Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour party, will take over from Rishi Sunak as UK prime minister with the most emphatic election victory by any British political party this century. Individual constituency results overnight signalled Labour would comfortably win an overall majority on a modestly increased share of the vote, returning the left-of-centre party to government for the first time since 2010. A despondent Sunak conceded defeat in a short speech shortly after 4.30am, following a lacklustre campaign in which the Conservative leader failed to dent a substantial deficit in the polls that had lasted throughout his premiership.
Labour on track for record-breaking election victory in the UK
Starmer’s Labour was on course to achieve a remarkable turnaround from a disastrous result for his party 2019, with a landslide victory forecast to be roughly on a par with Tony Blair’s first election win in 1997. Predictions were that Labour would win 408 seats out of 650, well ahead of the 326 required for a majority, with some seats falling to the party on swings of over 20 percentage points from the Conservatives, including both Tamworth and Lichfield in the Midlands. Its first gain, South Swindon, in the south-west of England, saw a swing of 16.4 percentage points from Sunak’s losing Conservatives to Labour. That was well ahead of the 12.7 points needed to win an overall majority in Britain’s parliament, and would be the biggest swing to any winning party in the UK since the second world war. Five years ago, few politicians or commentators expected Labour could recover so quickly, but the winning party was aided by a divided opposition in which insurgent rightwing party Nigel Farage’s Reform UK took votes from the Conservatives weakened and tarnished by the unpopular premierships of Sunak predecessors Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
It was more of an anti-Conservative vote, than a pro-Labour one
The Conservative vote collapsed, while the Labour vote increased only modestly. Sunak’s party polled about 22.3% of the vote with more than two-thirds of the seats declared, a catastrophic fall of 20 percentage points from the 42.4% achieved in 2019. The party was predicted to win 136 seats, its worst ever election result in the three-century history of Britain’s democracy. Eight Conservative cabinet members had lost their seats by 5am, a record, headed by Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, and Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons. In Wales, the party lost every seat. Labour’s share of the vote, however, was 36.3%, 4.2 percentage points higher than in the previous election, although the party’s share of the vote overall was below the level of Blair’s victories in 1997 and 2001 but not 2005. In Nuneaton, in the Midlands, Labour gained a seat previously held by the Conservatives with a sizeable majority of 13,144. The Conservative vote fell by 32.7 percentage points while Labour increased its share by a more modest 5.4 points. British voters had clearly not forgiven the Conservatives for a series of disasters, most recently a catastrophic mini-budget from Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss in September 2022, where unfunded tax cuts led to sharp rise in mortgage costs for ordinary Britons as interest rates soared because of concern about the health of the UK’s public finances.
Scotland’s independence movement took a body blow
The previously dominant Scottish National party was knocked back for the first time in a decade, setting back its struggle for independence. The SNP, which won 48 seats in Scotland in 2019, was forecast to win eight. Labour, which had won only one seat in 2019, had won 35 seats by 5am, including every seat in Glasgow. Though the SNP failed in its bid to secure Scottish independence at a referendum in 2014 it had won a majority of Scottish seats at every UK election since 2015 and has run the Holyrood parliament since 2007. It had campaigned on the argument that if it won a majority of Scotland’s 57 seats it would have a mandate to renegotiate a second independence referendum. But the party’s comprehensive defeat pushes the issue into the background for now.
Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK wins a handful of seats
The pro-Brexit, anti-immigration Nigel Farage won a seat in the UK parliament, at the eighth attempt, alongside three others, creating a small but potentially noisy bloc at Westminster. Though Farage, now the MP for Clacton, in the east of England, is already a familiar media figure, leading a small party in the Westminster parliament guarantees him more media exposure in the future. The party won four seats, lower than the 13 initial projections had forecast, taking seats in Great Yarmouth, and Boston and Skegness from the Conservatives and retaining Ashfield in the east Midlands, where the party had been represented by a defector from the Tories, Lee Anderson. Labour, however, held on to the two seats in Barnsley, Yorkshire, by around 8,000 and 5,000 votes respectively. Reform UK had been predicted to win both. Significantly, Reform UK also came second in dozens of seats, particularly in areas that previously supported Brexit, positioning the party as a challenger to Labour in future elections should Starmer falter and prove unpopular.
British politics has become more volatile
Five years ago, at the last election, there was talk of a realignment in British politics as the Conservatives, then led by Boris Johnson, took traditional working-class areas from Labour, largely because voters in those areas were willing to support him to complete Brexit. Labour needed a record postwar swing simply to achieve a majority of one seat, but as the results came in it was clear the party was on track to do considerably better than that, as voters had moved on to focus on the Conservatives’ economic record in office. Starmer’s victory suggests there was no long-term realignment, but rather that old tribal loyalties in British politics, where people vote habitually, are not as strong as they once were. British voters are quite prepared to judge politicians harshly if they are deemed to fail. A landslide victory in one election does not render defeat in the next impossible.