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BREAKING: UK GENERAL ELECTION: LABOUR PARTY WINS LANDSLIDE
The Labour Party has secured a landslide victory in the United Kingdom election to end 14 years of Conservative rule. “We did it!” Keir Starmer, the Labour leader and incoming prime minister, said in his victory speech. “Change begins now.”
Outgoing Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak concedes defeat, saying it has been a “difficult night”.
There was a surge in support for the Liberal Democrats, while the populist right wing Reform UK party picked up support from disgruntled Conservative voters to win a clutch of parliamentary seats.
The Scottish National Party had what party leader John Swinney called a “very poor result” losing dozens of seats.
Key issues for voters in the UK included the cost of living, the health service and housing.
‘We are going to be beat in Scotland, and we are going to be beat well’
The Scottish National Party (SNP) has had its worse showing in more than a decade, projections showed.
It is predicted to get only between 6-11 of 57 contested seats, the party’s lowest since the six it won at the 2010 British parliamentary election.
“We are experiencing something that we have not experienced in quite some time. We are going to be beat in Scotland, and we are going to be beat well,” the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said after retaining his own seat.
Labour, meanwhile, is projected to win a big majority in the British parliament overall, and has thus far won 15 out of 20 seats in Scotland, its most since the 41 won under the leadership of Gordon Brown, a Scot, in 2010.
The results are seen as derailing a Scottish independence push, as the SNP had said that winning a majority of Scottish seats would give it an impetus to pursue independence talks.
The SNP had dominated the British parliament’s Scottish seats since 2015. But it has been embroiled in turmoil, with two leaders who quit in a little over a year and a police investigation into the party’s finances, and splits.
Starmer, meanwhile, has ruled out another independence referendum. Recent polling has indicated that Scots favour remaining part of the UK by a narrow margin.
The former prime minister has lost her seat of South West Norfolk by just over 600 votes, to Labour.
Truss became the country’s shortest-serving leader, at just 44 days, when she caused a bond market meltdown and a collapse in sterling in 2022.
Truss secured 11,217 votes behind 11,847 votes for Labour candidate Terry Jermy.
Tories facing ‘fundamental debate’ after election calamity
Diamond has also told Al Jazeera that the Conservatives are about to enter a long period of self-reflection following their dismal election showing.
“It will be very difficult and no doubt in the months ahead there will be recriminations and arguments about why they’ve lost just so badly,” he said.
“There will be a big debate in the party about fundamentally, did the Tories make a mistake by moving away from the kind of centrist, moderate politics that we saw under leaders like David Cameron, or did they make a mistake by trying to become another version of Reform by having very harsh positions on issues like immigration as well as Europe?”
Diamond concluded: “I think we’ll see in the months ahead a really fundamental debate about what British conservatism is for and how it needs to change in order to be relevant to the Britain of today – not 20 or 30 years ago.”
Labour has won more than 400 seats, with most of the votes counted.
Country Starmer inherits ‘in a very different position’ than 1997’s UK under Blair
There have been a lot of comparisons made with Labour’s win today and the 1997 victory under Tony Blair.
But Patrick Diamond, a former policy adviser for the Labour government led by Blair and Gordon Brown, has told Al Jazeera that the situation today is markedly different.
“In 1997, there was in the country a greater sense of hope and optimism based on the fact that Britain was in a very different position – not least because economically it was doing very well at that time,” said Diamond, who is a professor in public policy at Queen Mary University of London.
“The country that Keir Starmer inherits today is in a very different position,” he added. “The economy has been weak for some time, it’s been through a number of shocks dealing with the aftermath of COVID, the Ukraine war and so on.”
The Labour Party has now broken through that magic number of 326 seats needed to form a majority government. We can now say that Labour is the victor in the 2024 election, and Keir Starmer is going to be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Now, the list of challenges that the UK is currently facing is very long indeed.
There is a widespread opinion here that over the last few years, things have been getting worse and worse and worse – that public services in particular are crumbling; that the National Health Service is on its knees, you have to wait for doctors appointments, you have to wait for ambulances to arrive; that there is sewage in the rivers; that jails are overflowing; the courts are bogged down; that libraries and swimming pools are closing; that the chaos of the last few years of Conservative rule have basically distracted the government as it has been from doing what governments are supposed to do.
And that is what Keir Starmer says that his Labour Party is going to change.
Whether it can do that, whether it will do that of course, we will have to wait and see over the next weeks.
Starmer is going to have to hit the ground running, he’s going to be naming his cabinet probably by the end of today. Then he has to do things like go to the NATO Summit next week, so there is a lot that he has to do very fast and he knows it.
Liberal Democrats dance to ‘Sweet Caroline’ as party celebrates seat surge
The Liberal Democrats are gathering in London after turning in their best electoral performance since 1923.
Party leader Ed Davey was dancing to Sweet Caroline as he entered the room, according to a video shared by Sky’s Jack Taylor on social media.
Sarkar, contributing editor at Novara Media, has been speaking to Al Jazeera on Starmer’s policy on Israel’s war on the Palestinian enclave.
“Keir Starmer made it quite clear his position on Israel’s genocide or war in Gaza is completely indistinguishable from that of Biden in the White House. When Biden moves his position, Keir Starmer magically moves it as well,” she told Al Jazeera.
“At the beginning of this particular war, back in October, Keir Starmer said that Israel does have that right to cut off food, fuel, electricity, water and medicine to the people of Gaza. He’s since said that he was taken out of context, that that’s not what he meant. But actually, his fellow shadow cabinet ministers went out and defended that line. It was only when this was causing electoral problems, he was losing the Muslim vote, that he decided to backpedal,” Sarkar said.
“Labour has said they will recognise a Palestinian state. Again, they’ve backed off from that. So I don’t think that we’re going to be seeing anything significantly different on foreign policy. This is something that has profoundly angered and moved voters in this country, particularly in areas where you’ve got a lot of young people, a lot of left-wing people, and also a lot of Muslim voters as well. They’ve felt completely disgusted that the consensus position of the media class, which has been to enable this genocide, is so far away from the heartfelt moral position of most people in this country.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has congratulated Keir Starmer on Labour’s victory.
Albanese, who leads his country’s Labor party, says he’s looking forward to working with the new UK prime minister.
Congratulations to my friend and new UK Prime Minister @Keir_Starmer on his resounding election victory – I look forward to working constructively with the incoming @UKLabour Government
The Labour leader, who was just addressing supporters in London, acknowledged the “great responsibility” of his mandate and pledged to “govern for every single person” in the UK.
Here are key quotes from his speech:
A mandate like this comes with a great responsibility. Our task is nothing less than renewing the ideas that hold this country together. National renewal. Whoever you are, wherever you started in life, if you work hard, if you play by the rules, this country should give you a fair chance to get on.
We have to return politics to public service. Show that politics can be a service for good. Make no mistake, that is the great test of politics in this era. The fight for trust is the battle that defines our age.
By all means, enjoy this moment … But use it to show to the rest of the country, as we must, that this party has changed, that we will serve them faithfully, govern for every single person in this country.
Don’t forget how we got here. This morning, we can see that the British people have voted to turn the page on 14 years. But don’t pretend that there was anything inevitable about that. There’s nothing preordained in politics. Election victories don’t fall from the sky. They are hard won and hard fought for. And this one could only be won by a changed Labour Party.
The BBC has revised its election forecast again with just over 100 seats still to declare.
It estimates Labour will end up with 408 seats, with the Conservatives the second biggest party with 136 seats. The Liberal Democrats look set to record their best performance since 1923, winning 66 seats.
It looks like a dreadful night for the SNP, however. It’s expected to get eight seats with Scottish Labour winning big north of the border.
Those forecasts are broadly in line with the exit poll that was released shortly after the polls closed.
‘Change begins now’, Starmer says
The Labour leader, who will become the UK’s next prime minister, is addressing supporters in London.
“Change begins now,” he said to loud cheers. “And it feels good. I have to be honest. Four and a half years of work, changing the party. This is what it is for. A changed Labour Party, ready to serve our country, ready to restore Britain to the service of working people.”
Keir Starmer, leader of Britain’s Labour party, reacts as he speaks at a reception to celebrate his win in the election, at Tate Modern, in London, Britain,
UK’s finance minister holds on to seat
Jeremy Hunt retained his parliamentary seat in southern England, fending off a fierce challenge from the smaller Liberal Democrat party.
This comes as Hunt, a Conservative lawmaker who was also health secretary and foreign secretary during 11 years at the top of government, had been tipped to be the biggest scalp on the night, as the Conservatives lost seats across the country.
Preliminary results show Labour has won more than 326 seats of the 650 constituencies.
She said that Reform UK has lost several of the 13 constituencies they were projected to win in, including Hartlepool, Barnsley North and Barnsley South, which have all gone Labour.
The right-wing party so far has only two seats, Sarkar noted, but said the “power of Nigel Farage has been in vote share rather than in how many seats he wins”.
“What you can see from the results that have come in is that they’re coming second in many places. That will give Farage a very powerful position from which to kind of reconstitute the right wing of politics in his own image. They very successfully did that before – that’s basically how we ended up leaving the EU – and I think the signs point towards him being able to do that again,” she said.
“Where Labour, I think, don’t get to breathe easy is that in some areas, Reform’s manifesto are to the left of Labour. They’ve promised to wipe out student debt for doctors and for nurses, they’ve promised to implement an online tax for corporate giants like Amazon. Labour don’t go anywhere near that kind of thing, which means that under a Keir Starmer government, particularly if his personal poll ratings don’t pick up – they’re actually very low considering that he’s just won this landslide victory – that he might actually be vulnerable to a right-wing populist party like Reform.”
