Polls have closed in the UK General Election, and the nationwide exit poll says the Labour Party has won around 410 seats nationwide, replacing the Conservatives after 14 wasted years.
Sir Keir Starmer, a top lawyer who once served as the United Kingdom’s Director of Public Prosecutions and supposedly former hardline leftist radical, who claims to have changed his mind and reformed the Labour party he now leads into a mature and capable governing force, is going to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
The Ipsos exit poll claims 410 seats for Labour — the second largest Labour majority ever, if it proves to be correct — and a crushing defeat to the Conservatives, collapsing from 365 seats won in 2019 to an estimated 131 today.
The Liberal Democrats are polled to have enjoyed strong growth to 61 seats. Nigel Farage’s Reform, if this exit poll is correct, have well and truly gained the beachhead they said they wanted with an estimated 13 seats — he will be very happy with this.
UPDATE 0400 — Reform UK’s Richard Tice wins seat in Parliament
Nigel Farage’s deputy leader Reform party chairman, Richard Tice won his seat in Boston and Skegness, becoming the fourth successful candidate so far, following Mr Farage in Clacton, former Tory MP Lee Anderson in Ashfield, and Rupert Lowe in Great Yarmouth.
UPDATE 0340 — Nigel Farage is a Member of Parliament
One of the big questions of the evening has been answered. At the eighth time of trying, Nigel Farage has been elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Read all about it here.
UPDATE 0225 — Reform UK wins first seat
Reform are doing well time and time again with its second places, but now they’ve have their first Member of Parliament elected, former Tory Lee Anderson who defected to Reform earlier this year. Standing for re-election in Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, Anderson took 17,062 votes, well ahead of Labour who took 11,553.
Importantly the Conservatives were beaten into just fourth place on 3,271 votes by a local independent. Humiliating for them.
The question remains just how many Reform MPs the party is going to manage to clinch tonight. Breitbart News understands the Farage camp is very confident about their outcome in Clacton, meaning — if correct — their leader will be going to Westminster next week too. We may be able to expect that result within the hour.
UPDATE 0125 — Nigel Farage in a good mood
It is still very early days for this election. We haven’t even had a dozen results yet, and a really clear picture of what’s actually happening for maybe three more hours, when the avalanche of seats declaring around four AM shows the lay of the land. Nevertheless Mr Farage seems extremely optimistic and has forecast a whopping six million votes for his party. Read the full story here.
UPDATE 2320 — Sunderland South result is first of the night
Labour holds the first result of the night — no surprise there — but what is really surprising is the Reform UK result, gaining over twice as many votes as the Conservative Party. Farage HQ will be cheering this: they will be collecting second-place finishes tonight keenly as they look at where to build their ground operation in the coming months and years.
UPDATE 2220 — Results appear to be less extreme than polled
There’s no way to get around the fact Labour are winning a historic majority in Parliament tonight. But if the results do resemble the exit poll, then this election sees a much smaller victory for Labour than many polls suggested in recent months, and a much better performance for the Conservatives.
Don’t forget in recent days there was talk of a Labour ‘supermajority’ and we’re not quite there. In recent days there was talk of the Conservatives dipping to double-digits seat numbers. They’re looking like they’ll survive total wipeout and could — sadly, some might say — survive this to bounce back another day.
Even for Nigel Farage’s faction, Reform UK. On 13 seats predicted, that’s absolutely the high-end of predictions.
But predictions are one thing. The real numbers are hours away yet, so stay tuned as they roll in and the real picture emerges.
The original story continues below
The counting of individual seats for the Westminster Parliament’s House of Commons is now underway. It will continue in many cases until the early hours of Friday morning. Still, the national swing has all but confirmed that Starmer will lead the largest party and, consequently, will take over the role of Prime Minister on Friday after an audience with the King.
So Britain is getting a left-wing government. The big question is, what kind? If Sir Keir really has reformed as much as claimed, we’re in for continuity Rishi Sunak. If he’s been hiding his true self to get at the levers of power, things could be about to get even more uncomfortable for Britain’s squeezed middle class. Who he appoints to his cabinet in the coming days may telegraph some of this.
Who is Sir Keir Starmer?
Labour Party leader Sir Kier Starmer is one of the least known political figures to ascend to the top job in Britain in recent memory, apparently making the calculation to step back and let the Conservatives self-immolate as an election strategy rather than relying on his own personality or party platform to win voters over to his side.
Much like Joe Biden in the United States, Starmer has promised a ‘return to normalcy’ — whatever that means — as his central pitch to the public, promising a dispassionate technocratic and managerial style of governance.
However, many have warned that underneath his boring exterior, the leftist leader is looking to fundamentally transform the United Kingdom along the lines of the ‘New Labour Revolution’ of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who remains deeply influential within the Labour Party and will undoubtedly be seeking to steer the Starmer ship to continue his globalist agenda.
Similarly to Blair, Starmer has sought to downplay his history of radical leftist politics as well as his previous support of far-left former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, however, he does still admit to being a “socialist”.
Starmer joined the Labour Party Young Socialists at the age of 16 and would go on to serve as the editor of the Trotskyist magazine Socialist Alternatives, which sought to advance the aims of International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency (IRMT) in the United Kingdom. The IRMT was founded by Greek Trotskyite Michel Pablo and sought to advance a “red-green” form of communism, combining far-left economics with the environmentalist movement.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that Starmer has made the green agenda a central piece of his platform, vowing to achieve “Net Zero” carbon emissions in the UK by the end of the decade, a goal that would drastically transform the British economy and likely make the country poorer and more dependent on foreign energy imports to survive economically.
The Labour Party leader has also tried to downplay his well-to-do upbringing in the affluent London suburb of Oxted. Starmer has often made bones about his father being a “toolmaker” to demonstrate his working-class roots, however, his father, Rodney, was actually the owner of a toolmaking factory, rather than being a labourer as Starmer seemed to imply.
Starmer was also privately educated at the Reigate Grammar School before studying law at Oxford University. The Labour Party has sought to use Starmer’s history as a prosecutor — previously serving as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) — to give weight to the party’s alleged plans to crack down on people smuggling and human trafficking gangs behind the illegal migrant crisis.
However, critics have pointed to his office’s failure to prosecute infamous paedophile and BBC children’s television host Jimmy Savile as evidence that he would likely be weak on crime as prime minister.
Starmer’s critics have also took aim at the Labour Party leader for his apparent willingness to shift possessions in order to gain political favour. This came to the fore on the issue of gender, with Starmer initially saying that some women could have penises — a position held by much of his progressive metropolitan base — before later backtracking as the election loomed to declare that women were, in fact, “adult females“.
Like his stance on who and who cannot have penises, how Starmer will govern remains something of a mystery.
How did this happen?
The Conservative Party has led the United Kingdom for over 14 years and, until now, has always been extremely adept at election winning. With the coming of David Cameron earlier this century, the party appears to have landed upon a new, even easier route to quick, cheap electoral success: promise what your voters want, even if you find their opinions distasteful, but actually do what you as the enlightened leader wanted to do all along anyway, once elected.
Cynical as it may seem, this actually worked for a while and the excuses why the party couldn’t do the popular thing — and let’s be frank here, we’re talking about border control — seemed plausible enough. But then things started to go wrong; when promises made at election time came to be expected to be delivered.
Cameron promised in the 2015 general election, for instance, to deliver a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Like the empty migration control promises, this was a cynical ploy to make voters and activists the very smart people leading the Conservative party considered gauche and low-quality shut up. After all, the promise would never have to be acted upon, because Cameron never expected to win that election.
But whoops! He did, quite likely in part because he had promised a referendum and that was more popular than he’d realised, and then he lost the referendum he’d never intended to hold in the first place because once again he misread the room on Europe. Funny how those lies catch up to you, isn’t it?
By this stage, the Conservative Party was in the hands of others, and again promising to do the precise opposite of what it actually wanted to do, because its leaders still had absolutely nothing in common with its voters. On Brexit, the Tories promised to deliver the will of the people without wishing to in any way whatsoever — the people who actually ‘did’ the Brexit process in the government weren’t even Brexiteers — and on migration those old lies were still in the manifestos and being absolutely completely and totally ignored.
Some very senior Conservatives even had mask-off moments and admitted their total contempt for the immigration question and admitted they never ever intended to fulfil their election-time promises. The fact they felt able to say this in public told the members of the public that were listening pretty much all they needed to know about the contempt their ‘betters’ felt for them.
And so it followed with everything else. The Conservatives were supposed to be the party of limited taxation and a smaller state but have made them the biggest ever on top of failing to do anything meaningful whatsoever on the culture wars, failing to help families… failing the whole lot.
The fact is that after the Conservatives, after 14 years in power, have absolutely nothing to show off as an achievement to the would-be voter, and every promise made for future action immediately conjures the inevitable question: Why didn’t you think of that ten years ago?
So here we are, with a massive Labour Majority. But there are some interesting things to note here; because while this is absolutely a Tory defeat, it’s a funny sort of Labour victory. Not that how you win in this system matters so much in this system, as the winner takes all. But these factors may be handy for crystal-balling what comes next, and how long this government survives.
Normally when a new Prime Minister wins a national election and takes office, he is popular in the public and has a net-positive approval rating. This has always been the case in the past. With Sir Keir Starmer, on day one in office he’s going to have a net-negative rating, meaning more members of the public dislike him than like him.
That’s big and implies he only won because the Conservatives couldn’t. A big claim, and it may seem like sour grapes on the day a giant of a left-wing government sweeps into power. But other polling backs it up. YouGov this week asked people who said they would vote for Labour on Thursday why they were doing it. Just five per cent said it was because they agreed with Labour policies. Meanwhile, 61 per cent said they were voting Labour “to get the Tories Out” or because “the country needs a change”.
Strange world we’re in. But at least it should be interesting.
What happens now?
Assuming the national vote spread translates into enough seats for Starmer to hold a majority of seats in the Parliament by breakfast time Friday — and it will — Sir Keir will be able to travel to Buckingham Palace and tell the King, Charles III that he commands the confidence of Parliament. In return, the King will appoint Sir Keir as his new Prime Minister.
He would be the third Prime Minister of the King’s short reign so far, having assumed the crown during the short tenure of Liz Truss in 2022.
Sir Keir will then embark upon the process of building his government by appointing ministers. Many of these have been pre-determined for a long time because the opposition party maintains a ‘shadow’ government to hold the ministers of the day to account and to allow those who wish to replace them to learn their roles. There could be some surprise changes, and we’ll see that in the next couple of days at most.
From next Tuesday, Parliament will be sitting again and the new members will be sworn into the house. It is at this point the business of the new government will begin.
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