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The U.K. Labour party is celebrating a landslide victory.
Keir Starmer’s party has 411 seats, excluding the speaker’s, and a large majority in the House of Commons. His tally includes a number of “red wall” constituencies the party lost to the Conservatives in the previous election in 2019, and seats the Scottish National Party had dominated for nearly a decade.
But a closer look at the numbers suggests Labour strategists should not rest on their laurels.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party won five seats, but placed second in more than 100 other constituencies. By vote share, it is now the U.K.’s third-largest party.
Those same vote shares paint a far weaker picture for Labour than its seat number would suggest. The party recorded a 200-seat jump — but its vote share advanced by only an inch.
The Conservatives lost 250 seats, as their vote share plummeted from more than 40 percent in 2019 to below 25 percent now.
But both Labour and the Liberal Democrats recorded major seat gains despite barely making any advance at all in their vote shares.
The U.K.’s first-past-the-post election system means Labour will occupy about 60 percent of the House of Commons, with less than 35 percent of the votes. That vote share is less than former leader Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017, when he lost to Theresa May’s Conservatives.
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK won five seats — but collected more than 14 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party by vote share, ahead of the Liberal Democrats.
Labour’s anticipated win, while an extraordinary turnaround for a party that didn’t look electable just a few years ago, doesn’t appear to have enthused voters.
With turnout estimated at 60 percent, no election in the past 20 years drew fewer voters to the ballot box.
`Still, Labour made huge strides in the U.K.’s embattled swing seats.
Those constituencies were held by the Conservatives until 1997, before flipping to Labour and then back to the Tories from 2010.
Most of them have now swung behind Labour once more.
Labour’s loss in 2019 was punctuated by the crumbling of the “red wall,” as strongholds stretching from the Midlands to the north of England voted in a Conservative MP, many for the first time.
But that Tory control in these seats proved short-lived…
The Conservatives have had a terrible 2024 election, but so has the Scottish National Party.
The SNP has had a firm grip on power in Scotland since 2015, when it won nearly every Scottish seat — most of which had been occupied by Labour before.
But Thursday’s vote put an end to its winning streak. The party have lost around 80 percent of the seats they held in 2019, with most going to Labour.
This election has radically changed the UK’s electoral map: a sea of red reminiscent of 1997 has the Conservative party reeling; a few dots of bright light blue and a significant vote share mark Reform UK’s entrance to mainstream UK politics, and the Lib Dems can enjoy a return from relative obscurity with more than 70 MPs, its highest number ever. Meanwhile, the shockingly poor performance of the SNP marks the end of an era north of the border.
*These figures are being updated as constituencies declare
