LONDON (Sputnik), Anastasia Levchenko — The May 7 UK election results suggest that Scottish National Party (SNP) will play a transformative role in Westminster, Scottish experts said.
The SNP has taken a record lead over the Labour in Scotland, winning 56 seats at Westminster – as opposed to six seats it had in the previous British parliament.
"The SNP has won an astonishing number of seats. Even if they play no role in a coalition government, SNP MPs will have a transformative effect on other aspects of political life at Westminster, not least through their overwhelming representation on the Scottish Affairs select committee," Henderson said in an exclusive interview for the British Centre of Constitutional Change, obtained by Sputnik.
Henderson added that the SNP owes its result to the firm believe by the voters that the party is able to ensure the devolution of significant powers to the Scottish Parliament.
Craig McAngus, a research fellow at the Scottish University of Stirling, who is currently working on a branch of the Economic and Social Research Council's "Future of the UK and Scotland" project, also sees SNP results as extraordinary.
"In Scotland the polls were showing that the SNP would probably win half of the votes. I had in my mind 51 or 52 [seats] may be, but 56 is extraordinary… We did think that the SNP is going to win quiet big, but we did not expect this big," McAngus told Sputnik.
"It is not really a credible argument. They [the Labour Party] would have lost the election even if they had held on to the seats in Scotland. The Labour party should think deeply why it happened," McAngus said.
Nicola McEwen, Professor of Territorial Politics at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Director of the Centre on Constitutional Change shares the same view on the SNP results.
"The party has achieved swings at a scale never seen before anywhere in the UK in a General Election," McEwen stressed.
She noted that in its election campaign the Conservative Party seemed to cast doubt on the legitimacy of SNP parliamentarians, adding that "it would be an incredibly high risk strategy for the future of the UK if they were to carry this stance into government."
McEwen noted that without support from the Conservative government, SNP would be unable to deliver on two of its major election promises — putting an end to fiscal austerity and blocking the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent program. But the party has already secured the fulfillment of the third promise: a stronger voice for Scotland in Westminster.
