Last night, as the votes were counted and each of the 650 seats were announced, the General Election was neck-and-neck, with no majority looking clear. This morning, there is no majority, Parliament is hung, and the UK government is hanging in the balance.
Of the 650 seats up for grabs in the general election, the Conservative Party and their leader Theresa May won 318 seats, which is 48.9% of the overall vote. The Labour Party and their leader Jeremy Corbyn won 261 seats, which is 40.2% overall. Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish National Party won 35 seats, which is 5.4% overall.
The Liberal Democrats and their leader Tim Farron won 12 seats for 1.8% of Parliament.
The fringe parties also mustered up a few seats in the general election. The Democratic Unionist Party and their leader Arlene Foster won 10 seats, an overall 1.5%. Sinn Féin and their co-leaders Gerry Adams and Michelle O’Neill won 7 seats for 1.1% of Parliament. Leanne Wood and her Welsh party Plaid Cymru won 4 seats, which is 0.6% of the seats. The Green Party and their co-leaders Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley won 0.2% of the seats in Parliament, which is just one seat. UKIP and Paul Nuttall, Ulster Unionist Party and Robin Swann, Colum Eastwood and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and Alliance and Naomi Long won no seats, while one seat has yet to be declared.
Small victory for Labour voters
While Labour didn’t win the majority and Jeremy Corbyn isn’t the Prime Minister, this election was still a small victory for Labour supporters, some of whom always had doubts that their party would win. Labour didn’t win the election, but it did win enough seats to leave Parliament hung and Theresa May without the majority of seats.
Under Ed Miliband, Labour won 232 seats at the last general election in 2015. Now, with Corbyn in charge, a leader who many doubted, 261 seats have been won.
The Conservative Party garnered 318 seats in the general election, which is 8.7% more of the seats than Labour, but they need more of a lead than this to take the UK government and for Theresa May to be reinstated as British Prime Minister.
The Irish Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, has won 10 seats (1.5% overall), so May is looking to strike a deal with them and form a coalition that could just push the Tories over the edge and get her back on Downing Street and running Great Britain into the ground.
May striking deal with DUP
The DUP is a reviled party amongst left-wing parties. They once tried to throw together a coalition with the likes of the Green Party and SNP a few weeks ago in a half-baked attempt to win themselves the majority vote in the general election, but their anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion policies got their hopes quickly dashed.
But of course, Theresa May has no qualms with that, and she’s striking a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party that will give her the opportunity to take over the UK government and remain our Prime Minister for the Brexit process, which was the whole reason she called the general election in the first place.
She wanted more seats and now she has less. Hilarious! May is expected to go behind everybody’s backs and meet with the Queen to confirm that she’s made a deal with the DUP, and she hopes the Queen will say, “Yeah, that’s great. You’re Prime Minister again. Woo!” So, we’ll see how that turns out.
This won’t officially be a coalition, since Conservative voters didn’t vote for the DUP, so that would be sly. Instead, it’ll be a “confidence and supply,” which is basically a coalition, let’s be honest. May spoke with DUP all through the night as the general election results came in. She used the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn being Prime Minister to sway them. A DUP source has said that “the alternative” to May’s government, which would be Corbyn’s government, is “intolerable.” They said, “For as long as Corbyn leads Labour, we will ensure there’s a Tory PM.”
