Britain’s Labour Party swept to power Friday after more than a decade in opposition, as a jaded electorate handed the party a landslide victory — but also a mammoth task of reinvigorating a stagnant economy and dispirited nation.
Labour leader Keir Starmer will officially become prime minister later in the day, leading his party back to government less than five years after it suffered its worst defeat in almost a century.
In the merciless choreography of British politics, he will take charge in 10 Downing St. shortly after Conservative leader Rishi Sunak and his family left the official residence and King Charles III accepted his resignation at Buckingham Palace.
“This is a difficult day, but I leave this job honored to have been prime minister of the best country in the world,” Sunak said in his farewell address.
Sunak had conceded defeat earlier in the morning, saying the voters had delivered a “sobering verdict.”
In a magnanimous farewell speech in the same place where he had called for the snap election six weeks earlier, Sunak wished Starmer all the best but also acknowledged his missteps.
“I have heard your anger, your disappointment, and I take responsibility for this loss,” Sunak said. “To all the Conservative candidates and campaigners who worked tirelessly but without success, I’m sorry that we could not deliver what your efforts deserved.”
With almost all the results in, Labour had won 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons and the Conservatives 118.
“A mandate like this comes with a great responsibility,” Starmer acknowledged in a speech to supporters, saying the fight to regain people’s trust after years of disillusionment “is the battle that defines our age.”
Speaking as dawn broke in London, he said Labour would offer “the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day.”
For Starmer, it’s a massive triumph that will bring huge challenges, as he faces a weary electorate impatient for change against a gloomy backdrop of economic malaise, mounting distrust in institutions and a fraying social fabric.
“Nothing has gone well in the last 14 years,” said London voter James Erskine, who was optimistic for change in the hours before polls closed. “I just see this as the potential for a seismic shift, and that’s what I’m hoping for.”
And that’s what Starmer promised, saying “change begins now.”
Anand Menon, professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London, said British voters were about to see a marked change in political atmosphere from the tumultuous “politics as pantomime” of the last few years.
“I think we’re going to have to get used again to relatively stable government, with ministers staying in power for quite a long time, and with government being able to think beyond the very short term to medium-term objectives,” he said.
Britain has experienced a run of turbulent years — some of it of the Conservatives’ own making and some of it not — that has left many voters pessimistic about their country’s future. The U.K. divorce from the European Union followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine battered the economy, while lockdown-breaching parties held by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his staff caused widespread anger.
Rising poverty, crumbling infrastructure and overstretched National Health Service have led to gripes about “Broken Britain.”
Johnson’s successor, Liz Truss, rocked the economy further with a package of drastic tax cuts and lasted just 49 days in office. Truss, who lost her seat to Labour, was one of a slew of senior Tories kicked out in a stark electoral reckoning.
While the result appears to buck recent rightward electoral shifts in Europe, including in France and Italy, many of those same populist undercurrents flow in Britain. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage roiled the race with his party’s anti-immigrant “take our country back” sentiment and undercut support for the Conservatives and even grabbed some voters from Labour.
The result is a catastrophe for the Conservatives as voters punished them for 14 years of presiding over austerity, Brexit, a pandemic, political scandals and internecine conflict.
The historic defeat — the smallest number of seats in the party’s two-century history — leaves it depleted and in disarray and will spark an immediate contest to replace Sunak, who said he would step down as leader.
In a sign of the volatile public mood and anger at the system, the incoming Parliament will be more fractured and ideologically diverse than any for years. Smaller parties picked up millions of votes, including the centrist Liberal Democrats and Farage’s Reform UK. It won four seats, including one for Farage in the seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea, securing a place in Parliament on his eighth attempt.
The Liberal Democrats won about 70 seats, on a slightly lower share of the vote than Reform because its votes were more efficiently distributed. In Britain’s first-past-the-post system, the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins.
The Green Party won four seats, up from just one before the election.
One of the biggest losers was the Scottish National Party, which held most of Scotland’s 57 seats before the election but looked set to lose all but handful, mostly to Labour.
Labour did not set pulses racing with its pledges to get the sluggish economy growing, invest in infrastructure and make Britain a “clean energy superpower.”
But the party’s cautious, safety-first campaign delivered the desired result. The party won the support of large chunks of the business community and endorsements from traditionally conservative newspapers, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun tabloid, which praised Starmer for “dragging his party back to the center ground of British politics.”
The Conservative campaign, meanwhile, was plagued by gaffes. The campaign got off to an inauspicious start when rain drenched Sunak as he made the announcement outside 10 Downing St. Then, Sunak went home early from commemorations in France marking the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.
Several Conservatives close to Sunak are being investigated over suspicions they used inside information to place bets on the date of the election before it was announced.
In Henley-on-Thames, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of London, voters like Patricia Mulcahy, who is retired, sensed the nation was looking for something different. The community, which has long voted Conservative, flipped to the Liberal Democrats this time.
“The younger generation are far more interested in change,’’ Mulcahy said ahead of the results. “But whoever gets in, they’ve got a heck of a job ahead of them. It’s not going to be easy.”
(AP)
8 Responses
a catastrophe for the Conservatives as voters punished them for 14 years of presiding over austerity, Brexit According to this logic, the Liberal party should have had the landslide, as their #1 policy, is immediate return to the EU.
While Starmer who’s wife is Jewish, himself is staunchly pro-Israel, many pro-Palestinians have also gotten seats in the parliament either within Labor or as independent. Under that pressure, Labor seems to be shifting left in favor of a Palestinian state.
George Galloway Ym”s anti-semite and pro-Palestinian by extreme lost his seat after just 50 days and none of his party made it B”H.
Liberal Democrats, wanting to recognise the Palestinian state immediately also got an extra 63 now total 70 seats.
The Scottish National who caused a chaos with their motion to demand an immediate ceasefire (call it surrender) in Gaza lost most of their seats down to 9.
Farage from the right wing Reform UK got in the 1st time with just 4 seats but garnered 4m votes.
We are in Golus despite living in a Malchus shel chessed…
I’m sure many Jews voted for him. They will likely regret it. I wish he won’t b terrible but he will b without some miracle
Such utter hogwash in the above article.
To put thngs in perspective:
1) Labour did not have a landslide “win”, more so the conservatives had a landslide “lose”, which therefore gave way to labour, don’t forget labour is extremely unpopular IN ITSELF, and some of the most important cabinet members of Kier Stamer’s new cabinet, himself included, nearly lost their own seats, or their majority was severely reduced, some of them barely scraping by with 3 digit number majorities, not really “landslide victory”…
2) His wife is “jew-ish”, and therefore asked Kier to keep friday night closed from the public, and private family time, as she keeps the Shabbat. Right, enjoy the Friday night prawn and pork, but don’t call it Shabbat (even so, deep down who knows if her little sacrafice on her very low ignorant level is not chashuv..? only Hashem knows).
3) His policies is nearly 0% different to Sunak’s, whenever he was/is asked, he “squirms and squishes” about, clearly hating it but eventually getting out of it by pointing at Sunak and calling him the bad boy, and that he’s different (but never tell you why – because he isn’t).
4) The polls speak for themselves, in which only 37% of UK held the belief that any change at all is likely under Kier Starmer (which is why many didn’t vote, even though it was a very contested vote).
5) He can’t sort out his own party, which is a whole conglomeration of liberal ignoramuses, with extreme islamist militant-“kill the Jews” jihad-calling nutjobs, *** bullies (that flood conservative MP’s with all kinds of inappropriate pictures, and other related paraphernalia..), scammers, ex-convicts, tax evaders (apparently labour is the party of the people), bald faced liars, criminals, and so many others.
@sensibleyid,
Yes, unfortunately you are right, there are people that went back over, under the assumption that he has “rebranded” labour.
They’ll wake up [hopefully] one day.
I am still unsure if I should have or should have not voted (irrelevant to what I actually did).
Same junk just rebranded.
Maybe next time Farage will get in and shake up Britain a bit, and get it back on its feet, much like Trump would over the pond by you guys….
Dust up halochos of how to deal with King Agrippah? Is his wife halachically Jewish or not (her mother converted and was in Liberal synagogue …)? If not, how would one respond to a kiddush that, I presume Lady or Jr recites? When invited to their house of course.
1. The Conservatives lost, rather than Labour won. The major issue was domestic policy and economics.
2. The previously Labour leader was someone who supports Hamas (and has been kicked out of the Labor party). Given that the Labor victory was based on dislike of the governing party rather than yearning for the opposition, the anti-Semite would have become Prime Minister had he been the opposition leader when the election was called.
Time to move out of England and move to EY
Problem is EY is run by Bibi and the Likud government who are very weak and incompetent.
Very few housing projects approved and the economy is not so great. It’s time for a new frum and strong right.
Likud like the labor party should be dissolved into the books of history
Interestingly, Labour’s vote was barely up from last time when they were thoroughly defeated. There was no swing to Labour; the swing was just against the Tories. In particular many Tory voters went over to Reform, which will be the real opposition for the next five years. Unfortunately Reform only got 4 seats, after the early expectations of 13, but they got a huge percentage of the vote and will only improve on that next time. They are the future of the Tory side of UK politics; the Conservative Party is finished, unless it takes a good hard look at itself and adopts the Reform Party’s manifesto in place of its own.