5 highlights as Labour secures landslide win in UK election

Labour has won a landslide victory in the UK general election, as support for the Conservative Party collapsed, votes for the right-wing populist party Reform surged and the Liberal Democrats won a record number of seats.

Sir Keir Starmer will become the country's prime minister on Friday and preside over an enormous majority in the 650-seat parliament, winning over 400 seats, with big Conservative names including former Prime Minister Liz Truss and several cabinet ministers losing.

Beneath the surface the voting trends pointed to an exceptionally volatile electorate, however, with protest votes rife in a low-turnout election on Thursday. The victorious Labour Party attracted little over one-third of the votes cast and support from just one in five eligible voters, while smaller parties recorded their highest combined vote share in over a century.

Here are some key trends from the election.

Huge Labour majority

Labour has won an enormous majority, in the region of 180 seats, with a handful of results still to be confirmed. The margin is similar to that of Tony Blair's Labour Party in 1997, which won a 179-seat majority after 18 years of Conservative government.

It means Starmer will be prime minister and Rachel Reeves will become the UK's first female chancellor of the exchequer. 

The new prime minister will now get to work on appointing his government, expected to be very similar to his shadow team, and will have the chance to announce himself on the world stage almost immediately – he will head to Washington next week for a NATO summit.

Despite securing around two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons, the party only won around one-third of the national vote. Whether this was down to a low turnout, voter complacency born from the polls suggesting Labour was on course for a landslide, or a lack of enthusiasm for the party remains to be seen. 

Labour also lost some big names, including Jonathan Ashworth, a close ally of Starmer, and Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary, in areas which attracted strong support for pro-Gaza candidates.

But while there were some hiccups, the scale of the majority gives Starmer and Labour a huge mandate to deliver the change they have promised.

Conservatives collapse

The Conservative vote completely collapsed after 14 years in government, falling to a historic low of around 120, and a number of senior members of the party were removed from office.

Outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak held on to his seat, but those of the other four Conservative prime ministers over the past 14 years were lost – two to Labour and two to the Liberal Democrats.

Former leader Truss, along with cabinet ministers Grant Shapps, Gillian Keegan, Mark Harper, Simon Hart, Penny Mordaunt and Alex Chalk, lost their seats as the party's national vote share dropped by nearly 20 percentage points from 2019 to around 23.7 percent.

The party's voters largely went to Reform, which campaigned to the right of the Conservatives, but didn't compete in the previous election. The success of Reform will likely frame the race to replace Sunak as Conservative leader in the coming weeks and months.

Reform shakes up election

The hard-right populist party Reform only won four seats, but took around 14.3 percent of the vote and had a huge influence on the election by luring voters away from the Conservatives. 

Nigel Farage, the party leader, was elected at the eighth attempt. Richard Tice, the former leader, won; former Conservative MP Lee Anderson was reelected; and Rupert Lowe, the former chairman of Southampton football club, took the party's fourth seat. There was a huge gender gap in support for the party, far more men than women backed it.

Farage warned Labour that he was coming after them next, and called on Conservative MPs to join his party. 

"There is a massive gap on the centre right of British politics and my job is to fill it, and that's exactly what I'm going to do," he said after being declared the winner. "Believe me folks, this is just the first step of something that is going to stun all of you."

Liberal Democrats replace SNP as third party

The Liberal Democrats returned to the kind of representation they had in the House of Commons before entering a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, winning over 70 seats and replacing the Scottish National Party as the third party in UK politics.

Whether the leader Ed Davey's unique, playful campaigning style or tactical anti-Conservative votes was the impetus for the result won't bother the party, which has endured a torrid time since its support went into freefall in the 2015 election.

The party is historically extremely pro-European, and it could play an important role in pushing Starmer to rebuild ties with the European Union.

As the Liberal Democrats enjoyed a successful night, support for the SNP, another pro-EU party, collapsed after a period of chaos among its leadership. It won 48 of the 59 seats available in Scotland in 2019, but is struggling to break into double figures this time around with Labour making huge gains.

Green and independent vote rises

There was also some notable wins for independent candidates, while the Green Party performed well and support for the Democratic Unionists in Northern Ireland slumped.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader at the 2019 election who was thrown out of the party by Starmer, comfortably defended his London seat as an independent. 

His former Labour colleague George Galloway had a less successful night, losing in Rochdale to Labour candidate and former political journalist Paul Waugh.

The Green share of the vote increased significantly and the party won all four of its target seats, as smaller parties and independents tempted disillusioned voters to their cause.