on the United Kingdom unlike the stresses and strains that we have previously seen, however, the union has been put under strain before and has endured," Ms Davidson said.

<>The pro-independence party had been predicted to make major gains since last September's referendum, despite having lost that vote by 55 per cent to 45 per cent. A series of polls had shown the party winning close to 50 per cent of the total votes cast in Scotland.

The SNP picked up momentum over the campaign, helped by Ms Sturgeon's prominent role in two live televised leaders' debates.

It came in for weeks of attacks from the Conservative party, which warned its MPs would go to Westminster to try and break up the UK. The SNP said in its manifesto that it was "not about a second referendum", but Ms Sturgeon has not ruled out promising one before next year's Holyrood election.

Weeks before polling day, Labour MPs began to despair of their chances in Scotland as canvas returns showed voters who had voted for their party in the past had shifted to the SNP and were unlikely to come back.

"There was just a pro-SNP mood in the country," said one. "You can't fight a feeling."

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