Conservatives Gain Enough Seats for Outright Majority in UK Parliament

By Staff, Agencies

UK’s Conservative Party scored a decisive win in the kingdom’s general election in what could be their best result in decades. Meanwhile Labor had a disappointing night, losing big.

The Tories passed the majority threshold as of Friday morning, with votes still counting. According to the BBC, the ruling party won 344 seats; the Labor seems to have won 201, trailing far behind their Conservative rivals.

The overwhelming victory means that Boris Johnson will return to Downing Street with a mandate to "get Brexit done" and lead the UK out of the European Union next month.

If Johnson ends up with a 45 percent vote share it would be the Tories’ highest result since Margaret Thatcher. In sharp contrast, Labor’s performance is down around 8 percent on the 2017 election.

Jeremy Corbyn has already vowed he would not fight a future election and lamented a “very disappointing night” that Labor had to go through. He insisted that Labor’s “manifesto of hope” was immensely popular among the public, but Brexit “has so polarized debate it has overridden so much of normal political debate.”

Referring to the seats that the Tories gained from Labor, Johnson joked “we made Redcar Bluecar,” according to a private speech to Conservative aides cited by BuzzFeed. "We must understand now what an earthquake we have created, the way in which we have changed the political map in this country,” the Prime Minister said.