Scotland Matters General Election 2024 Campaign + Holyrood 2026

Scotland Matters would like to thank the many people who donated to and participated in the Scotland Matters general election campaign. Hopefully, we made a good contribution to the stunning victory over the SNP, particularly in Gordon, West Aberdeen and Inverness Skye and Ross.

Highlights of our  campaign:

• Our advans toured 48 – mostly Labour-targeted – constituencies and covered almost 2,500 miles.
• Delivered 45k leaflets by hand or Royal Mail in 9 “difficult” constituencies.
• Almost one million people saw our  “vote for the party best-placed to beat the SNP” message on our advan, leaflets, TikTok, Youtube views, website visits and “shares”  on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin by supporters.

Below is a summary of our thoughts on the campaign and the implications for our activities between now and the second electoral assault on the independence movement: the 2026 Holyrood elections. If you have any feedback or suggestions please email: info@scotlandmatters.co.uk.

Our approach

• Focus on 9 seats where our efforts could the extra few hundred votes that would beat the SNP.
• Highlight widely local issues eg LEZ’s, A96/A90, oil and gas policy.
• Recommend voting for the pro-uk party that won in 2019 or came a clear second to the SNP.
• Minimal activity in seats where this was unclear, eg East Renfrewshire.
• As far as possible use Scotland in Union’s tactical voting charts which was generally correct.

Good and bad

• Inverness, Skye and West Ross, which the Libdems won. We delivered leaflets in Inverness and organised a visit by our advan.
• Gordon and West Aberdeen, both tight races against the SNP and clear tactical voting successes.
• Linlithgow and Bathgate, and Inverclyde: volunteers requested extra leaflets as there was huge, growing dissatisfaction with the SNP. Massive Labour wins.

Biggest disappointments were

• Argyll and Bute lost to a split vote.
• Aberdeen South: a clear opportunity to unseat Stephen Flynn lost because of a split vote.

“Who to vote tactically for” charts were much more reliable than in previous years. However, there were inconsistencies, causing confusion for voters. For the 2026 Holyrood elections and proportional representation, there needs to be more up-front discussion and agreement.

We only had £11k to spend in this election but we covered a lot more ground and had a bigger impact than in 2021 when we had much more money.

Holyrood 2026

• Work starts immediately on fund-raising to keep up the pressure on the SNP and prepare for 2026.
• A lot depend on the success of the Labour Government but there’s a great opportunity to repeat the 2024 General Election success in routing the SNP.
• Issues will be how to best utilise the PR system, what the anti-SNP message is given that indy is currently off the table and what impact Reform will have, they had a strong showing in most constituencies but only affected one result – Aberdeenshire North. It could be different in 2026.