Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

5 July 2024

The SNP’s catastrophic defeat is an opportunity for Scotland

Like the wider UK result, the SNP getting a hammering in yesterday’s general election was largely predicted by the polls. But this has not lessened the impact of seeing the many well-kent faces of high-profile former SNP MPs being given their marching orders by the Scottish electorate. One after another they fell, and with them the hubris that has defined the party since 2014 melted away. Popularity in democracies tends to be cyclical, but the SNP has defined itself not as a mere political party but as the beating heart of a national liberation movement and, as such, able to transcend political gravity. It also has a particular emotional pull

Katy Balls

The Tory blame game begins

As Labour declares victory in the general election, Rishi Sunak is on course to preside over the Tories’ worst ever general election result. As the results pour in, the Conservative losses are piling up with Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan and Chief Whip Simon Hart among the senior members of Sunak’s team to lose their seat. Sunak and Jeremy Hunt may have clung on but the Tory party is losing all over the place – from the north-east and Wales to Surrey and Oxfordshire. The recriminations are well under way On current results, it looks as though Labour has won around 36 per cent of the vote but

Steerpike

Full list: Rees-Mogg and Mordaunt among big beasts felled in Tory wipeout

They’ve been some of the most dominant figures in British politics of the past five years – but now they’re out of the Commons. Former prime minister Lis Truss has lost her seat. And among the other high-profile casualties are the Defence Secretary Grant Shapps and Penny Mordaunt, the Leader of the House of Commons. Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan and Michelle Donelan, the Science Secretary, have also been given the boot. Below is a list of all the ministers who have lost their seats thus far:

Keir Starmer

We will govern as a changed Labour party

Keir Starmer has given a speech in Central London early this morning after winning the 2024 general election. Below is a full transcript of his remarks: We did it. You campaigned for it, you fought for it, you voted for it, and now it has arrived. Change begins now. And it feels good, I have to be honest. Four and a half years of work, changing the party. This is what it is for. A changed Labour party, ready to serve our country, ready to restore Britain to the service of working people. And across our country, people will be waking up to the news, relieved that a weight has

Coffee House

Who won the general election? Results in maps and charts

Labour has won an historic landslide in yesterday’s general election. The latest forecasts expect Keir Starmer to come to power with 410 seats, with the Tories reduced to a rump of 131. North of the border the SNP have faced disaster and are predicted to retain just six seats. Perhaps the story of the night, though, will be how well Starmer does with a relatively small share of the vote: 36 per cent. If that number holds true for the rest of the results then that will be lower than the vote achieved by Corbyn in 2017. The night started with the exit poll that lead to audible gasps in

Thursday

4 July 2024

Katy Balls

Exit poll predicts Labour landslide

12 min listen

Ross Clark

Are the Lib Dems and Reform really right to feel happy?

It’s a disaster, a cataclysm, a wipeout. Half the cabinet will lose their seats, and Labour will be in power for a decade. All those things will be true if the BBC exit poll is anything close to reflecting reality – but hang on a minute. At the risk of sounding like one of those football managers insisting that ‘there are positives to take out of this’ after a five-nil defeat, isn’t there reason for the Tories to feel a bit of relief here? Talk of the Lib Dems overtaking the Conservatives to become His Majesty’s Opposition seems to be wide of the mark. They appear to be nowhere close,

Patrick O’Flynn

This exit poll is truly devastating for the Tories

If Tories find some comfort in getting into three figures in the exit poll, they are kidding themselves. Not only are the Tories on course to record a significantly lower number of seats than it won at its modern nadir of 1997, but it has lost its parliamentary monopoly over right-of-centre opinion too. Yes, it looks like there will be sufficient Conservative MPs to put together a workable shadow cabinet and frontbench. Yes, it will be a Tory who leads the interrogations of Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs rather than bungee-jumping Sir Ed Davey. But Nigel Farage must be presumed to be home and hosed in Clacton, and to be

Stephen Daisley

The election result could kill Scottish independence for a generation

The exit poll puts the SNP on ten seats. That is very much at the low end of the spectrum of expectations among the Nationalists. The party won 48 out of 59 Scottish seats in 2019. There are 57 constituencies north of the border, and if John Swinney has managed to win only ten of those, he and his rank and file will be bitterly disappointed. On the ITV results programme, Nicola Sturgeon stuck the boot in, describing the exit poll as ‘the grimmer end of expectations for the SNP’ and said the party’s campaign failed to put forward a ‘unique selling point’. Swinney, formerly Sturgeon’s number two, stepped forward

Katy Balls

Labour majority of 170, says exit poll

The polls have closed and the exit poll is in. The BBC exit poll projects that Labour will win a landslide of 410 MPs and the Conservatives will be left with 131 seats. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats will win 61 seats, the SNP ten seats and Reform 13 seats. This would mean a Labour majority of 170 – and would be the Tories’ worst ever result. If this comes to pass, this will be Labour’s largest number of seats, but a slightly smaller majority than the Tony Blair landslide of 179. This seems to be down to the the level of success that Ed Davey’s party has enjoyed (if the

Coffee House

As it happened: Starmer appoints cabinet after landslide win

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appointed his cabinet after winning a landslide in the general election. Rachel Reeves has been announced as the first ever female Chancellor and Angela Rayner is deputy prime minister. With one seat left to count, Labour has won 412 seats, and the Tories 121. Starmer will enter government on a vote share of 35 per cent, the lowest of any majority government in the democratic era. Here’s what unfolded: Here’s how the election unfolded on our live blog:

James Heale

Your guide for general election night 2024

After six weeks of campaigning, we are finally here. The bongs of Big Ben at 10 p.m. mark the end of voting across the UK and the start of an election night full of drama. Labour are set to make huge gains at the respective expense of the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats will try to topple as much of the ‘blue wall’ across the south as possible, while Reform will hope Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Lee Anderson enter the new Commons too. Following the publication of the exit poll, there is then a lull until shortly before midnight when the first seats

John Keiger

The plot to stop Marine Le Pen’s National Rally

This week France has drifted from surprise to confusion and panic as Sunday’s second round vote approaches. The bien-pensant centre-left weekly Nouvel Obs’ cover says it all. Black lettering on a red background menacingly warns: ‘Avoiding the Worst’; ‘The National Rally at the gates of power’. Yet the National Rally is an officially recognised legitimate mainstream party. France is not staring into the abyss. But if we were to indulge in such gloom-ridden musings what would be France’s post-electoral worst case scenarios. Let us begin gently. Marine Le Pen called this ‘an administrative coup d’etat’ In the event the National Rally cannot form a government on Monday, moves are already afoot by Macronist

Brendan O’Neill

This election is a pale imitation of democracy

Does anyone else feel like they’re living through a simulation of democracy? All the apparatus of democracy has been laid out before us today. The polling booths, the ballot papers, the boxes to stuff them in. But the stuff of democracy, the substance of it, feels oddly, sadly absent. We’re being canvassed, but not engaged. We’re being asked to vote, but not to think. Not really. This imitation of democracy is unsustainable The whole thing has felt like a phantom election. Not to get too Baudrillard about it, but is an election even taking place? It must be because they’ve been talking about it on television. You might have seen

Lara Prendergast

The reckoning: it’s payback time for voters

39 min listen

This week: the reckoning. Our cover piece brings together the political turmoil facing the West this week: Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and Joe Biden all face tough tests with their voters. But what’s driving this instability? The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews argues it is less to do with left and right, and more a problem of incumbency, but how did this situation arise? Kate joined the podcast to discuss her argument, alongside former Cambridge Professor, John Keiger, who writes in the magazine about the consequences that France’s election could have on geopolitics (2:32). Next: what role does faith play in politics? Senior editor at the religious journal First Things Dan Hitchens explores

William Atkinson

The Tories don’t deserve my vote – but they’ll still get it

Sometimes I feel like the only person in Britain who is intending to vote Conservative. I know this can’t be true, since I have a few colleagues at ConservativeHome, and someone has been putting blue leaflets through my door. I assume Rishi Sunak will vote Tory, but he might have been distracted by dreams of Santa Monica. Not many others are hoping today proves more Britain 1970 than Canada 1993. Half of all voters want us Tories completely wiped out, including 24 per cent of those who voted for us in 2019, according to a poll published last month. And a YouGov survey published yesterday revealed that almost half of

Ross Clark

Why German carmakers don’t want EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles

I recant. On a number of occasions I have asserted that the European Union is run by lobbyists acting on behalf of French farmers and the German car industry. It seems I was wrong – or perhaps that I have become wrong as the politics of global trade has shifted. A more accurate way of putting it would be to say that the EU is run by people who think they are acting in the interests of French farmers and the German car industry, but who are not quite plugged in to what those industries really want. It is a typical case of EU protectionism. However, this time, there is a twist At

Sam Bidwell

The problem with outdated Commonwealth voting rights

It’s time to decolonise Britain. And no, I’m not talking about tearing down statues of Victorian imperialists, or running roughshod over the school curriculum with self-flagellating historical revisionism. Instead, I’m talking about the fact that more than two billion people worldwide have the automatic right to vote in British elections, thanks to an archaic feature of our post-colonial citizenship laws. Ludicrous as this might sound, Commonwealth citizens – that is, citizens of any of the Commonwealth’s 56 member states – enjoy automatic voting rights in the UK, whatever their reason for settlement in the UK and regardless of their intention to seek citizenship. When the ballots are finally tallied at this year’s election, hundreds of thousands –

Ross Clark

Stanley Johnson and the trouble with Green Tories

I have a theory about intra-Johnson family politics. Some time in 2017 or 2018 Stanley agreed to shut up about his opposition to Brexit if Boris dropped his climate scepticism and threw himself wholesale into green issues. A truce between father and son certainly seemed to emerge around that time, and Boris, the man who a few years earlier had written that wind farms ‘couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’ was reborn an environmentalist. If I am right, Boris sure kept his side of the bargain. But if so, Stanley evidently no longer feels bound to keep quiet about Brexit, or even to remain loyal to the party

Steerpike

Full list: Which newspapers backed Labour?

They may not command the power that they once did, but newspaper endorsements are still highly-prized by political parties. Labour is trying to convince voters that they have moved on since the Corbyn era, with the backing of Fleet Street’s titles being a useful way of demonstrating this to their readers. The endorsement of the Sun this week comes after four years of effort by Keir Starmer’s to show that his party has truly changed. Facing a landslide loss, the Conservatives meanwhile are getting only semi-enthusiastic support from the Tory press. The Daily Mail for instance is advocating tactical voting for the Tories to ensure it provides an effective opposition