Landslide win for Labour, anger towards Tories: The 6 big takeaways from UK election results

Britain has handed a spectacular victory to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which has ended the 14-year rule of the Conservatives. The outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has accepted defeat, saying “sorry” to his party candidates.

Starmer is set to succeed Sunak as UK prime minister as the centre-left Labour Party returns to power for the first time since 2010. The 61-year-old has declared, “Change begins now.”

As the Labour leader moves into 10 Downing Street – the official residence of the British Prime Minister, here are the key takeaways from the UK general election results.

Labour’s emphatic success but with a catch

Labour’s landslide victory was widely expected. The party has won over 411 seats in a 650-member House. The Labour Party only under Tony Blair had won more – 418 – in an election.

Not many politicians or commentators had expected Labour to recover so quickly in just five years after its crushing defeat in the 2019 general elections.

British voters have shown they wanted change after the last five years that saw multiple controversies, and two PM resignations: Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Several Conservative heavyweights, including 11 Cabinet ministers, failed to return as an MP. Former UK PM Truss’ loss was perhaps the most embarrassing defeat for the Tories.

However, Labour’s decisive win is “fragile”. As CNN noted, the results show that the party’s decisive success is more about the voters’ disenchantment with the Conservatives than the excitement for Labour’s offer.

The Labour Party has secured a vote share of 33.7 per cent, just a 1.6 per cent rise since the last elections.

The Tories bagged a vote share of 23.7 per cent, registering a massive drop of 19.9 per cent.

According to the AFP, Labour’s vote share is the lowest ever to win a majority, signalling the “fracturing of the opposition and the quirks of the UK’s electoral system.”

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Rise of Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats have returned as the third largest party in the UK Parliament.

The party has won more than 70 seats, increasing its tally from just 11 seats in 2019. The centrist Liberal Democrats were nearly wiped out after entering a coalition government led by the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015, reported Euronews. 

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey hailed the party’s “record-breaking” performance in these UK elections.

The party candidates defeated many Tory ministers, including Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan.

The Liberal Democrats also unseated Conservatives from two major constituencies – Witney, the constituency previously held by former Prime Minister David Cameron and Maidenhead – once represented by former PM Theresa May.

Davey has promised not to let down the voters. He said, “I want to thank you for trusting us again. We will not let you down. Trust is a very precious commodity.”

He also thanked supporters for the party’s best results “in over 100 years”, reported The Guardian.

Reform UK gains at Tories’ cost

Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party took votes away from the Conservatives. The party won four seats, including Clacton represented by its leader Farage.

He emerged victorious at his eighth attempt. The pro-Brexit, anti-immigration Farage, with three other MPs from his party, is likely to form a “noisy bloc at Westminster”, according to The Guardian.

While the exit polls had predicted 13 seats for Reform, the final results were not that accommodating.

However, the party proved to be a “disruptive force”, noted CNN, as it diverted the Conservative voter base in several seats.

In his victory speech, Farage said, “It’s not just disappointment with the Conservative Party. There is a massive gap on the center right of British politics and my job is to fill it. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

He also declared “Labour government will be in trouble very, very quickly and we will now be targeting Labour votes. We’re coming for Labour - be in no doubt about that.”

The Reform UK’s relative success comes at a time when Europe is seeing a turn towards the far-right.

ALSO READ: The big winners and casualties of UK elections

Setback for Scotland’s independence movement

The election results were sobering for the Scottish National Party (SNP) which has been reduced to nine seats in Scotland, a catastrophic fall of 38 seats.

This comes after the SNP was hit by a series of scandals and changes in the party’s leadership – including Nicola Sturgeon stepping down.

According to The Guardian, the SNP had the most seats at every UK election since 2015 despite failing in its bid to secure Scottish independence at a referendum in 2014.

Labour has emerged as the most popular party in Scotland which elects 59 MPs. The Lib Dems have also taken seats from the SNP.

The pro-independence party, which has been dominating Scottish politics for a generation, had promised to get approval for a second independence referendum. However, its diminished position shelves the issue for now, as per the British newspaper.

More women reach Parliament

British voters have elected more women to Parliament than they did in 2019.

At least 242 female MPs will be in the House of Commons. This breaks the record set in 2019 when 220 women were elected to Parliament.

The UK has seen an upward trend in the election of women MPs. In 2015, the number was 196, which further rose to 207 in 2017.

Conservative Party’s internal woes

The Tories’ rout has brought its internal right to the fore. The results could trigger a contest for the Conservative Party leadership, with many vying for Rishi Sunak’s job.

One of the probable candidates to replace Sunak, the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman said in her victory speech, “I’m sorry that my party didn’t listen to you”.

“(The) Conservative Party has let you down. You – the great British people – voted for us over 14 years and we did not keep our promises. We’ve acted as if we’re entitled to your vote regardless of what we did, regardless of what we didn’t do, despite promising time after time that we would do those things and we need to learn our lesson because if we don’t, bad as tonight has been for my party, we’ll have many worse nights to come.”

Kemi Badenoch is another name doing rounds for the Tory leadership battle.

Some senior Conservatives like Penny Mordaunt – who lost the election – are calling for the party’s shift back to the centre. She was also seen as a possible Sunak replacement.

“Renewal … will not be achieved by us talking to an ever smaller slice of ourselves, but by being guided by the people of this country. Our values must be the people’s,” she said.

Not just a division within the party, the next Conservative leader would also have to fend off the challenge from Reform UK. They already seem to have their hands full.

With inputs from agencies