UK election: Keir Starmer's Labour set for landslide victory

Just six years after coming into existence as the Brexit Party, the anti-immigration Reform UK party is predicted to become the fourth largest force in parliament with up to 13 seats.

The exit poll, where voters are asked who they voted for as they leave the polling station, suggests that millions of people had cast votes for the new party and its leader Nigel Farage.

"This is the beginning of a movement," Reform's co-deputy leader David Bull told Sky News in the UK, claiming that "there'll be a new voice in parliament" and that Reform are "the true voice of opposition," having "destroyed" the Conservative Party.

It was pointed out to Bull that the Conservatives are still predicted to win ten times as many seats as Reform but the first declared result of the evening did see Reform beat the Tories into third place in the northeastern constituency of Sunderland South.

With Reform predicted to win 13 seats, it seems likely that party leader Farage could win in the southeastern constituency of Clacton and finally become a member of parliament at the eighth attempt.

Ben Habib, Reform’s other co-deputy leader, said: “This is politically seismic. This is the beginning of the fight back for the nation state of the United Kingdom."

In the race to be the first seat called, the Labour Party's Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, has secured Houghton and Sunderland South.

The result is not a surprise, with it being a hold for the Labour Party.

Reform UK came second.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer has issued his first reaction since the exit poll, writing on X (formerly Twitter). 

"To everyone who has campaigned for Labour in this election, to everyone who voted for us and put their trust in our changed Labour Party – thank you," he posted.

Deputy Labour Party leader Angela Reyner, who would likely become deputy UK Prime Minister, is warning that, while the exit poll is "very encouraging," there is "nothing to celebrate just yet."

Nevertheless, she has praised Starmer for changing the image of the Labour Party and thanked voters for putting their trust in them again after the party's disastrous performance in 2019.

"Keir has done a tremendous job in revitalizing the party," she told Sky News in the UK.

"After 14 years of chaos and decline under the Tories, people want change. Thank you to those who have voted Labour. If the exit poll is correct, it's an honor to have them put their trust in us. We understand the weight on our shoulders, and we want to restore people's trust in politics."

The UK's incumbent Work and Pensions Secretary (or employment minister), Mel Stride, told BBC Radio 4: "This is a very difficult moment for the Conservative Party."

He added that he is "very sorry" that the exit poll is projecting that a number of his colleagues will lose their seats.

One of them could potentially include the current Chancellor (finance minister) Jeremy Hunt. With the local exit poll in Hunt's constituency projecting only a 19% chance of him winning, Hunt could become for the first Chancellor in modern British history to lose his seat.

The Labour Party's projected landslide victory represents a personal victory for party leader Sir Keir Starmer who, despite criticism for a defensive campaign which has taken no risks, is set to become the UK's first Labour prime minister since Gordon Brown in 2010.

Alastair Campbell, former advisor to Brown and his predecessor and ally Tony Blair, who won a similarly big majority in 1997, told UK broadcaster Channel 4: "No-one should ever under-estimate Keir Starmer."

Harriet Harman, a Labour member of parliament between 1982 and 2024, said: "It's a moment for hope and change."

Meanwhile, Conservative Kwasi Kwarteng, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) was jointly responsible for the disastrous budget which characterized and ended the short-lived premiership of Prime Minister Lizz Truss, said of the defeat: "It's on all of us."

The UK's center-left Labour Party is on course to win 410 seats and a 170-seat majority in a landslide general election victory, with party leader Sir Keir Starmer set to become Prime Minister, according to country's exit poll.

For the Conservative Party and incumbent Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the exit poll points to a crushing defeat with 131 seats marking party's worst performance ever.

Elsewhere, the Liberal Democrats are on course to win 61 seats while anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage's Reform UK party predicted to win 13 seats.

An exit poll commissioned by the main UK broadcasters will be published as soon as the polls close and will give a clear indication of the result of the election. 

It doesn't provide the final result, but exit polls have become increasingly accurate in UK elections.

Counting will begin immediately but most of the results will only be announced in the early hours of Friday.

The UK general election also comes in the midst of Euro 2024, bringing together two events of huge national importance, with the English national team in Germany preparing to play Switzerland in Saturday's quarterfinal.

Admittedly, it's not a massive problem for Scottish players and fans whose team were knocked out in the group stage, or indeed Wales or Northern Ireland, who didn't qualify.

According to the BBC, the Football Association (FA) has made the players aware that they can vote by post or by proxy – as can the women's team, who are currently away on a training camp in the Netherlands. According to defender John Stones, however, the England men's team's base in Blankenhain in the eastern German state of Thuringia is a "politics-free zone."

"I couldn't tell you about the other lads. I'm sure it'll be something that'll get brought up tonight, later on, but I couldn't tell you who they vote for," he told reporters. "They keep it close to their chests."

Not only does polling day in the UK fall conveniently in a short pause in play between the last-16 and the quarterfinal, it also falls between the two rounds of the snap French legislative elections. The stance in the England camp contrasts starkly with the atmosphere in the French squad, where several players have spoken out against the far-right National Rally (RN).

After previously calling on France's young voters to reject extremism, superstar captain Kylian Mbappe said the RN's successes in the first round last week were "catastrophic."

"I think that more than ever, we have to go and vote, it is really urgent, we cannot leave our country in the hands of these people, it is really urgent," Mbappe told the media.

The last time a UK ballot coincided with a football tournament was when the Brexit referendum took place while England, Wales and Northern Ireland (but not Scotland) were competing at Euro 2016 in France.

Four days after the historic vote, the England team followed in the country's footsteps by embarrassingly losing 2-1 to minnows Iceland. Wales, at least, made it to the semifinals.

What is an exit poll? When can we expect it? Who's even running? And how does voting in UK general elections actually work?

DW's Charlotte Chelsom-Pill reports from London:

Rather like in the US, the majoritarian or "first-past-the-post" voting system in the UK can make it difficult to predict the most important part of the election outcome, how seats are divided up in the House of Commons. 

Effectively, Thursday's election is 650 separate and unconnected mini-votes. In every constituency, the candidate with the most votes wins.

A party has the numbers to govern if it wins 326 of these races. The party vote share at the national level is fundamentally unimportant to seat numbers. There are no runoffs or second rounds, and usually no coalitions.

Smaller parties have long railed against the system as unfair, but never have enough seats to bring about any reform; Labour and the Conservatives have traditionally both endorsed and benefitted from the system.

On the one hand, it makes matters simpler arithmetically. But it can make predicting seat numbers in the House of Commons a perilous game for pollsters.

At least 40 seats are considered marginal or at risk for both the Conservatives and for Labour — often in direct competition with each other, or sometimes in competition with third parties like the Lib Dems, Reform, or the SNP in Scotland.

Tiny changes in overall popular support across these battleground contests could swing many or even all of them. And that could be the difference between Labour winning around 400 seats, or even approaching 500, in the case of a Survation poll prediction that was near the upper range of any prognoses prior to the polls. 

Labour's all-time record haul of seats to date came in the 1997 general election, Tony Blair's first of four wins, when they claimed 418.

The phenomenon is similar to the way the so-called "6% of six states" in the US — the undecided voter cohort in the most crucial battleground states — is expected to have an outsized influence on the 2024 presidential election in the US.

The first glimpse of just how right, or wrong, the predictions are will come with the exit polls, released just after voting finishes at 10 p.m. in the UK (2100 GMT/UTC).

Another returning feature in this election is the only self-identifying extra-terrestrial on the ballot, the satirical candidate Count Binface, first conceived in its current guise by comedian Jonathan David Hardy in 2018.

"Bins" are trash cans, like the massive one he wears on his head, just in case some transatlantic translation is in order at this point. 

He describes himself as 5,702 years old, and an "intergalactic space warrior, leader of the recyclons from the planet Sigma 9, and a parliamentary candidate for the constituency of Richmond and Northallerton at the 2024 general election."

As such, he will be competing in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's constituency.

He has done this intentionally at recent votes, moving his candidacy to follow Boris Johnson and now Sunak — there was nowhere near enough of a window for him to run against Liz Truss. 

"I pledge to build at least one affordable house, which is more than the other parties can muster between them," he modestly told DW on the campaign trail.

He, too, has picked up on the symbolism of this year's July 4 date — dubbing it Britain's "Bindependence Day" and an opportunity to "take out the trash." 

He also ran for the Mayor of London recently, scoring more than 24,000 votes or 1% of the total, more than the far-right Britain First party candidate.

Prior to his Count Binface identity, he had run against Theresa May as "Lord Buckethead," but ran afoul of a copyright infringement lawsuit from a US science fiction filmmaker. 

DW's correspondent in London Birgit Maass says that while it was "definitely a bit of a gamble" for Rishi Sunak to call a vote this summer, whenever he had held the vote "it would have been a long shot, and difficult to turn things around." 

Speaking from Keir Starmer's Holborn and St. Pancras constituency in London, she also said she had not noted very much enthusiasm when asking locals how they would describe the Labour leader. 

"I have to say that it really wasn't very easy. Lots of people couldn't really describe him, characterized him as a little bit boring," Maass said. 

"Keir Starmer knows this, and he's trying basically to use it to his advantage. He's saying, 'I'm not your candidate to be the circus director, I'm your candidate to be the next prime minister.' He's a lawyer, so he's saying he's going about things diligently, slowly — he's not offering a great vision, but rather slower reforms, mostly to get the economy back on track." 

She said he was offering voters "a change," in a nod to Labour's one-word slogan, "but a change to a more solid center-ground, center-left politics." 

Asked what his main task would be if he were to become prime minster, Maass said it would be restoring voter trust in the political class after a chaotic few years. 

"Trust in the UK of politics, of politicians, is at an all-time low. That will be very difficult to turn around. But when it comes to very concrete policies, I think the cost of living crisis is the most defining issue for most of British voters," Maass said.

In the 2023 edition of the British Social Attitudes survey, when participants were asked if they trust politicians to "tell the truth in a tight corner," 58% answered "almost never." 

Is your social media timeline filled with photos of non-voting animals loitering outside voting booths? Don't worry, it's less unusual than you might think.

With purdah rules in effect in the UK, campaigning takes a bit of a back seat on polling day itself. 

In the social media age, particularly since the 2015 and 2017 votes in the UK, one habit that's stuck is people sharing photos of their #dogsatpollingstations, rather than more overtly political material. 

The phenomenon married a subject not certain to be amplified on social media — electoral politics, with another whose engagement chances tend to be rather higher. Perhaps that explains why the fashion stuck, and was even succesfully exported to places like Australia.

Even Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson got in on the canine action early on Thursday.

Whether it's in Barking, Pawlett, Labrador Bay, Woofferton in Shropshire, Hound, London's Dog Island, or a less aptly named voting station near you, expect four-legged friends posing for the camera.

Scotland's First Minister John Swinney voted in Burrelton, a rural village north of Edinburgh, early on Thursday. 

His Scottish National Party (SNP) has, in recent elections, dominated the battle for the 57 Scottish seats up for grabs in Westminster. The party, which advocates independence for Scotland, claimed 48 of the seats at the last vote in 2019. But that has already slipped to 43 between the general elections and could fall further still on Thursday. 

Scotland used to be a stronghold for Labour, and the SNP's emergence has coincided with more than a decade of electoral supremacy for the Conservatives at a UK-wide level. 

Labour took just one seat in Scotland in 2019, but is hoping to scoop up 20 or more this time around. The SNP appears likely to remain the strongest single party north of the border, though.

Support for the SNP has slumped amid a finances scandal that saw Peter Murrell, the husband of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and the party's former chief executive, accused of embezzlement. The legal investigation came to light fairly soon after Sturgeon stepped down.

Sturgeon's successor Humza Yousaf also lasted barely a year as Scotland's leader. He ultimately stepped down after scrapping a power-sharing agreement with the Greens in the separate Scottish parliament, which left the SNP in a minority and him facing no-confidence motions in the Holyrood Scottish chamber.

The gambling-obsessed UK is one of the few countries where it's legal to bet on politics. Still, it's typically frowned upon for politicians themselves. 

The issue has dogged the Conservative Party campaign ever since it was forced to drop a series of candidates — including Craig Williams, a fairly close ally of Rishi Sunak — for using insider information while betting on Sunak calling a July election date, slightly earlier than was necessary or expected. 

For those of you at home looking at the calendar, yes, this means either Sunak or Conservative Party strategists actually chose to hold the general election on July 4 — synonymous as it is with US independence and waning British global power.

In one more extreme case, a Conservative MP is even accused of placing a fairly sizeable 8,000 pound (roughly €9,450 or $10,200) bet on himself losing his own seat.

Sir Philip Davies neither confirmed nor denied the allegation when responding to media reports, saying his betting habits were "nobody's business," and that even if he had, he would not have broken the law.

"I had a bet on myself to lose in the 2005 election, and my bet went down the pan," he said last week. "I hope to win. I'm busting a gut to win. I expect to lose." 

This lack of confidence has been more broadly apparent in the 75 Conservative MPs who announced they would be stepping down and would not compete in the July 4 election. 

These included former Prime Minister Theresa May, former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, Cabinet veteran and Brexit advocate Michael Gove, and the former Chancellors Sajid Javid and Kwasi Kwarteng.