Explainer
UK
general election 2024: five key points
Keir
Starmer’s Labour is heading for power with a large majority as voters punish
Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives
Dan Sabbagh
Fri 5 Jul
2024 06.29 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/05/uk-general-election-2024-five-key-points
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.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3.
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 seats at every UK election since 2015 and has run the
regional Scottish government 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
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