London
CNN
—
The British people overwhelmingly voted to end 14 years of Conservative rule and hand the Labour Party a landslide victory, causing a seismic shift in British politics.
Labour’s victory is bigger than the party would have imagined until very recently, when the last general election in 2019 saw the party suffer its worst defeat in more than 80 years and usher in a long period of political darkness.
But the party has since been rebuilt under the leadership of Keir Starmer, who is set to become Britain’s next prime minister.
In the UK’s single-member constituency system, people in 650 constituencies across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland vote to choose the MPs who will represent them in Parliament. Results were announced early on Friday morning, with most of the votes tallied later that day. However, due to a recount in the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire constituency, the final result of the election will not be released until Saturday morning.
A party needs 326 seats to officially win, and Labor cleared that milestone at around 5 a.m. local time on Friday, giving the new government an overwhelming majority of more than 170 seats in the next parliament.
The UK electoral system can lead to large discrepancies between the proportion of seats a party wins and the proportion of the popular vote it receives.
When support for one party, or antipathy towards another, is spread fairly evenly across the country, you don’t need a large proportion of the popular vote to win a supermajority in Parliament. The Labour Party won a landslide victory despite only getting about a third of the popular vote.
The result is one of the biggest shakeups in British political history, a shock defeat for the Conservative Party after 14 years in power, losing around two-thirds of the 372 seats it held and bringing a brutal end to Rishi Sunak’s chancellorship.
The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s traditional third largest party, also made a huge leap forward from just 11 seats they won in the 2019 general election to more than 70 seats, their best result yet.
Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party, Reform UK, won four seats for the first time and then came second in many seats, splitting the right-wing vote and contributing to the Conservative Party’s defeat.
Meanwhile in Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP) endured a disastrous night, dropping from 48 in 2019 to just nine seats as of Friday morning.
Across the UK, Sinn Féin is the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, winning seven of the 18 seats. Sinn Féin advocates reunification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland in the south, and does not recognise British sovereignty over Northern Ireland, so no Sinn Féin MPs are seated in the assembly.
