By JILL LAWLESS, DANICA KIRKA and MIKE CORDER
LONDON (AP) — Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative
Party has won a thumping majority of seats in Britain’s Parliament — a decisive
outcome to a Brexit-dominated election that should allow Johnson to fulfill his
plan to take the U.K. out of the European Union next month.
Britain's Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks after the Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency count declaration at Brunel University in Uxbridge, London, Friday, Dec. 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
With 642 of the 650 results declared on Friday, the
Conservatives had 358 seats and t he main opposition Labour Party 203.
Johnson said it looked like the Conservatives had “a
powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”
The victory makesJohnson the
most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher,
another politician who was loved and loathed in almost equal measure. It was a
disaster for left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn,
who faced calls for his resignation even as the results rolled in.
Corbyn called the result “very disappointing” for his
party and said he would not lead Labour into another election, though he
resisted calls to quit immediately.
Results poured in early Friday showing a substantial
shift in support to the Conservatives from Labour. In the last election in
2017, the Conservatives won 318 seats and Labour 262.
The result this time delivered the biggest Tory majority
since Thatcher’s 1980s heyday, and Labour’s lowest number of seats since 1935.
The Scottish National Party won almost 50 of Scotland’s
59 seats, up from 35 in 2017, a result that will embolden its demands for a new
referendum on Scottish independence.
The centrist, pro-EU Liberal Democrats took only about a
dozen seats. Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson stepped down after losing in her own
Scottish constituency.
The Conservatives took a swath of seats in
post-industrial northern England towns that were long Labour strongholds.
Labour’s vote held up better in London, where the party managed to grab the
Putney seat from the Conservatives.
The decisive Conservative showing vindicates Johnson’s
decision to press for Thursday’s early election, which was held nearly two
years ahead of schedule. He said that if the Conservatives won a majority, he
would get Parliament to ratify his Brexit divorce deal and take the U.K. out of
the EU by the current Jan. 31 deadline.
Speaking at the election count in his Uxbridge
constituency in suburban London, Johnson said the “historic” election “gives us
now, in this new government, the chance to respect the democratic will of the
British people to change this country for the better and to unleash the
potential of the entire people of this country.”
That message appears to have had strong appeal for
Brexit-supporting voters, who turned away from Labour in the party’s
traditional heartlands and embraced Johnson’s promise that the Conservatives
would “get Brexit done.”
“I think Brexit has dominated, it has dominated
everything by the looks of it,” said Labour economy spokesman John McDonnell.
“We thought other issues could cut through and there would be a wider debate,
from this evidence there clearly wasn’t.”
The prospect of Brexit finally happening more than three
years after Britons narrowly voted to leave the EU marks a momentous shift for
both the U.K. and the bloc. No country has ever left the union, which was
created in the decades after World War II to bring unity to a shattered
continent.
But a decisive Conservative victory would also provide
some relief to the EU, which has grown tired of Britain’s Brexit indecision.
Britain’s departure will start a new phase of
negotiations on future relations between Britain and the 27 remaining EU
members.
EU Council President Charles Michel promised that EU leaders meeting
Friday would send a “strong message” to the next British government
and parliament about next steps.
“We are ready to negotiate,” European Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen said.
The pound surged when an exit poll forecast the Tory win,
jumping over two cents against the dollar, to $1.3445, the highest in more than
a year and a half.
Many Investors hope a Conservative win would speed up the
Brexit process and ease, at least in the short term, some of the uncertainty
that has corroded business confidence since the 2016 vote.
Many voters casting ballots on
Thursday hoped the election might finally find a way out of the Brexit
stalemate in this deeply divided nation. Three and a half years after the U.K.
voted by 52%-48% to leave the EU, Britons remain split over whether to leave
the 28-nation bloc, and lawmakers have proved incapable of agreeing on
departure terms.
On a dank, gray day with outbreaks of blustery rain,
voters went to polling stations in schools, community centers, pubs and town
halls after a bad-tempered five-week campaign rife with mudslinging and
misinformation.
Opinion polls had given the Conservatives a steady lead,
but the result was considered hard to predict, because the issue of Brexit cuts
across traditional party loyalties.
Johnson campaigned relentlessly on a promise to “Get
Brexit done” by getting Parliament to ratify his “oven-ready” divorce deal with
the EU and take Britain out of the bloc as scheduled on Jan. 31.
The Conservatives focused much of their energy on trying
to win in a “red wall” of working-class towns in central and northern England
that have elected Labour lawmakers for decades but also voted strongly in 2016
to leave the EU. That effort got a boost when the Brexit Party led by Nigel
Farage decided at the last minute not to contest 317 Conservative-held seats to
avoid splitting the pro-Brexit vote.
Labour, which is largely but ambiguously pro-EU, faced
competition for anti-Brexit voters from the centrist Liberal Democrats,
Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, and the Greens.
But on the whole Labour tried to focus the campaign away
from Brexit and onto its radical domestic agenda, vowing to tax the rich,
nationalize industries such as railroads and water companies and give everyone
in the country free internet access. It campaigned heavily on the future of the
National Health Service, a deeply respected institution that has struggled to
meet rising demand after nine years of austerity under Conservative-led
governments.
It appears that wasn’t enough to boost Labour’s fortunes.
Defeat will likely spell the end for Corbyn, a veteran socialist who moved his
party sharply to the left after taking the helm in 2015, but who now looks to
have led his left-of-center party to two electoral defeats since 2017. The
70-year-old left-winger was also accused of allowing anti-Semitism to spread
within the party.
“It’s Corbyn,” said former Labour Cabinet minister Alan
Johnson, when asked about the poor result. “We knew he was incapable of
leading, we knew he was worse than useless at all the qualities you need to
lead a political party.”
For many voters, the election offered an unpalatable
choice. Both Johnson and Corbyn have personal approval ratings in negative
territory, and both have been dogged by questions about their character.
Johnson has been confronted with past broken promises,
untruths and offensive statements, from calling the children of single mothers
“ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate” to comparing Muslim women who wear
face-covering veils to “letter boxes.”
Yet, his energy and determination proved persuasive to
many voters.
“It’s a big relief, looking at the exit polls as they are
now, we’ve finally got that majority a working majority that we have not had
for 3 1/2 years,” said Conservative-supporting writer Jack Rydeheard. “We’ve
got the opportunity to get Brexit done and get everything else that we promised
as well. That’s investment in the NHS, schools, hospitals you name it — it’s
finally a chance to break that deadlock in Parliament.”
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Gregory
Katz, Sheila Norman-Culp and Jo Kearney in London, and Angela Charlton, Raf
Casert and Adam Pemble in Brussels contributed.
