Labour triumphs in UK July 4 elections, Conservatives defeat. The first exit polls provide the size of the victory of the party led by Keir Starmer: 410 seats for Labour and 131 for the Conservatives. Then, 61 seats for the Liberal Democrats. Followed by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK with 13 and the Scottish National Party with 10.
“To everyone who campaigned for Labour in this election, to everyone who voted for us and put their faith in our Party, thank you,” Starmer wrote on X. “If you want change you must vote for it,” he said yesterday, fearing abstentionism. “I know there are swing constituencies across the country, I take nothing for granted, I respect the voters and we must earn every vote.”
The majority of 170 seats that Starmer is set to have is only slightly less than the one that Tony Blair (179 seats) won in 1997: this figure indicates the extent of Labour’s success and the Conservative collapse. If the final results confirm the initial data, the 131 seats for the Tories would represent the worst outcome for the party since the term Conservative has been used, starting from 1830. It would worsen the negative record of 156 seats that dates back to 1906.
Who is Keir Starmer
Starmer, 61, loves to remember growing up in a working-class family. His father was a factory worker, his mother was a nurse – who later suffered from a rare, serious autoimmune disease – and his family was so staunchly Labour that they named their son after the party’s first leader in the Commons, Keir Hardie. Starmer also loves to talk about the terraced house where he grew up in Surrey, which “was everything to my family, it gave us stability,” he wrote in recent months in a post announcing the plan for public housing so that “the aspiration of working people to have their own home can become a reality.”
As a boy he attended Reigate Grammar School, one of Britain’s top state schools, which became private two years after he entered: Starmer’s fees were paid by the local council until he was 16. After graduating, he was the first in his family to go to university, first at Leeds and then Oxford, becoming a human rights lawyer in 1987, which led to travel to the Caribbean and Africa.
In the late 1990s he defended pro bono the so-called McLibel activists, who had been accused of defamation by McDonald’s for distributing leaflets questioning the fast food corporation’s environmental claims. In 2008 he was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions, the highest-ranking prosecutor in England and Wales, and in 2014 he was made a baronet, although he rarely uses his title ‘Sir’.
His entry into politics came in 2015 when he was elected MP for a district in North London, when Labour was led by left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn who appointed him shadow secretary for Brexit, which once approved was considered by Starmer, who resigned from his post, “a catastrophic outcome for the United Kingdom, our communities and future generations”.
Starmer has held this belief for years, becoming an advocate for a second referendum to give the British people the chance to confirm the actual deal to leave the EU. However, he has abandoned this position in recent years, making it clear that his Labour government will not seek to backtrack on the exit from the EU or the terms negotiated by Boris Johnson.
After the disastrous 2019 election, in which Labour won its fewest seats since 1935, the maximalist Corbyn stepped down as party leader, and Starmer was elected leader in April 2020, promising to lead the party “into a new era with confidence and hope”. He took a clear reformist turn, aiming to win back lost voters and attract more voters to lead Labour back to victory.
Thanks in part to the Tories’ internal disasters, the Labour Party began to lead the polls in October 2021 and has had a 20% lead since the beginning of 2023, which it will be running with in the elections next Thursday. In particular, Starmer, after the humiliating defeat in the Hartlepool by-election in 2021, has focused on recovering voters in the so-called Red Wall, the red wall of historic Labour strongholds in the north of England and the Midlands, won by the Tories in the 2019 elections.
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