A woman leaves after casting her vote at a polling station in London, Thursday, July 4, 2024. Voters in the U.K. are casting their ballots in a national election to choose the 650 lawmakers who will sit in Parliament for the next five years. Outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised his own party on May 22 when he called the election.
“Nothing has gone well in the last 14 years,” said London voter James Erskine, who was optimistic for change in the hours before polls closed. “I just see this as the potential for a seismic shift, and that’s what I’m hoping for.” Britain has experienced a run of turbulent years — some of it of the Conservatives’ own making and some of it not — that has left many voters pessimistic about their country’s future. The U.K.’s exit from the European Union followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine battered the economy, whileJohnson’s successor, Liz Truss, rocked the economy further with a package of drastic tax cuts and lasted just 49 days in office.
With a majority of results in, the broad picture of a Labour landslide was borne out, though estimates of the final tally varied. The BBC projected that Labour would end up with 410 seats and the Conservatives with 144. In a sign of the volatile public mood and anger at the system, some smaller parties picked up millions of votes, including the centristand Farage’s Reform UK. Farage won his race in the seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea, securing a seat in Parliament on his eighth attempt, and Reform has won four seats so far.
Labour did not set pulses racing with its pledges to get the sluggish economy growing, invest in infrastructure and make Britain a “clean energy superpower.”