2024 United Kingdom general election

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pWotD Episode 2620: 2024 United Kingdom general election
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With 376,778 views on Thursday, 4 July 2024 our article of the day is 2024 United Kingdom general election.
The 2024 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 4 July 2024 to elect 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons. The election resulted in a landslide victory for the opposition Labour Party led by Keir Starmer, similar to that achieved by Tony Blair at the 1997 general election, the last time a Labour opposition ousted a Conservative government. The governing Conservative Party under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak lost over 240 seats and suffered their worst ever defeat, ending its 14-year tenure as the primary governing party. The combined vote share for Labour and the Conservatives reached a record low, with Labour's vote share becoming the smallest of any majority government in UK electoral history. Smaller parties did significantly well; the Liberal Democrats made significant gains to reach their highest ever number of seats. Reform UK did well in vote share and had MPs elected to the Commons for the first time. The Green Party of England and Wales also won a record number of seats. The Scottish National Party (SNP) lost around three quarters of its seats to Scottish Labour. Labour returned to being the largest party in Scotland and remained so in Wales. The Conservatives won no seats in Wales or Cornwall and only one seat in North East England.
Discussion around the campaign focused on public opinion of a change in government, as Labour maintained significant leads in opinion polling over the Conservatives, but usually by around 20 percentage points, twice the lead they would eventually win. Significant constituency boundary changes were in effect, the first since those implemented at the 2010 general election. It was the first general election in which photographic identification was required to vote in person in Great Britain. The general election was the first since Brexit, the UK's departure from the European Union (EU) on 31 January 2020, which was a major issue in the 2019 general election; it was also the first to take place since the COVID-19 pandemic or under the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022. This was the first victory for Labour in a general election in 19 years.
A record number of Conservatives lost their seats at the election. Eleven were cabinet ministers, the highest amount in history, including Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Alex Chalk, Liam Fox, Johnny Mercer, Gillian Keegan and Mark Harper. Other MPs who lost their seats included the former prime minister Liz Truss, Michael Fabricant, Jonathan Gullis, Jacob Rees-Mogg, George Galloway and Douglas Ross. Newly elected MPs included the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and its chairman Richard Tice, and the Green Party of England and Wales co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay. MPs who stood down at the election included the former prime minister Theresa May, former cabinet ministers Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock, Ben Wallace, Nadhim Zahawi, Kwasi Kwarteng and Michael Gove, and long-serving MPs Harriet Harman and Margaret Beckett.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 12:35 UTC on Friday, 5 July 2024.
For the full current version of the article, see 2024 United Kingdom general election on Wikipedia.
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