Keir Starmer’s Labour Party set for landslide victory

Pollster John Curtice told the BBC the scale of the Conservatives’ projected defeat was due to the rise of smaller parties as well as a challenge from Labour.

He said the seat projections showed the national voter turnout had “swung decisively against the Conservatives”.

“The Conservatives have seen a much bigger drop in support in areas where they are defending seats than in areas where Labour already has seats,” he said.

“Not because Labour is doing spectacularly well in Conservative-held seats, but because the Reform Party is doing spectacularly well. Tonight, much of the damage inflicted on the Conservatives has been done by the Reform Party, but it has turned out that it is Labour who is the beneficiary.”

Reform UK is a right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage.

He also noted that while the Liberal Democrats’ support had not increased significantly overall, they had risen in constituencies where they were challenging the Conservatives, and warned that the patterns shown in the polls may not be entirely accurate.

“The election may look like a landslide victory for Labour, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Labour won a landslide victory in terms of the vote,” he told the BBC.

Jenni Reed

Exit polls suggest the SNP is on track to win just 10 seats in the UK Parliament, down from 48 in 2019.

This comes after a period of turmoil for pro-Scottish independence parties.

Former party leader Humza Yousaf Yousaf resigned as Scotland’s First Minister in April after just over a year. Long-serving leader Nicola Sturgeon suddenly announced her departure in February 2023. Sturgeon is under police investigation as part of a probe into the party’s finances, and her husband, Peter Murrell, was charged with embezzlement earlier this year.

John Swinney became the party leader earlier this year.

Katrina Bishop

The outcome of the 2024 UK general election remains a matter of prediction, but it is widely being described as a historic result.

One reason is that the election is likely to be a big success for the Labour Party: even if it won a slim majority, it would need to win more seats than Tony Blair achieved in 1997. A projected majority of 170 would be an unprecedented gain.

Exit polls showed the party won 410 seats, up from 202 in the last general election in 2019.

But the rise of smaller parties means Labour may have won a smaller share of the vote than it did under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, when it narrowly prevented the Conservatives from winning a majority.

Exit polls showed the ruling Conservative Party won just 131 seats, down from 365 in the last election and its lowest since the post-war era.

Jenni Reed

Ruth Davidson, a former leader of the Scottish Conservative party, told Sky News that the result was a “disaster” for the party, but she said exit polls showed it was not as bad as had been predicted in the days leading up to the vote.

“There is no room for covering this up. This is a genocide. It is a genocide,” she said.

-Matt Clinch

The manual counting of millions of votes has begun in 650 constituencies across the UK, with the first results due to be announced shortly, with announcements continuing overnight and into Friday morning.

Jenni Reed

Britain’s ruling Conservative Party was expected to lose power in Thursday’s general election, but initial exit polls showed a surprising change in its support.

According to an Ipsos UK poll conducted for Sky News, BBC and ITV News, the 650 seats in the House of Commons are expected to be roughly divided as follows:

Labor: 410
Conservative: 131
Liberal Democratic Party: 61
Reformation: 13
Scottish National Party: 10
Plaid Camry: 4
Green: 2
Others: 19

In the 2019 election, the Conservatives won 365 seats and Labour won 202. The Liberal Democrats won 11 seats and the Scottish SNP won 48 seats.

Jenni Reed

Exit polls released as the polls closed predicted a landslide victory for the Labour Party and a major defeat for the incumbent Conservative Party.

The poll, conducted by Ipsos UK for Sky News, the BBC and ITV News, predicts that Labour will win 410 of the 650 seats, while the Conservatives will win 131. Smaller parties are also expected to gain significant seats, with the Liberal Democrats expected to win 61 seats and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK expected to win 13 seats.

Jenni Reed

The first seat announced for the 2024 general election will be won by Labour in the Houghton Sunderland South constituency.

Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s education leader, has been elected as the first member of Britain’s new parliament, saying that if exit polls are correct, “after 14 years, the British people have chosen change”.

Labour retained the seats of Houghton and Sunderland South, but Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party candidate made a significant improvement on his 2019 election result (then called the Brexit Party), overtaking the Conservatives into second place.

Several constituencies in the north of England are competing to be the first to declare voting in the general election.

In the 2017 and 2019 votes, Newcastle took that honour by announcing within 90 minutes of the polls closing. Between 1992 and 2015, Sunderland were the first to declare their seat.

Jenni Reed

Opinion polls are predicting a Labour victory across the board, but many seats are seen as close races, including those of British Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt.

According to a Financial Times forecasting model, there are about 120 of the 650 seats where the margin of victory is expected to be less than 5 percentage points.

Prominent politicians are trying to avoid what is known in British political jargon as a “Portillo moment,” a reference to former Conservative politician Michael Portillo, who lost his seat in the 1997 general election to a relatively unknown Labour candidate, Stephen Twigg, but was a big name who had served as defence minister and was seen as a future leader of the party.

The shock result was seen as a symbol of a swing in Labour’s favour, following Tony Blair’s landslide victory over incumbent Prime Minister John Major.

Jenni Reed

Under former Conservative leader Boris Johnson, the party won a majority of 365 seats in the last general election in 2019 to Labour’s 202.

The voter turnout was 67.3%.

When Parliament was dissolved on May 30 to begin the election campaign on July 4 this year, various political developments had split the party into 344 Conservative MPs and 205 Labour MPs.

Jenni Reed

On Thursday, millions of British people in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to elect their local representatives in the House of Commons, the UK’s lower house.

In typically British fashion, the weather was changeable and unseasonably cold during the first July general election since 1945.

In the UK, there are 650 elected members known as the Members of Parliament. By long-standing convention, the Prime Minister is a member of Parliament appointed by the King who has the “confidence” of the House of Commons, which means he is in effect the leader of the party with the most seats.

Candidates for parliament stand in one of the UK’s 650 constituencies. Under this system, known as the “single-member constituency” system, voters can only choose one candidate from a list of local candidates, and the person who receives the most votes in each constituency becomes the member of parliament.

Unlike other voting systems, there is no second round or first- and second-choice rankings, which means it can be difficult for smaller parties to translate an increase in their vote share into seats.

Around 40,000 polling stations will be open on Thursday from 7am to 10pm, with one of the two main parties, Labour or the Conservatives, expected to hand over victory by Friday morning.

Jenni Reed