Conservatives lost UK’s landslide election just as much as Labour won it
Ashen-faced, the defeated Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak took to the stage at 4.40am at the count centre in his Yorkshire constituency of Richmond and Northallerton, where he held his seat.
“Labour has won this election,” said Sunak, acknowledging only half the truth. The reality was that, almost as much as his rival party had won it, the Conservative Party under his leadership had lost it.
Labour has turned Britain’s electoral map red and is on course for a huge majority and more than 400 seats in the House of Commons. Yet nationally it has only modestly increased its vote share. Its vote was up by 3 per cent in England’s midlands, where it has rebuilt the so-called red wall. Its vote was also up by a large 19 per cent in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party has been routed.
But in Wales and also in London the Labour vote was actually down by 5 per cent on the last election, while it also dipped marginally elsewhere in the south of England. Compared to the 2017 election under Jeremy Corbyn when the party denied the Tories a majority, Labour’s share of the vote had actually fallen from 40 per cent to 37 per cent.
[ Northern Ireland analysis: Job done for Sinn Féin, but DUP face terrible night with high-profile losses ]
The Conservative Party, meanwhile, saw its vote share collapse from 45 per cent to just 23 per cent. This is the real reason that Labour has won such a large majority, along with the surge in support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. Reform and the Liberal Democrats, and not Labour, have picked up the lion’s share of the votes lost by the Tories. Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system is an unforgiving beast.
Yet all of this will matter little to triumphant Labour leader Keir Starmer, who later today will become prime minister, ending 14 years of Tory rule. His party has won everywhere that it wanted to. It has swept aside the SNP in the central belt of Scotland that runs from Edinburgh to Glasgow, reducing the nationalist party to a handful of seats, down from the 48 it won in 2019.
Labour has also taken back most of the traditional working class seats in the midlands and north of England that it lost to the Tories under Boris Johnson in 2019.
Yet beneath the surface, there is also an early warning here for Labour. Farage’s Reform UK, although it will win barely a handful of seats, came second in some constituencies in the northeast with close to 30 per cent of the votes. It may cause trouble for Labour in these areas in the years ahead.
- Listen to our Inside Politics Podcast for the latest analysis and chat
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
