So, Here’s What Happened at Last Night’s UK General Election

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | July 5, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | July 5, 2024 |

Rishi Sunak is out, Keir Starmer is in, and British politics received one of its biggest shake-ups in over 20 years. Sunak has handed in his resignation to the King, and Starmer has gone to accept his new position from Charles III (yes, that’s a thing we have to do here). What happened last night? Where to even begin?

The Conservative Government decided to hold the general election on July 4th, a symbolic date for sure, but also a sign that they knew how bad things were going to be for them, and they wanted to get it over and done with in time for Summer. Everyone knew that Labour was going to win. It was just a matter of how large their majority would be. At the time of writing this piece, all but two seats have been declared, and Labour holds 412 seats out of 650. They saw an increase of 211, while the Tories lost a staggering 250 constituencies.

Some of the most prominent names in the Conservative Party lost their seats. Liz Truss, the woman who was Prime Minister for less than two months, is gone. Penny Mourdant is gone. Grant Shapps, Michelle Donelan, Gillian Keegan, Lucy Frazer, Johnny Mercer, Jacob Rees-Mogg (the one who looks like an evil pencil) … all gone. Many Tories decided not to run for re-election rather than be humiliated, and it’s not hard to see why. David Cameron’s old seat is no longer Tory, nor is Boris Johnson’s. Others held their positions but with slim majorities, far smaller than was expected in supposedly safe seats.

The Liberal Democrats saw incredible gains, too. Their leader Ed Davey spent most of the election being a proud nerd who enjoyed theme park rides and clearly it paid off in those key marginal seats because the party won 71 seats. They only had 11 in the last election.

In my neck of the woods, the Scottish National Party suffered a near-total wipeout. At one point in the 2010s, they held almost every seat in the country, bolstered by pro-independence support following the referendum. Now, they have only nine, losing most of them to the Labour Party in regions like Glasgow and Dundee (hi!) John Swinney, the party leader and First Minister of Scotland, has only been in his job for a couple of months and will continue as such despite these losses.

The Green Party won four seats, as did Reform, a newly founded hard-right party that saw Nigel Farage, a despotic vulture who has long exploited political hate for personal profit, become an MP after trying to earn a seat at eight previous elections. Reform gained a lot of votes across the country, largely eating into Tory majorities, but it didn’t translate to the landslide that Farage had bragged about.

So, what to make of all of this? As a big honking leftie, I have a lot of mixed feelings. It’s been undeniably nourishing to watch the Tories be so resolutely humiliated. I got up early just to watch the rictus grins of embarrassment on Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s faces as their own constituents told them to get stuffed. Some of the most caustic rabble-rousers who have spent the past couple of years forcing ginned-up culture wars down our throats lost, such as Joanna Cherry, an SNP MP who is one of the most virulently anti-trans voices in parliament. But we didn’t lose every bully. Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch, two hard-core far-right MPs who are astonishingly anti-immigration and anti-trans, held their seats. Expect them to put themselves forward as candidates for the next Tory leadership election as the party must decide whether to move back to the centre or swing harder into the right than even Sunak took them.

Labour won but they also saw some major losses due to their stance on the war in Gaza. Jonathan Ashworth was expected to be a prominent voice in Keir Starmer’s cabinet, but he was ousted in favour of an independent candidate who was proudly pro-Palestinian rights. Shockat Adam, who won by just under 1,000 votes, said, ‘This is for Gaza’ in response to the victory. Seats with large Muslim populations pushed back against Labour and elected no fewer than four independents, often with slim majorities. Jeremy Corbyn, who was kicked out of the Labour Party, ran in his constituency as an independent and won. But Labour did win back the Rochdale constituency, which George Galloway, a truly repulsive man, won only a few weeks ago in a by-election.

Sir Keir Starmer is the new Prime Minister, but all election season, we’ve heard from voters about a lack of true enthusiasm for any candidate and a general sense of confusion as to what Starmer stands for. He is a former human rights lawyer, but he has spent his years as Labour leader walking back many of the more progressive policies previously established by Jeremy Corbyn and even Ed Miliband. In the final days of this race, he doubled down on anti-trans rhetoric by declaring that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to use ‘women’s only spaces.’ He has been more closely aligned with the Tories on issues of defence and immigration than prior Labour leaders.

This was an anti-Tory election more than a pro-Labour one, and the Tory divide between hard-right and not-so-hard right led to a lot of infighting that was easy to topple. We were just so eager to vote out the party that led to vast increases in the use of food banks, the bullies who partied during lockdown while the rest of us couldn’t go out to see our families. We were pissed off about Brexit, the cost of living crisis, about a succession of Prime Ministers who were somehow more incompetent than the last and increasingly crueler as the years passed. We didn’t just want the Tories to lose. We wanted them to be annihilated. And they were.

But I must admit I find it hard to be truly enthused about Labour’s future. Starmer sold out so much to get to this day, and he’s become the most powerful person in the land right as we descend into a rabbit hole of hard-right radicalism, transphobia, Trump-inspired culture war mania, and economic volatility. Will Starmer face a Tory party eager to return to the centre that worked so well for David Cameron (before he flushed it down the toilet with a Brexit vote), or will he have to spend five years fending off people making faux-fury about trans women in sports? Does he make a tangible change or stick rigidly to the centre even as the world cries out for something else? I desperately want him to make things better. I’m rooting for him to do so, truly. But then I remember him giddily bragging about how he got the endorsement of The Sun, and I wonder if he stands for anything other than himself.

Whatever happens, the next few years are going to be difficult. We don’t expect our politicians to be perfect, but we do hope that they are principled and diligent. The absolute bare minimum has become too much to demand from some, apparently. At least we got to watch some Tories suffer.