Labour Faced Surges On Left And Right Amid Landslide Election Victory
Keir Starmer at a post-election rally at the Tate Modern (Alamy)
3 min read
The Labour Party will be relieved to have secured their landslide election victory and more than 400 seats in the House of Commons, but the party faced surges from opponents on the left and right.
Labour leader Keir Starmer secured an historic victory, winning more than 400 seats across the country with a landslide result, while the Conservatives struggled towards 120.
However, amid the Labour gains, the party’s two high-profile losses of the evening, shadow ministers Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire, were to an independent candidate and the Green Party respectively.
Labour lost seats -including Ashworth’s Leicester South - to candidates who are pro-Gaza and independent.
Heather Iqbal, who was previously an aide to Rachel Reeves, lost in Dewsbury and Batley by almost 7,000 votes. Iqbal won 8,707 votes compared to independent Iqbal Mohamed, who secured 15,641 votes.
Labour were also pushed into second place in Blackburn by fewer than 150 votes, with independent Adnan Hussain claiming victory, and Khalid Mahmood, who had represented Birmingham Perry Barr, since 2001 lost to independent Ayoub Khan.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also claimed a comfortable victory in Islingston North, beating Labour into second by more than 7,000 votes.
The loss of shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire also demonstrated the threat the party faces from the Green Party.
Debbonaire, who had been an MP since 2015, was pushed into a distant second by more than 10,000 votes by Green co-leader Carla Denyer in Bristol Central.
Overnight, the Greens quadrupled their Commons total to 4 MPs, gaining two rural seats in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire, as they have expanded their reach beyond their previously more urban targets.
After the local elections earlier this year, PoliticsHome reported that the Green’s performances in May offered signes of “little red warning lights” of potential problems for a Labour government, and signalled the party could take “a bit of a hit” on its “left flank”.
Labour did not lose any seats to Nigel Farage’s ReformUK, but the party came second in a number of seats with strong leave votes in the 2016 Brexit referendum, taking chunks out of the Conservative vote.
In his victory speech in Clacton, Nigel Farage said that the party are "coming for Labour" votes.
Reform came second in the two seats in Sunderland, as well as in Blyth and Ashington, although Ian Lavery still secured almost double the number of votes of the Reform candidate.
Hartlepool, Amber Valley, and Angela Rayner’s seat of Ashton Under Lyne were also among the seats that saw the Conservatives pushed into third behind Labour and Reform.
Labour would also have hoped to have won in the Norfolk seat of Great Yarmouth, where Reform toppled the Conservatives, but Starmer’s party came in a close second, losing by fewer than 1,500 votes.
The Conservatives lost votes to Labour, Reform and the Liberal Democrats across the country, as Rishi Sunak failed to hold on to the coalition Boris Johnson built in 2019, but among the seats have managed to cling on to, many previously safe constituencies have been pushed into marginal territory.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt held on to his Surrey seat by fewer than 1,000 votes, while party chairman Richard Holden won in Basildon and Billericay by just 20 votes.
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