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Reuters

Scottish nationalists rampaged to victory north of the border in Britain’s national election, obliterating their opponents and setting the stage for a new battle over independence.
In an epic performance, the Scottish National Party (SNP) ousted the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland and took former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s onetime stronghold in Kirkcaldy.

Labour’s UK campaign chief Douglas Alexander lost his Scottish seat to a 20-year-old politics student, the SNP’s Mhairi Black, the youngest British member of parliament since the 17th Century.
With results in for all but one of Scotland’s 59 seats, the SNP had won 56, with the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats managing only one apiece.
"The Scottish lion has roared this morning across the country," former SNP leader Alex Salmond said after triumphing in the Gordon constituency in Aberdeenshire.
"Scotland has asked to speak with a united voice, that voice will be made clearly for Scotland in the next Westminster parliament," said Salmond, whose campaign to lead Scotland to independence was defeated last September.
But with Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives on course for overall victory, the SNP will be shut out of any role in the British government - a scenario likely to bring a new confrontation over Scottish aspirations for independence.

The SNP had hoped for a kingmaker role in the House of Commons in a leftist alliance with Labour to force Cameron out.
Its landslide makes the political divide between England and Scotland starker than ever. England accounts for 85 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland and Wales.
"It has serious implications for the United Kingdom as a political union. Whatever government is formed after this election will need to seriously consider its constitutional structure," said Murray Stewart Leith, senior lecturer in politics at the University of West Scotland.
The SNP, which took just six seats in 2010, secured a clean sweep in Glasgow, whose large working-class had been solidly Labour for decades.
Alistair Carmichael, Scottish secretary in the government in London, held on to the Orkney and Shetland seat for the Liberal Democrats and David Mundell, the only Conservative from Scotland in the previous parliament, was re-elected in Dumfriesshire in the south. Labour kept Edinburgh South.
Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander, treasury secretary in Britain’s coalition government and the most powerful Scottish politician in the cabinet, was trounced in Inverness in the Highlands.
SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said in Glasgow: "Tonight, the Scottish people have put their trust in the SNP to make Scotland’s voice heard and to stand up for progressive politics, and that’s exactly what we intend to do."
"This election wasn’t about independence. I promised people in Scotland that I wouldn’t take anybody’s vote as an endorsement of independence."
The results will nonetheless bolster Scots to push for a new referendum after separatists lost one last September.
 
 


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British Election 2015

‘The Scottish lion has roared’: Nationalists rampage to victory setting stage for new independence battle

Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Nicola Sturgeon is delighted with results at the Glasgow election count. Photo: AFP

Newly elected Scottish National Party (SNP) member of parliament, Mhairi Black, Britain's youngest member of parliament since 1667. Photo: AFP

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon after casting her vote at a polling station in Broomhouse Community Hall, Glasgow. Photo: EPA

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World

Scottish nationalists rampaged to victory north of the border in Britain’s national election, obliterating their opponents and setting the stage for a new battle over independence.
