Polling stations have now closed on the United Kingdom’s 2019 snap election, the fifth national vote in Britain since 2014, and results are expected to roll in until early Friday morning.
While the first results may come in as quickly as an hour after the polls closed at 2200GMT, some of the most rural and remote areas — including the Scottish Islands where votes have to be brought to the mainland by boat — could take until Friday morning.
A so-called exit poll, based on interviews with voters as they leave polling stations across the country and trying to forecast the overall vote can legally be published immediately after 2200, when all polling stations close and its results can no longer influence would-be voters.
UPDATE 2335 — Newcastle Upon Tyne wins the race to first to declare
Labour has retained the seat of Newcastle central, the city returning Chi Onwurah to Parliament again. Her vote fell by 2,500 — interestingly near exactly the same number of votes the Brexit Party achieved.
Sunderland followed shortly after, also returning a Labour MP — Bridget Phillipson. Her vote also fell considerably — again by a similar number of votes to the Brexit Party, who enjoyed a decent showing with 15.5 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 40.7 per cent.
We’ve also had the first Tory MP of the night — the Conservatives have taken Blyth Valley from Labour, overturning a strong majority to take the seat by 600 or so seats. The Conservatives have a ten per cent swing in this key seat — considered a key to the rest of the night’s results.
647 seats to go…
UPDATE 2300 — Twitter responds
Because our political class lives on Twitter, here are some choice responses:
Boris Johnson is obviously happy:
Thank you to everyone across our great country who voted, who volunteered, who stood as candidates. We live in the greatest democracy in the world. pic.twitter.com/1MuEMXqWHq
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) December 12, 2019
But Labour’s David Lammy is not:
This looks abysmal. The result will be devastating for communities like mine all around the country who are now facing five years of Boris Johnson with unchecked power. I am more fearful for our country than at any point in my lifetime.
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) December 12, 2019
Hollywood luvvie Hugh Grant — who has been campaigning for anti-Brexit candidates this election — is also not a happy fellow:
There goes the neighbourhood.
— Hugh Grant (@HackedOffHugh) December 12, 2019
He’s joined by Labour’s Jess Phillips
There are very few words for how heartbroken I am for the community I represent who have been through enough.
— Jess Phillips Esq., (@jessphillips) December 12, 2019
Oh dear…
I’m so, so sorry guys. Just utterly devastating. Brexit just smashed us. Keeping together an electoral coalition of Remainers and Leavers as the country bitterly divided just became impossible.
— Owen Jones? (@OwenJones84) December 12, 2019
An important point — you either believe in democracy, or you don’t:
I cannot imagine how so many people in England can have been quite so stupid
Sorry, but it has to be said
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) December 12, 2019
UPDATE 2230 — How would this result compare to elections past?
A majority of 368, if the exit poll is correct, is obviously nothing like any election result the United Kingdom has seen in the past decade. The last time any UK party exceeded that number was the then left-centrist Labour party in its 1997 landslide under europhile globalist Tony Blair, who won 418 seats.
The last Tory win of such a magnitude was Margaret Thatcher in 1983, when she won 397 seats, a majority of 144 seats.
Read more at Breitbart London:
Latest: If the UK election exit poll is correct, the Conservatives will have won their best victory since the days of Thatcher https://t.co/yh5fHXAdy3
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 12, 2019
UPDATE 2203 — Exit polls suggest enormous Conservative majority, Labour collapse
The exit poll has now been released, and if the figures are to be believed — bearing in mind even this poll has got it wrong before — there will be champagne corks popping in Conservative headquarters.
While the Conservatives needed nine seats to control the house, the prediction is they would actually gain 50, taking them to 368. This is a majority of 86 over Labour — a potentially major achievement that would give the Conservatives the largest majority for the party in decades.
UPDATE 2200 — Polls close
Polling stations have now closed, leaving the not inconsequential task of counting. Sealed crates of paper ballots will be transported to local government counts around the country where they will be counted and verified, before the constituency returning officer declares the results.
We’re in for a long night.
The Day So Far
British electoral law prevents journalists from reporting on many aspects of the day so not to influence voters on the day they actually cast their ballots — but some unusual events have permeated the shutdown.
Police in Motherwell, Scotland were called to a polling station in the early hours of this morning after a “suspicious device” was spotted. The incident was deemed sufficiently serious that the surrounding area was evacuated before a bomb disposal robot was sent in to destroy the device.
Police subsequently revealed the object was not a “viable” bomb, but arrested a 48-year-old man. Information about the identity of the suspect, or a potential motive.
Britain Goes to the Polls in So-Called ‘Brexit Election’ https://t.co/PaC7fneemJ
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 12, 2019
Why is this election happening? A potted history of Brexit
British politics has been in an unusually intense state of political activity in recent years, with the watershed moment arguably coming in 2014 — meaning the British people have been in a state of near-constant debates, coverage, and national votes for half a decade.
This has been largely down to Brexit — Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union — probably the defining political feature of this generation.
Then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron promised Eurosceptics an in-out referendum way back in 2013, a major concession but an easy concession for him to make. Not only did Cameron not believe the country would vote for it — offering the vote would allow him to silence anti-Europe critics within his own party for a generation — but he said he would only give in in 2015 or later, after a general election he did not believe he would win.
This promise became complicated for him when the British people voted Nigel Farage’s UKIP into first place in the 2014 European Union elections. Not only did this knock Cameron’s Conservatives off the top perch in the European Parliament, it meant an overtly Eurosceptic party had won a national election for the first time.
With the following year came the 2015 general election Cameron did not expect to win — but win he did, and this time without the need of a coalition partner — leaving him with a manifesto promise to give that EU referendum to the British people. The pollsters had failed to predict the outcome of the 2015 election, and after a failed attempt to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union to make remaining seem more appealing, the pollsters got it wrong in 2016 when they failed to predict the outcome of the referendum.
The British people voted to leave the European Union, giving Brexit the greatest political mandate for any issue or government in British political history. But rather than taking the message — the vote threw into crisis a government which had been whole-blooded in its support for the losing side — David Cameron resigned as prime minister within hours of the news coming in.
Then followed Prime Minister Theresa May, elevated to the leadership of the Conservative Party after frontrunner Boris Johnson dropped out of the race. May — a Remain supporter who nonetheless promised to deliver Brexit — was determined to get a new parliament to carry her plan through, but bungled the 2017 snap general election and put the events in motion that inevitably led to today’s general election.
After two years of, at times, torturous ‘negotiations’ with the European Union, May found herself unable to pass her Brexit deal through a House of Commons her party had no majority in. While she clung onto power, it was Nigel Farage again winning the European Parliament elections — in 2019 under a newly concocted Brexit Party banner — that finally brought the curtain down on May’s reign.
Mr Farage in the meanwhile credited himself with the scalp of a second Conservative prime minister in three years.
Reigns of the Conservative Party now passed to Boris Johnson, Britain again moved into another period of renegotiation with the European Union. This more swiftly concluded, the so-called deal again failed to pass through Parliament, Johnson having inherited the same hung fractious, broadly anti-Brexit parliament that had frustrated Theresa May.
Hence today’s snap election — after several attempts, Boris Johnson finally got the blessing of Parliament to hold fresh votes. While Brexit is far from the only issue at stake, it has certainly been the most discussed — hence the British press dubbing this the ‘Brexit election’.
Yet despite that, it will be the fifth national vote in five calendar years — and the fourth dominated by Brexit. Whether this will be the last Brexit election or not, depends on the polls and the coming months and years.
Read More
Oliver JJ Lane
Breitbart News 2019-12-12T22:01:55Z
