Millions went to the polls in the U.K. on Thursday, to vote for 650 MPs in the House of Commons, with the Labour Party projected to win a sizeable, if not historically large majority of more than 400 seats, according to several poll projections.
When final results are announced Friday morning, the accuracy of the polls and the fate of Rishi Sunak’s government will be known. The 44-year-old British Prime Minister, the first person of Indian descent to hold the position, heads the fifth in a series of Conservative governments that have spanned 14 years. During this period, Britons voted by a small margin to exit the European Union and went through the COVID-19 pandemic with attendant political scandals, including then Prime Minister Boris Johnson breaking lockdown rules.
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The Conservative years also saw the U.K. economy taking a battering in the years after Brexit, partly because of it, but also due to global inflationary pressures following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s economic policies, enacted during her record short term of 50 days. Britons faced soaring energy bills, inflation and a cost of living crisis, accompanied by a decline in public services including long wait times for doctors’ appointments.
Consequently, Labour had fashioned its campaign around the theme ‘change’.
“Vote change,” Labour leader Keir Starmer said on Thursday. “Today, Britain’s future is on the ballot,” he wrote, posting a photograph of himself with his wife, Victoria Starmer on social media site X. Some 400 kilometers north of Mr. Starmer’s London constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty cast their votes.
“Vote Conservative to stop the Labour supermajority which would mean higher taxes for a generation,” Mr. Sunak said on X, posting a photograph of himself and Ms. Murty on their way to a polling station.
In the last stretch of the campaign, Mr. Sunak has repeatedly accused Mr. Starmer and the Labour government of wanting to increase taxes. “You name it, they will tax it,” he had said in a tense final debate with Mr. Starmer on June 26. Conservative politicians have also presented the election as a foregone conclusion, often using the term supermajority. Mr. Starmer had responded accusing the Tories of attempting to “dissuade” people from voting.
The Liberal Democrats, who performed strongly in May’s local elections, are hoping to make third place in the new Parliament, with some polls projecting over 60 seats for them. The other parties in the fray include the Scottish National Party, the Green Party and the nativist and Eurosceptic party, Reform U.K.
The country’s monarch, King Charles III, who was in Scotland on Thursday is expected to return to London to appoint the next Prime Minister during the course of Friday.