A general election was held in the United Kingdom on 7 May 2015 and all 59 seats in Scotland were contested under the first-past-the-post, single-member district electoral system. Unlike the 2010 general election, where no seats changed party, the Scottish National Party (SNP) won all but three seats in Scotland in an unprecedented landslide victory, gaining a total of 56 seats and taking the largest share of the Scottish vote in sixty years, at approximately 50 per cent. The Labour Party suffered its worst ever election defeat in Scotland, losing 40 of the 41 seats it was defending, including the seats of Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and the then Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander. The Liberal Democrats lost ten of the eleven seats they were defending, with the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander and former leader Charles Kennedy losing their seats. The election also saw the worst performance by the Scottish Conservative Party, which received its lowest share of the vote since its creation in 1965, although it retained the one seat that it previously held. In all, 50 of the 59 seats changed party, 49 of them being won by first-time MPs.

James Francis Murphy is a Scottish former politician who served as Leader of the Scottish Labour Party from 2014 to 2015 and Secretary of State for Scotland from 2008 to 2010. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for East Renfrewshire, formerly Eastwood, from 1997 to 2015. He identifies as a social democrat and has expressed support for a foreign policy of Western interventionism. He has been described as being on the political right of the Labour Party.