After a decade of instability, the United Kingdom handed Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson a healthy majority in Thursday's general election and charted a course towards five years of untethered Tory rule not seen since the days of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
The Conservatives won 365 seats out of 650 in Parliament, giving them a 40-seat cushion that gives Johnson the flexibility to govern as he sees fit, including negotiating a deal on Brexit with the European Union. Johnson’s majority was won on the back of a swath of longtime Labour strongholds in the country’s economically troubled industrial north, which saw massive drops in Labour support to the benefit of the Conservatives and the Brexit Party.
As a result, Labour fell to just 203 seats, its worst showing since before World War II, and the party's head, Jeremy Corbyn, announced that he would not contest another election as leader. Prominent Labour figures such as Ed Milliband and Yvette Cooper barely clung to their seats, which were once previously safe northern turf. Other notable Labour MPs, including Laura Pidcock, who had been seen as a possible Corbyn successor, and Dennis Skinner, who had served in Parliament for 49 years, lost outright.
Labour struggled with both an unclear message on Brexit and the deep unpopularity of Corbyn, which saw the party's share of the vote drop 8 points nationwide compared to the previous elections in 2017. The Tories only increased their vote by a little over a point, but the Labour collapse was more than enough for the Conservatives to garner a comfortable victory.
Many Labour defectors went to the Liberal Democrats, which saw its vote shoot up 4.2% from 2017, and the Greens and Scottish National Party, which each were up about 1% nationwide. Still others went to the Brexit Party, which hadn't previously contested a U.K. general election but took 2% nationally while running only in non-Tory seats.
A new leader of the Labour party will likely be elected in the new year, though a timeline must first be set by the party’s National Executive Committee. New rules requires leadership contenders to receive endorsements from local Labour parties or affiliated societies such as trade unions and affinity groups like LGBT Labour, as well as the traditional endorsements from MPs. That means the nomination period will take significantly longer than on previous occasions.
The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, had little to show despite their notable increase in vote share. In England, the party traded a few seats that had voted in favor of Brexit for a handful that had voted to remain in the EU while holding steady in Scotland, picking up one marginal seat while losing another. That marginal just happened to be the seat of new leader Jo Swinson, who lost by just 149 votes to the SNP. The problem with having so few seats is that there are no safe MPs to make leader. Swinson, responsible for running a national campaign, couldn't spend as much time in her own district, costing her her seat and her leadership position.
The SNP benefitted from Labour’s collapse north of the border, gaining 8 points in Scotland over their 2017 result as Scottish Labour shrunk by the same proportion. The party picked up seven Tory seats and six Labour seats while trading a pair of seats with the Lib Dems. While it now holds 48 of 59 seats in Scotland, it still only received 45% of the vote, almost identical to the share of the pro-independence vote in 2014's referendum. The party has called for a second referendum, but Johnson has stated firmly that he will not allow one, and it’s unclear if the SNP has any real recourse.
Finally, Northern Ireland saw significant vote losses for both the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, which have been locked in a stalemate for three years that has prevented the formation of a Northern Ireland government. The Good Friday Agreement requires the largest unionist party and the largest nationalist party to jointly govern Northern Ireland, which the two parties had done from 2007-2017. It’s expected that the two parties will seriously look to compromise and end the deadlock in the new year in the wake of their poor results.
As for Boris Johnson, he has a healthy majority, no real threats to his leadership, and a fractured opposition that will go through a lengthy leadership fight. He has the power to remake the United Kingdom as he pleases, the first leader with that capacity since Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997. The question is whether Johnson wants to govern as the moderate, One Nation Tory he claimed to be as mayor of London, or as the stridently anti-EU, populist leader of the Leave campaign. The United Kingdom will spend the next five years finding out.