Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Friday

5 Jul 2024

Why Muslim voters turned their backs on Starmer’s Labour

In an otherwise jubilant night for Labour, the party has performed badly in areas with a high proportion of Muslim voters. So far, Labour has lost five seats with large Muslim populations – four to independent candidates and one to the Conservatives. The party’s vote is down on average by 11 points in seats where more than 10 per cent of the population identify as Muslim, with pro-Gaza candidates making significant inroads. Labour has been wary throughout this campaign of the impact that the Middle East crisis would have on its vote in urban areas with significant numbers of Muslim voters. It followed comments last year by the Labour leader, Sir Keir

Kate Andrews

Labour passes its first test with the markets

Markets don’t like surprises. And the election results, while explosive, are not a surprise – or at least the winner isn’t. Labour has secured a substantial majority, as markets had been expecting the party to do from the start of the election. No surprise this morning means no immediate jitters, as the result was already priced in. Sterling is slightly up, by 0.1 per cent, hovering around $1.28. The FTSE 100 is up 0.4 per cent since markets opened this morning. Most notably, housebuilding stocks are on the up. The strong speculation that Labour will use its first days in power to announce a planning overhaul has given the market

Nick Cohen

Why conservatives should get behind Starmer

The Conservatives are going down to one of their worst defeats ever. The opposition has come from nowhere to absolutely destroy them. It ought to be one of those rare moments in British history when the centre-left can celebrate crushing a Tory party, that drives us to despair and rage in equal measure. Speaking at a victory rally at 5 a.m. this morning, Keir Starmer told his supporters, ‘We can look forward to walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first, but getting stronger through the day’. It was not quite as poetic as Wordsworth’s greeting of the French Revolution ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corybn and the rise of the Gaza independents

A counterpoint to the main story of Labour’s election victory is the way Gaza has cost the party at least five seats – and ran it very close in others. Jon Ashworth’s shock loss to independent Gaza campaigner Shockat Adam in Leicester South was the most high profile but there were three other losses to independents standing on a similar platform. Jeremy Corbyn was returned as an independent in Islington North, referencing Gaza in both his campaign literature and acceptance speech. It won’t just be on Gaza that Starmer now comes under pressure to move Khalid Mahmood, a Labour MP who has campaigned against Islamist extremism, was beaten in Birmingham

William Atkinson

Rishi Sunak should do the honourable thing – and stay put

A record number of cabinet ministers gone. A wipeout in Wales. Only 22 per cent of the vote, with Reform and the Liberal Democrats snapping at the Conservatives’ heels. A generation of Tory talent mowed down by an unearned Labour landslide. Rishi Sunak is the only one of the last four Tory leaders whose seat is still Conservative. The Tory party is looking for someone to blame for its election wipeout. Members might currently be staggering across the battlefield, shellshocked and stunned. But the Conservative party loves nothing more than an uncivil war of finger-pointing and blame-shifting. Each tribe and family will have their own explanation for the defeat. Each

James Heale

Labour wins by a landslide

15 min listen

Where to start with an historic election night. Keir Starmer has got his 1997 moment, winning an enormous majority. Elsewhere, eleven cabinet ministers have lost their seats, including: Grant Shapps, Gillian Keegan and Penny Mordaunt. Former prime minister Liz Truss has lost her seat, as have senior Tories Jacob Rees-Mogg and Miriam Cates. The Lib Dems have made massive gains, the SNP were decimated in Scotland and Nigel Farage is the MP for Clacton. But it’s not a clean sweep for Labour. Two Labour frontbenchers have lost their seats and Starmer will enter government on a vote share of 35 per cent, the lowest of any postwar governing party. Will this hinder him in government?

Fraser Nelson

Labour’s Potemkin landslide

Something pretty big is missing from Labour’s historic landslide: the voters. Keir Starmer has won 63 per cent of the seats on just 33.8 per cent of the votes, the smallest vote share of any modern PM. Lower than any of the (many) pollsters predicted. So Labour in 2024 managed just 1.6 percentage points higher than the Jeremy Corbyn calamity in 2019 – and less than Corbyn managed in 2017. ‘But for the rise of the Labour party in Scotland,’ says Professor John Curtice, ‘we would be reporting that basically Labour’s vote has not changed from what it was in 2019.’ And that’s on the second-lowest turnout in democratic history. So

Kate Andrews

Voters never forgave Liz Truss for her mini-Budget

Tonight was the first time since Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership that voters got to have their say on exactly what happened back in 2022, and what’s happened since. The verdict is in: Truss has suffered a devastating defeat in South West Norfolk, going from a 25,000 seat majority in 2019 (one of the safest Tory seats in the country) to losing to Labour candidate Terry Jermy, with a difference of just over 600 votes. The 26 per cent voter swing from Tories to Labour made Truss the first former prime minister to lose their seat in almost 90 years. Were this any other MP, it would be easy to chalk

Katy Balls

The Sophie Winkleman Edition

29 min listen

Actress Sophie Winkleman was born in London, educated at Cambridge, and has appeared in television and film roles across both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps best known for her roles as Big Suze in Peep Show and Zoey in Two and a Half Men, she is now patron to several children’s charities. On the episode, Katy Balls talks to Sophie about how she got into acting, whether she has ever dated a Jez or a Mark, and why she believes in the comfort of strangers. Sophie also talks about her campaign to reduce smart phone use and technology exposure for children, which you can read more about here. Produced by Patrick

Iain Macwhirter

The game is up for the SNP after its election meltdown

Every election is historic in its own way, and of course the top line this 2024 general election is Labour’s humongous parliamentary majority. Though never can a landslide have been delivered with so little voter enthusiasm. But something equally significant happened in the wee small hours of the morning. For, an existential threat that has arguably hung over the United Kingdom for nigh on twenty years simply evaporated. The all-powerful Scottish National Party collapsed in ruins, losing all but nine of its forty-eight Scottish MPs. This is worse than even the most pessimistic poll forecasts. The Scottish National Party, it seemed, could not lose Yet, less than a decade ago the Scottish

Steerpike

Watch: Liz Truss loses her seat

It’s the Portillo moment of 2024. Liz Truss sensationally lost her safe South West Norfolk seat this morning, less than two years after serving as prime minister. Amid much online excitement about her prospects of losing, Truss was initially not seen at the count at 6 a.m, forcing the result to be delayed by several minutes. Some of those watching began slow clapping before she appeared, not wearing a Conservative rosette. There were gasps and cheers as the results were read out, as Truss became the biggest Tory casualty on a painful night for the party. Labour’s Terry Jermy won by more than 600 votes in a seat that previously

Steven Fielding

Looking to the past won’t help the Tories navigate their future

These are going to be dark days of introspection for Conservatives. And, as they try to make sense of the 2024 election, some will look to the party’s past to put it into historical perspective. There is, however, no precedent for how awful the result was for the party in terms of vote share and seats won: it really was that bad. Yet, as a comfort amongst the wreckage, but also an inspiration for future effort, some party members will likely alight upon earlier examples of how the Conservatives recovered from cataclysmic defeat. Of those modern instances – 1906, 1945 and 1997 – 1945 is by far the most appealing.

Patrick O’Flynn

Will the Tories finally get the message?

Can it just be a coincidence that most of the leading figures of the Tory left lost their seats, while the coming women and men of the right largely held on? Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman all made it back to the Commons while whole phalanxes of would-be leadership contenders from the ‘One Nation’ wing of the party fell by the wayside. Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Alex Chalk and Gillian Keegan were among the biggest casualties. The coming civil war for the soul of the Tories is shaping up to be a humdinger Perhaps having anti-woke and mass-migration sceptic credentials helped those on the right minimise the Reform

Jake Wallis Simons

Why Jews returned to Labour

Two weeks before the general election, the Jewish Chronicle commissioned a Survation poll to map the voting intentions of British Jews. To our surprise, we found that, unlike the rest of the country, the Tories were just ahead in the community – by nine percentage points. The stain of the Corbyn years, it seemed, had not yet been fully erased. The following week, however, a second, larger poll was published. This one, by Jewish Policy Research, put Labour 16 points ahead. It was against this background of ambiguity that amid high drama overnight, the Jewish heartland seat of Finchley fell to Labour’s Sarah Sackman, who defeated the Conservative candidate, Alex Deane,

John Ferry

The SNP’s catastrophic defeat is an opportunity for Scotland

Like the wider UK result, the SNP getting a hammering in yesterday’s general election was largely predicted by the polls. But this has not lessened the impact of seeing the many well-kent faces of high-profile former SNP MPs being given their marching orders by the Scottish electorate. One after another they fell, and with them the hubris that has defined the party since 2014 melted away. Popularity in democracies tends to be cyclical, but the SNP has defined itself not as a mere political party but as the beating heart of a national liberation movement and, as such, able to transcend political gravity. It also has a particular emotional pull

Katy Balls

The Tory blame game begins

As Labour declares victory in the general election, Rishi Sunak is on course to preside over the Tories’ worst ever general election result. As the results pour in, the Conservative losses are piling up with Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan and Chief Whip Simon Hart among the senior members of Sunak’s team to lose their seat. Sunak and Jeremy Hunt may have clung on but the Tory party is losing all over the place – from the north-east and Wales to Surrey and Oxfordshire. The recriminations are well under way On current results, it looks as though Labour has won around 36 per cent of the vote but

Steerpike

Full list: Rees-Mogg and Mordaunt among big beasts felled in Tory wipeout

They’ve been some of the most dominant figures in British politics of the past five years – but now they’re out of the Commons. Former prime minister Lis Truss has lost her seat. And among the other high-profile casualties are the Defence Secretary Grant Shapps and Penny Mordaunt, the Leader of the House of Commons. Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan and Michelle Donelan, the Science Secretary, have also been given the boot. Below is a list of all the ministers who have lost their seats thus far:

Keir Starmer

We will govern as a changed Labour party

Keir Starmer has given a speech in Central London early this morning after winning the 2024 general election. Below is a full transcript of his remarks: We did it. You campaigned for it, you fought for it, you voted for it, and now it has arrived. Change begins now. And it feels good, I have to be honest. Four and a half years of work, changing the party. This is what it is for. A changed Labour party, ready to serve our country, ready to restore Britain to the service of working people. And across our country, people will be waking up to the news, relieved that a weight has

Coffee House

Who won the general election? Results in maps and charts

Labour has won an historic landslide in yesterday’s general election. The latest forecasts expect Keir Starmer to come to power with 410 seats, with the Tories reduced to a rump of 131. North of the border the SNP have faced disaster and are predicted to retain just six seats. Perhaps the story of the night, though, will be how well Starmer does with a relatively small share of the vote: 36 per cent. If that number holds true for the rest of the results then that will be lower than the vote achieved by Corbyn in 2017. The night started with the exit poll that lead to audible gasps in

Thursday

4 Jul 2024

Katy Balls

Exit poll predicts Labour landslide

12 min listen

The polls have closed and the exit poll is in. The BBC exit poll projects that Labour will win a landslide of 410 MPs and the Conservatives will be left with 131 seats. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats will win 61 seats, the SNP ten seats and Reform 13 seats. This would mean a Labour majority of 170 – and would be the Tories’ worst ever result. Megan McElroy speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews.