Labour will win a 170-seat majority in the UK general election, exit poll shows

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Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party is on track to win a majority of around 170 seats in the UK general election, according to a national poll that shows Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives will lose after 14 years in power.

Polls on Thursday night showed Starmer would become prime minister with 410 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons while Sunak’s party faced its worst result on record, with just 131 seats.

The result is momentous for Britain and will be known around the world: the UK’s political direction has shifted to an internationalist centre-left party at a time when right-wing populists are gaining ground in many countries.

Labour foreign secretary David Lammy said the poll was “encouraging” but warned of the task ahead for the party in government.

“If we don’t provide for workers, we will be out of business and the nationalists will come after us. That’s a lesson we’ve seen all over the world,” he told Sky News.

Indeed, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is forecast to do better than expected with 13 seats, a result seen as a major breakthrough for the right-wing populist party.

The first two constituencies to release results on Thursday evening, both in northern England, showed Labour winning, with the Reform Party coming in second.

The Labour Party’s majority forecast is a personal victory for Starmer, who took over Labor leader in 2020 after the party’s worst election defeat in nearly a century. His expected victory is on a similar scale to the landslide victory of Sir Tony Blair’s Labour Party in 1997.

The Ipsos exit poll is usually a reliable predictor of the overall result. Votes from individual constituencies will trickle in overnight, with Labour, if the polls are accurate, likely to have a clear majority by 5am.

According to the post-election survey, the centrist Liberal Democrats are on track to win 61 seats, close to the party’s record of 62 seats set in 2005. The Liberal Democrats are expected to make big gains in the Conservative “blue wall” of wealthy constituencies in the south of England.

According to exit polls, the Scottish National Party won only 10 seats behind the Labour Party in Scotland, which seriously affected the party’s dream of independence.

The survey revealed a shared sentiment among candidates from across the party that Britain wanted “change”, with many senior Conservatives admitting during the campaign that the party looked exhausted.

The UK has been under Careful ruled for 14 years, during which time there were five different prime ministers. This period was marked by economic austerity, Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic and energy price shocks.

Former Conservative minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg said it was “clearly a terrible night” and added that the Conservatives had taken the vote for granted.

“There is no way to describe this other than it was a bad night for the Conservative Party,” he told the BBC.

Starmer will become the seventh Labour prime minister in the party’s history and his victory is the first for the centre-left party since 2005. The last time Labour ousted the Conservatives from power was in 1997.

Starmer will move into 10 Downing Street on Friday and immediately form a cabinet, with instructions to ministers to quickly put in place policies to lift Britain out of its slow growth.

Speaking on the eve of the vote, Starmer said: “This is a great country, with limitless potential. The British people deserve a government that matches their ambition. Today is an opportunity to start rebuilding Britain with Labour.”

Voter opinion polls suggest Starmer’s pro-growth, pro-business agenda is paying off, as Labour bucks the international political trend. Far-right parties have performed strongly in recent elections to the European and French parliaments, while in the US, Donald Trump is leading in the polls for the presidential race.

Labour’s incoming chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves said she hoped investors would now see the UK as a “safe haven”.

Starmer has promised to work with business to stimulate growth, with an agenda that includes planning reform and state investment in green technology. Labour will also pursue its traditional agenda of reforming workers’ rights.

For Sunak, the result looks set to be a personal disaster. He opted to call an early election on July 4 — against the advice of his campaign chief Isaac Levido — and has embarked on a misguided six-week bid to turn around his party’s fortunes.

The party’s projected 131 seats are lower than its worst ever result of 156 in 1906. Starmer’s projected tally is close to the 418 seats won by Tony Blair in his landslide victory in 1997.

Several senior Conservative figures are expected to lose their seats after the devastating night, narrowing the list of potential candidates for the party leadership if Sunak steps down as expected.

Among the cabinet ministers tipped to be at risk according to exit poll results are Penny Mordaunt, Jeremy Hunt, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch and Grant Shapps, with the results due to be announced in their seats early in the morning.