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Kingdom — Britain’s main opposition Labour party looks set for a landslide election win, exit polls indicated on Thursday, with Keir Starmer replacing Rishi Sunak as prime minister, ending 14 years of Conservative rule.
As polling stations closed at 10:00 p.m., the survey for UK broadcasters suggested centre-left Labour would win 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, with the right-wing Tories managing only 131.
In another boost for the centrists, the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats would get 61 seats but Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK upstarts could secure 13.
Labour’s majority would be 170 — more than double than that won by Boris Johnson for the Tories at the last election in December 2019 dominated by Brexit.
“To everyone who has campaigned for Labour in this election, to everyone who voted for us and put their trust in our changed Labour Party — thank you,” Starmer wrote on social media.
Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, told the BBC the numbers were “encouraging… but I’m not counting my chickens until we’ve got those results coming in.”
Tim Bale, politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London, called the projected result “a disaster for the Conservative party.”
But it was “not as catastrophic as some were predicting” and the Tories, riven by ideological infighting, needed now to decide which direction they would take, he added.
