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London
CNN
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The British people overwhelmingly voted to end 14 years of Conservative rule and hand the Labour Party a landslide victory, causing a seismic shift in British politics.
Labour’s victory is bigger than the party would have imagined until very recently, when the last general election in 2019 saw the party suffer its worst defeat in more than 80 years and usher in a long period of political darkness.
But the party has since been rebuilt under the leadership of Keir Starmer, who is set to become Britain’s next prime minister.
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Under the UK’s single-member constituency system, residents in 650 constituencies across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland voted to elect their Members of Parliament (MPs) to represent them. The votes were counted overnight, with the final tally due to take place on Friday.
A party needs 326 seats to officially win, and Labour cleared that milestone at around 5 a.m. local time on Friday, giving the new government a supermajority in the next parliament.
The UK’s electoral system can lead to large discrepancies between the proportion of seats a party wins and the proportion of the popular vote it receives.
If support for one party, or antipathy towards another, is spread fairly evenly across the country, a party does not need to win a large percentage of the national vote to win a supermajority of seats in Parliament.
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The result is one of the biggest shakeups in British political history, a shock defeat for the Conservative Party after 14 years in power and a brutal end to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s term in office.
The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s traditional third largest party, also made a big leap forward, increasing their numbers from just 11 seats in the 2019 general election to more than 60 seats.
Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party Reform UK won its first seat and then came second in many seats, splitting the right-wing vote and contributing to the Conservative Party’s defeat.
Meanwhile in Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP) could lose several MPs and see its number of seats fall to single digits, down from 48 in 2019.
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