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.