Labour's landslide: Keir Starmer set to form new government
The elections for the House of Commons in the United Kingdom have concluded. According to exit polls, the opposition Labour Party has won, securing 410 seats in the 650-member House.
The opposition Labour Party decisively won Thursday's elections to the British House of Commons. According to exit polls, Labour will have 410 seats in the 650-member lower house of parliament. However, this is slightly fewer than pre-election forecasts predicted.
An absolute majority for the Labour Party means that on Friday, its leader Keir Starmer will be received by King Charles III, who will entrust him with the task of forming a new government. Labour has been in opposition since losing the elections in May 2010.
"The Labour leader has secured the 326 seats required for a majority in the House of Commons - putting an end to 14 years of Conservative rule.," reports Sky News.
Defeat for the Conservative Party
All indications are that the Conservative Party, which has governed the United Kingdom for 14 years, suffered a heavy defeat in Thursday's elections to the House of Commons. According to exit polls, the Conservatives will have only 131 seats in the 650-member House of Commons. This ties to their worst result in history.
However, this is not as bad a result as the last pre-election polls predicted, which suggested it could fall below one hundred seats or that the Conservatives would have fewer seats than the Liberal Democrats.
Nevertheless, the Conservative Party lost nearly two-thirds of its previously held seats. In the previous elections in December 2019, the Conservatives won 365 seats, although by the end of the House of Commons term, their parliamentary group had 344 members. Until now, the worst elections for the Conservative Party, in terms of the number of seats won, were those in 1906, when they secured 131 out of a possible 670 seats.
Elections in the United Kingdom
More than 46 million citizens registered to vote were eligible to participate in the elections. They voted in approximately 40,000 polling stations to elect 650 members of the House of Commons. A total of 4,515 candidates contested for seats, the highest number in history; 459 ran as independent candidates, and the remaining represented 98 political parties, which is also a record.
Results from exit polls were announced immediately after the polls closed. In the past five elections, the average difference between the number of seats predicted by exit polls and the final number for individual parties ranged from 1.5 to 7.5 seats.
As votes are counted, complete results from various districts will emerge overnight. Full results from all districts should be available later on Friday.
