1. Labour wins historic
landslide election
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.
Starmer’s Labour achieved a remarkable turnaround from a disastrous result
for his party 2019, with a landslide victory roughly on a par with Tony Blair’s
first election win in 1997.
2. It was more of an
anti-Conservative vote,
than a pro-Labour one
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.
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.
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.
3. Scotland’s independence movement took a body blow
The SNP, which won 48 seats in Scotland in 2019, won only 9. Labour, which had won only one seat in 2019, had won
35 seats by 5am, including every seat
in Glasgow.
The previously dominant Scottish National party was knocked back
for the first time in a decade,
setting back its struggle for independence.
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.
But the party’s comprehensive defeat pushes the independence 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.
The party has 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.
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
At the 2019 election, there was talk of
a realignment in British politics as the Conservatives took traditional working-class areas from Labour, largely because voters in those areas were willing to support Boris Johnson to complete Brexit.
Labour won most of these seats back
this time, as voters had moved on
to focus on the Conservatives’ economic record in office.
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.