Scottish nationalists poised for victory in parliamentary elections

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The separatist Scottish National Party looked poised to sweep to a third consecutive election win in parliamentary elections on Thursday, kick-starting fresh talk of another referendum on independence from the United Kingdom.

Initial results appeared to confirm what opinion polls have showed for months – a wide lead for the SNP over its rivals, likely enough to ensure another majority government. Scotland's Parliament, which was created in 1999, has steadily accumulated more powers from London.

Speaking ahead of Thursday's vote, former SNP leader Alex Salmond told The Globe and Mail that a resounding SNP victory – if it were followed by a "Leave" side victory in a June 23 referendum on Britain's membership in the European Union – would rapidly trigger another vote on whether Scotland should be an independent state.

"In these circumstances, there would be a referendum within two years," Mr. Salmond said in an interview outside the House of Commons in London, where he now sits as an MP. He stressed that the SNP was not in favour of a Leave vote, but that Scotland would be compelled to consider its future in the union in the event of a so-called "Brexit" from the EU.

Nicola Sturgeon, Mr. Salmond's successor as SNP leader, said during the campaign that a second referendum was "more likely than not" during the next five years if the SNP were to win another majority. Scots voted by a 55 per cent to 45 per cent margin in September, 2014, to remain in the United Kingdom, in what the SNP then billed a "once in a generation" decision.

Though a new independence referendum was not formally part of the SNP's election manifesto – as it was during the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election – Ms. Sturgeon has repeatedly said that a "material change in the circumstances" could trigger another vote. In addition to a "Brexit" vote, Ms. Sturgeon has suggested she might call a referendum if she saw a sustained surge in support for Scottish independence, which most polls currently put at just below 50 per cent.

More startling than the SNP's romp was the continuing decline of the Labour Party, long the dominant force in Scottish politics. It was unclear late Thursday whether Labour would hold on to its status as the main opposition party in Edinburgh, or whether it would fall into third place behind the Conservative Party, which has struggled in Scotland since the Margaret Thatcher era.

The Scottish results appeared to be part of a pattern of bad news for Labour and its controversial leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was facing his first electoral test since shocking the party establishment by winning the leadership in September.

While popular with the left wing of the party and its union allies, Mr. Corbyn has few friends among the centrists who held sway under Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Rather than pressing the Conservative Party about the country's housing crisis – or its lacklustre handling of the EU referendum – Labour spent the days before the election on the defensive after ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone, an ally of Mr. Corbyn, said last week in a radio interview that Adolf Hitler had been "supporting Zionism" by encouraging Jews to move to Israel before he "went mad and ended up killing six million Jews."

Mr. Corbyn has since fumbled to counter the perception that his party is tolerant of anti-Semites. Mr. Livingstone and at least 17 other Labour activists have been suspended over their remarks – some recent, some older – about Jews or Israel.

The effort didn't seem to impress the Jewish community. One poll showed that only 8.5 per cent of British Jews expected to vote for Labour on Thursday, down from 18 per cent in last year's national election.

The scandal was expected to hurt Labour's chances in local council elections around the country, as well as in national assembly elections in Wales. A YouGov poll conducted on Thursday predicted Labour would lose its grip on the 60-seat Parliament, dropping three seats to 27, while the right-wing UK Independence Party would stage a breakthrough, winning its first eight assembly seats in Wales.

But Labour was nonetheless expected to win in Mr. Corbyn's home city of London, where Sadiq Khan, the 56-year-old son of Pakistani immigrants, was expected to become the capital's first Muslim mayor.

Opinion polls conducted just ahead of Thursday's vote gave Mr. Khan a double-digit lead over Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith, after a nasty campaign tainted by Mr. Goldsmith's accusations that Mr. Khan had links to radical Islamists.

The winner of the London mayoral race was expected to be known on Friday. Official results weren't expected until Saturday for Northern Ireland, which uses a complicated preferential voting system, with multiple representatives for each constituency.

@markmackinnon