Labour Party wins UK election in a landslide: Live updates

 

 

LONDON — The U.K.’s opposition Labour Party won a huge parliamentary majority in the country’s general election, unseating the incumbent Conservatives after 14 years.

Early on Friday morning, Labour passed the threshold needed to govern alone as outgoing PM Rishi Sunak conceded defeat. Keir Starmer, leader of the center-left Labour, will become the country’s next prime minister and declared victory in the early hours.

“We did it,” he said, addressing his Labour colleagues. “You campaigned for it, you fought for it — and now it has arrived ... change begins now.”

Some projections show Labour will gain its second-largest majority after former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 179-seat majority in 1997.

Millions of people across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on Thursday voted for their local representatives in the 650-member House of Commons, the U.K.’s lower house of parliament. Ballots are still being counted, with constituencies announcing their winning candidate as soon as votes are tallied.

Here are the seats that have been declared so far:

Goldman Sachs upgraded its growth forecast for the U.K. after the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the country’s general election.

The investment bank said in a note released early on Friday morning that it expected Labour’s fiscal policy agenda to provide a “modest boost to demand growth in the near-term” and raised its gross domestic product (GDP) forecasts for the U.K. by 0.1 percentage points in both 2025 and 2026.

“Reforms to the planning system could boost housebuilding and productivity; higher public sector investment could lift potential output; and closer trade ties with the EU could mitigate some of the costs of Brexit,” Goldman Sachs economists said in the note.

However, the economists said that they “see risks that possible further increases in taxation could affect incentives to invest and Labour’s pledge to reduce net migration could weigh on labour supply.”

At the same time, they added that it was “difficult to gauge the magnitude of the effects of these policies on growth without further policy details.”

— Vicky McKeever