In a blowout victory, Great Britain’s Labour Party ousted the Conservative Party from power after a 14-year run. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has been officially named Britain’s prime minister. The only time in the nation’s history a party won more votes came in 1997, when Tony Blair’s Labour Party won 418 seats.
The Labour Party won 412 seats, adding a massive 214 seats to its previous total, while the Conservatives won a paltry 121 seats, plunging a whopping 251 seats. The centrist Liberal Democrats picked up 71 seats, adding 63 to their previous total, while Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party picked up four seats.
“Labour’s win was also fragile,” CNN noted. “The vote breakdown made clear that the election was as much, if not more, about the public’s anger towards the Conservatives as it was about excitement for Labour’s offer.”
Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the Conservative Party apologized after the results were made public, saying, “To the country I would like to say first and foremost, I am sorry. I have given this job my all, but you have sent a clear signal that the government of the United Kingdom must change. And yours is the only judgment that matters. I have heard your anger, your disappointment, and I take responsibility for this loss.”
Conservative Party leader Suella Braverman, whom Sunak fired last year as Home Secretary last year but won re-election to Parliament, stated, “I am sorry that my party didn’t listen to you. The Conservative Party has let you down. You – the Great British people voted for us over 14 years and we did not keep our promises. We’ve acted as if we’re entitled to your vote regardless of what we did, regardless of what we didn’t do, despite promising time after time that we would do those things and we need to learn our lesson because if we don’t, bad as tonight has been for my party, we’ll have many worse nights to come.”
Braverman was fired by Sunak after she wrote a piece in The Times that called the pro-Palestinian demonstrators in London “hate marchers” and condemned police for their “double standard” in protecting leftwing protesters. She pointed out that Britons “pride ourselves on our long-established traditions of freedom of expression. These liberties consist not only of freedom of speech but also freedom of assembly. The right to protest in public is a cornerstone of democracy. That is why peaceful marches are never banned and even controversial and disruptive ones are policed rather than blocked.”
Noting that in exceptional circumstances a chief constable can ask the home secretary to ban a march, Braverman, who was born in London and whose family is of Indian origin, continued:
These issues have come into sharp focus because of what happened on October 7: the worst massacre of Jews since the Nazi era. The ramifications of that terrible event and all that has followed have been felt on the streets of the UK. There have been dignified vigils in London held by Britain’s Jewish community, but that is not what has tested our capacity to maintain public order.
She then turned to the “pro-Palestinian movement,” writing that the tens of thousands of angry demonstrators marching through London every weekend had attacked police, stopped train services and mobbed poppy sellers raising funds for veterans.
Speaking of the march planned for Armistice Day, she wrote:
Here we reach the heart of the matter. I do not believe that these marches are merely a cry for help for Gaza. They are an assertion of primacy by certain groups — particularly Islamists — of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland. Also disturbingly reminiscent of Ulster are the reports that some of Saturday’s march group organisers have links to terrorist groups, including Hamas.
“There is a perception that senior police officers play favorites when it comes to protesters,” she commented. “During Covid, why was it that lockdown objectors were given no quarter by public order police yet Black Lives Matters demonstrators were enabled, allowed to break rules and even greeted with officers taking the knee?”
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