Britain Votes: Breitbart London Election Night 2019 Live Wire

(COMBO) In this combination of photos created on December 12, 2019, Britain's Prime M
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Oliver JJ Lane and Jack Montgomery

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 voter

UPDATE 1000 — Tory 364, Labour 203

With all but one seats nationwide now declared — St Ives in Cornwall are taking their time — the extent of the Conservative victory overnight has become apparent. With 364 seats so far, the Tories have a strong majority in the Commons of 79 seats. This is historic stuff for Boris Johnson, and gives him a strong mandate to deliver Brexit.

An important point to note is the nationwide Conservative vote share remained broadly the same as 2017, when Theresa May had her disastrous election result. Then, she lost a parliamentary majority with 42.4 per cent of the national vote giving her 317 seats. Today, Boris Johnson achieved 43.6 per cent — a rise of just 1.2 per cent — but won a clear majority of 364 seats.

The important difference is not so much the number of votes nationwide — but where they were cast. Nigel Farage may be able to take a bow here — by not standing against the Conservatives ins seats they already held, Conservative activists were more free to travel the rest of the country and drum up support in marginal seats. Clearly, the gamble paid off.

UPDATE 0635 — Trump congratulates Boris

President Donald Trump has congratulated Boris Johnson on his “great WIN!” and predicted a British-American trade deal after Brexit which will be far bigger and more lucrative than with the EU.

Read more here: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/12/12/celebrate-boris-trump-hails-uk-election-result-massive-new-trade-deal-after-brexit/

UPDATE 0510 — Dennis Skinner loses seat

Labour’s Dennis Skinner, the (in)famous “Beast of Bolsover”, has lost his seat to the Tories after an astonishing 49 years in Parliament.

The former miner was a staunch socialist but a firm Brexiteer — one of only a very few in the Parliamentary Labour Party — and admired across the political spectrum for his independence of mind.

UPDATE 0500 — Tories have OFFICIALLY WON

The Tories have officially won the general election, claiming their 326th seat in the House of Commons. It is no longer even theoretically possible for Boris Johnson’s party to lose the election — and they are projected to win an overall majority of around eighty; the largest since Maragaret Thatcher’s last election in the 1980s.

UPDATE 0345 — Red Ken Blames “Jewish Vote” for Corbyn’s Losses

The former Labour Party mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said that Boris Johnson’s predicted landslide victory spells “the end” for Jeremy Corbyn, blaming the loss on the “Jewish vote”.

In the latest antisemitic outburst from the far-left ex-Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone blamed the loss of his “close ally” Jeremy Corbyn on the 70-year-old socialist’s handling of allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Mr Livingstone said: “The Jewish vote wasn’t very helpful.”

Read more here: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/12/12/ex-labour-mayor-london-blames-corbyns-demise-jewish-vote/

UPDATE 0345 — Boris retains seat, gives acceptance speech 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has seen off leftist efforts to unseat him from his constituency through tactical voting comfortably.

Flanked by a number of independents — a common sight in prime ministers’ constituencies — the Prime Minister offered a shout-out to one of them, “Lord Buckethead”, by name as well a gentleman dressed as Elmo, before thanking the police, returning officers, and other involved in organising the election, and pledging to govern with renewed vigour.

UPDATE 0335 — Tories take Tony Blair’s former constituency

The Conservative Party have taken the constituency of Sedgefield, once held by former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, signalling the scale of the swing against the left-wing party.

UPDATE 0330 — Corbyn Gone

Jeremy Corbyn has retained his parliamentary seat but confirmed he will not lead the Labour Party in a future general election following tonight’s unfolding disaster in his acceptance speech. He will continue to lead during a post-election “period of reflection”, however.

UPDATE 0320 — McDonnell retains seat, cries of “terrorist”, punches thrown

Chaos has erupted at the count in John McDonnell’s constituency. The Shadow Chancellor, who is known for having made comments sympathetic to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) terror campaign against the British state and British citizens, was denounced as a “terrorist” by members of the crowd, and a scuffle broke out in which blows were exchanged before the police intervened.

UPDATE 0310 — DUP Westminster leader loses Belfast North

Nigel Dodds, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party’s Westminster contingent, has lost his Belfast North seat. The pro-Brexit, socially conservative party, which favours maintaining the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, made a so-called confidence and supply arrangement with the Conservatives after Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority in 2017.

UPDATE 0305 — Chuka Umunna fails in bid to remain a member of parliament

Former Labour member of parliament turned Change UK and then Liberal Democrat member Chuka Umunna — a key anti-Brexit MP — has failed to remain in Britain’s lower chamber. He was contesting the seat for Westminster but lost out to the Conservative’s Nickie Allen who won 17,049. The former Streatham MP got a respectable, but nonetheless insufficient 13,096 votes under the Liberal banner.

UPDATE 0225 — Brexit Party fails in Hartlepool

A key target for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party — being challenged by party chairman Richard Tice — has been held by Labour. Disappointing for the Brexit Party, certainly, but the party so far this evening has shown very little sign of splitting the right-wing vote — a key criticism of Mr Farage’s approach to the election so far.

UPDATE 0215 — Go woke, go broke

Since Britain considered the possibility of leaving the European Union, the political scene has been inundated with former Prime Ministers telling people how to vote. One of them is former Tory leader John Major, the Prime Minister who took over the party from Margaret Thatcher and too the country into the controversial Maastricht treaty — an act which essentially kick-started the eurosceptic movement in the United Kingdom.

The problem for Major’s elder statesman act is — according to the unproven exit poll — is how much more popular Boris Johnson’s pro-Brexit pitch to the people seems to be than his approach. Indeed, if the exit poll plays out this morning, Boris Johnson will have achieved a lead over Labour four times larger than Major’s in 1992.

UPDATE 0200 — Labour makes a gain! 

In their first gain of the night, the Labour Party have won in Putney, besting the Tories with 45.1 per cent of the vote. The seat is the first result so far in which Labour have gained more votes than the 2017 election as the party continues to bleed support nationwide.

UPDATE 0125 — Workington man votes Tory

The Conservative Party has won Workington — not only a seat that has never voted Conservative before, but the seat reckoned to characterise the whole election. Party leaders travelled to Workington to woo the so-called “Workington man”, a Brexiteer in a traditionally Labour area.

Cearly the Tory plan is working. The seat was created after the First World War and has voted consistently Labour ever since 1979, and mostly Labour since 1918. This is a predominantly working-class area — further evidence that the Conservatives have picked up working class, so-called left-behind areas abandoned by the increasingly liberal, urban Labour party.

UPDATE 0110 — Tories enjoy strong swing in key Nuneaton seat

Nuneaton was the key seat in the 2016 Brexit referendum — for many pundits seeing the key bellwether had voted to leave the European Union was the giveaway that Britain as a whole would do so.

The Conservative MP for the town Marcus Jones has dramatically increased his majority to over 13,000 tonight — up from 4,700 in 2017. This is an absolutely major swing for the Conservatives in a swing seat that had been Labour for decades before Jones won the seat for the Tories in 2010.

UPDATE 0030 — About Blythe Valley…

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:

But Labour’s David Lammy is not:

Hollywood luvvie Hugh Grant — who has been campaigning for anti-Brexit candidates this election — is also not a happy fellow:

He’s joined by Labour’s Jess Phillips

Oh dear…

An important point — you either believe in democracy, or you don’t:

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:

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.

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.

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