Labour ends 14 years of Tory rule, polls show
The Labour Party has succeeded in ending 14 years of Conservative government in the elections on 4 July, according to an exit poll carried out by the Ipso company and broadcast by the BBC, ITV and Sky. This survey, which in the last five elections has had a margin of error of one to seven seats, gives Keir Starmer’s Labour Party 410 deputies in a House of Commons with 650 seats. The poll predicts that the Conservative Party of the candidate and Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, will only have 131 seats compared to the 365 in the last election.
Former human rights lawyer and prosecutor Keir Starmer, 61, would thus secure Labour’s first general election victory since 2005, pending the completion of the vote count and the announcement of the final results at 5am, an hour later in mainland Spain. Starmer would have come very close to the 418 seats won by Labour’s Tony Blair in the 1997 election. In that election, the then Conservative candidate, John Major, won only 165 votes, with 30.6% of the vote.
The Liberal Democrats, led by candidate Ed Davey, are in third place with 61 seats, compared to the 11 they won in 2019, when they were relegated to fourth place. And one of the big news stories of the night is the emergence in the House of Commons of the leader of the populist right, Nigel Farage, the main promoter of Brexit in his day, who has won 13 seats, according to the poll, and would place him in fourth place. Farage had tried up to seven times to enter Parliament, but the British electoral system, which privileges the two-party system, never allowed him to do so. On this eighth occasion, Farage has succeeded.
The Scottish National Party (SNP), which won 48 seats in the last election, now has only 10 and falls to fifth place.
Several analysts argue that never before in recent UK history have so many voters changed their political affiliation in so many parts of the country. Labour has gained 209 seats and the Conservatives have lost 241. The Liberal Democrats have grown by 53 seats, Nigel Farage’s ultra-conservative populist Reform UK has managed to enter the House of Commons for the first time, taking 13 seats. And the Scottish independence movement of the SNP would have lost 38 seats if the results of the poll are confirmed.
#election #live #Starmer #celebrates #overwhelming #Labour #victory #Change #starts #wont #easy
