And pounce it did. By the time Alistair Smith issued this warning to his fellow members of the Conservative Party in 1976, the Scottish National Party had already emerged as an unexpected and almost unstoppable force. Although it never gained a national average of more than 3 percent, its true menace is revealed in the vote percentages it obtained in Scottish seats – the seats in which it competed. Between 1970 and 1997, the SNP consistently captured more than 11 percent of the vote in Scotland, with an average vote of 18.8 percent. In the October 1974 General Election, it achieved its peak vote of 30.4 percent, just 6 percentage points shy of Labour's electoral plurality. In this same election, the ethnoterritorial party surpassed the Conservatives to become the second most popular party in Scotland. Although support for the SNP would decline somewhat in the 1980s, the party reasserted its strength on the Scottish electoral scene in the 1990s.