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Voters in the U.K. have cast their ballots in a national election to choose the 650 lawmakers who will sit in Parliament for the next five years.
Polls closed at 10 p.m. local time (2100GMT) Thursday, and an exit poll suggested that the left-of-center Labour Party led by Keir Starmer is headed for a huge majority.
The exit poll results suggested that after 14 years in power under five different prime ministers, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ’s Conservatives are set to have their seats in the 650-seat House of Commons cut down to 131. That would be the Tories’ worst result in the party’s two-century history and one that would leave the party in disarray.
The Labour Party is expected to win 410 seats, comfortably past the 326 needed for a majority.
Most of the results are expected to be announced in the early hours of Friday.
Here’s the latest:
Labour’s economic spokeswoman warns of scale of coming challenge
Labour’s Rachel Reeves, who is set to become the first female Treasury chief if her party wins the U.K. election, said she is “under no illusions” about the scale of the challenge she will face.
“The severity of the inheritance from the Conservatives is truly awful,” she told Sky News.
Reeves noted that the U.K.’s debt burden is running at 100% of the country’s national income and the tax burden at a seven-decade high.
She said she “can’t promise to turn everything around straight away.”
Reeves said the driving mission of an incoming Labour government is to kickstart economic growth.
Conservatives lose the first seat they were defending
Britain’s governing Conservative Party has lost its first seat it was defending in the country’s general election.
Robert Buckland, a former justice minister, lost his Swindon South seat in central England after his vote slumped by 25% compared with the last election 2019. Labour’s Heidi Alexander won the seat, returning to Parliament after she resigned in 2018 to take up a position with the mayor of London.
According to the exit poll, the Conservatives are set to lose more than 200 seats and suffer its worst result since 1906.
What to expect in coming hours as ballots get counted by hand
Voting in the U.K. is done the old-school way — no voting machines are used. Instead, voters put a pencil to paper, and all ballot papers are counted manually.
After ballot boxes are opened, the ballot papers in the box are mixed with postal vote ballot papers and the counting begins at counting centers across the U.K.
Several dozen seats are expected to be declared from now until around 0100GMT to 0200GMT – including Labour leader Keir Starmer’s London seat, Holborn and St. Pancras.
From 0200GMT onwards will be the busiest part of the night, with more than 200 seats expected to be declared.
By around 0300GMT, enough results should be known to suggest which party is on course to win.
The first of 650 House of Commons seats is declared
A Labour Party candidate has won the first U.K. seat to report its result in the general election.
Bridget Phillipson, who is Labour’s education spokesperson, won with a majority of 7,169 in the Houghton and Sunderland South seat in the northeast of England from the second-placed candidate.
That’s more than double the majority she won last time the seat was contested in 2019.
The candidate from the recently formed anti-immigration Reform U.K. came second, pushing the candidate from the governing Conservative Party into third.
Phillipson said the result represented a vote for “hope and unity, not decline and division.”
Leading Conservative, Labour members react to exit poll results
Leading members of Britain’s main political parties are reacting to the exit poll suggesting the opposition Labour Party winning a landslide victory and returning to power for the first time since 2010.
Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner told Sky News that the Conservatives are getting punished by voters for “14 years of the chaos and the scandals and the decline.”
Labour’s national campaign chief, Pat McFadden, said the transformation of his party since its poor showing in the 2019 election has been “remarkable.”
“We have campaigned as a changed Labour Party, ready to change Britain,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said the exit poll pointed to a “massacre” for the party.
The projection suggests that the Conservatives will end up with its lowest number of seats in the House of Commons since 1906.
Exit poll: Conservatives set to face historic defeat; anti-immigration Reform UK gains big
Results from Britain’s exit poll suggest that the governing Conservatives are set to have their seats in the 650-seat House of Commons cut down to 131 — the Tories’ worst result in the party’s two-century history and one that would leave the party in disarray.
The exit poll also forecasts the left-of-center Liberal Democrats will take 61 seats, and Nigel Farage’s right-wing, anti-immigration Reform UK, which currently does not have any seats, is set to take 13 seats. The Green Party is expected to take 2.
