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: 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 me.
