UK Election Results: Labour Triumphs

Voting in elections for House of Commons ended at 10pm local time (11pm in Poland).

Opposition Labour Party won Thursday's election to the British House of Commons by a landslide. Exit polls show that Labour will have 410 seats in the 650-seat lower house of parliament.

This is a very clear victory, but not as spectacular as pre-election forecasts predicted. In terms of seats, this is more than twice as many as in the previous election in 2019, but fewer than in the first two Labour leadership wins Tony’ego Blaira – in 1997 and 2001, when they won 418 and 412 seats, respectively.

According to the exit poll, 131 seats will be won Conservative Partya 61 trafi do Liberal Democrats. Grouping Reform UK Nigel Farage can count on 13 seats, Scottish National Party which is 10, Greens for 2 seats. Other groups can obtain 23 seats.

Prime Minister Sunak’s Tory result is not as bad as the last pre-election polls predicted, which said it could fall below 100 seats or that the Conservatives would have fewer than the Liberal Democrats. Nevertheless, the Conservative Party has lost almost two-thirds of the seats it previously held.

In the previous election, in December 2019, the Conservatives won 365 seats, although at the end of the Commons term their MSP caucus had 344. The worst election so far for the Conservative Party in terms of the number of seats won was were those of 1906, when it obtained 131 seats out of 670 possible.

British media are drawing attention to the poor result of the Scottish National Party, which, according to exit polls, won only 10 of the 57 seats allocated to Scotland. This is the party's worst result in elections to the House of Commons since 2010. In the previous one, in December 2019, the party won 48 of the 59 Scottish seats.

More than 46 million citizens were eligible to vote. They voted in some 40,000 polling stations to elect 650 members of the House of Commons. A record 4,515 candidates ran for seats in the House of Commons, the highest number ever – 459 of them were independents, and the rest represented 98 political parties, also a record.

Full results from individual districts will start trickling in overnight as votes are counted. The first should appear around 00:30 on Friday Polish time, but most results will be announced after 3:00. Full results from all districts should be known by 9 a.m. ET on Friday.

What could the process of taking over power look like? As early as Friday Keir Starmer as the leader of the winning party he will be received in audience by the king Charles IIIwho will entrust him with the mission of forming a government. Starmer will probably announce the names of ministers on the same day. Probably on Friday, the current prime minister Rishi Sunak will announce his resignation from the leadership position Conservative Party.

The newly elected House of Commons will meet next Tuesday – that day the Speaker will be elected. According to British media, the favourite is Lindsay Hoyleand the parliamentary oaths will begin, which will last several days. The opening ceremony of the new parliamentary session is scheduled for July 17, along with the monarch's speech from the throne, during which Karol III will present the government's legislative program.

Polls show the state of the UK economy is now the most important issue for most voters, amid high living costs and record inflation, which peaked at 11.1% in 2022 and has only recently started to return to normal levels.

Another important topic of the election campaign was health care, or more precisely, the situation National Health System (NHS for short), the state-funded healthcare system. A decade of fiscal austerity that began under Prime Minister Davida Camerona after the 2009 global financial crisis, left British public services severely underfunded and chronically understaffed. Waiting lists for NHS treatment were already growing before the pandemic, which has only made matters worse. The healthcare crisis has been a major source of social discontent in the UK.

Immigration is the third most important issue for British voters, although its importance varies by party preference. In a recent YouGov poll, only 20 per cent of Labour voters said it was one of the most pressing national issues, compared with 65 per cent of Conservatives.

Keir Starmer is often compared to Tony’ego Blairabecause, like him, he made the Labour Party electable to centrist voters. And although the Labour leader is accused of lacking charisma, he looks set to win an even bigger victory in Thursday's House of Commons election than Blair did in 1997.

Starmer was born in London in 1962 but was raised in the small town of Oxted, south of the capital. The Labour leader has often highlighted his working-class background – his father was a locksmith and his mother worked as a nurse. His mother suffered from Still’s disease, a rare autoimmune disorder that eventually left her unable to speak or walk.

Although he was a member of the Labour Party youth group while still at school, he did not enter real politics until he was 50 – in the 2015 House of Commons election, Starmer easily won the safe Labour constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, but Labour lost the election by a landslide. A year later, in the referendum campaign, he supported Britain remaining in European Union.

After Labour's heavy defeat in the 2019 election and Jeremy Corbyn's resignation as leader, Starmer entered the party leadership contest, which he won, becoming the new Labour leader and eventually leader of the opposition in April 2020. His first task was to rebuild the reputation of a Labour Party that had struggled under his predecessor with allegations of condoning anti-Semitism and had veered so far to the left that it had become unelectable for most Britons.

Source: BBC, PAP, Reuters

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