In a stunning win for the other side, the far-left Labour Party swept to power by picking up more than 200 seats. A ruling party needs 326 for a majority and Labour jumped to 400-plus seats while Conservative lost 200 and dwindled to about 120 seats.
The lopsided defeat for the Conservative Party meant the end of Rishi Sunak’s time as prime minister. The new prime minister is Keir Starmer.
Heritage Foundation analyst Max Primorac, a senior fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, says the Conservatives brought it on themselves.
“Quite frankly,” he says, “the Conservatives, the Tories in the UK, abandoned their principles of small government, low taxation, low regulations.”
Great Britain’s supposed conservative leaders, he says, have pushed the “net zero” green energy on their own constituents for several years. That sent energy costs soaring and hurt people financially.
A news story from 2023 describes how Sunak was attempting to ditch or delay some “net zero” mandates – all of them set by his own political party – because families were bearing the costs.
A BBC story about rising energy prices, published at the end of 2023, announced an average 5% jump in natural gas and electricity. That increase, while not huge, came after British households got hit with higher prices during the previous winter of 2022, the story said.
“They were the party that increased taxes to the highest level that the country had seen in probably 40 years,” Primorac says. “They -- until very recently -- failed to address the problem of immigration."
Farage and Reform win seats
Lost in news headlines about Labour’s win, the Heritage expert says, is the emergence of a populist party in parliament. Reform UK, an upstart party led by Nigel Farage, won five seats for the first time ever after accusing the powerful Conservative Party of failing to stand by its principles. Reform's wins came at the expense of Conservative losses.
Farage, a main leader of the “Brexit” movement, is described in the liberal British media as “controversial” and “polarizing” for views on nationalism and immigration that mirror the Republican Party in the U.S.
“Let's hope now,” Primorac says, “that this historic clobbering of the Tories will result to internal reforms, and the empowering of true Conservatives, so that they can clear up their bad policies and institute the kind of Thatcherite principles that would lead UK back to greatness again."
