Cries From The Heartlands

For all the concentration on Glasgow, the Labour heartlands mostly held up for the Union.

The areas of Lib Dem strength, even those currently with Nationalist MSPs, indicated the extent to which they regarded Holyrood, Westminster and doubtless also Brussels as much of a muchness, to none of which would they ever vote any additional power, even at the expense of one or both of the others.

One underestimates the extent to which the Liberal redoubts of England, Scotland and Wales alike are consciously out of sorts with the politics of the last hundred years.

And the SNP's supposed citadels collapsed. Yes won Dundee by far less than had been expected, while the No votes poured in from Clackmannanshire, Perth and Kinross, Angus, Aberdeenshire, Moray, the Western Isles (delivered in Gaelic, a vote for the Union), and so on.

There are Labour and a few Lib Dems Westminster and Holyrood seats to be held and to be won back. But most of those areas have rarely or never been Labour. They were the heartlands of the old Unionist Party.

Ruth Davidson has had a good war. Reports of the death of Tory Scotland may turn out to have been greatly exaggerated, especially in view of the precise electoral arithmetic of many parts of rural and semi-rural Scotland.

Reports of the death of the SNP, on the other hand, seem more realistic by the hour.