UK Election Results in Maps: How Labour’s Landslide Victory Happened

The election has dramatically reshaped Britain’s electoral map, with nearly half of seats in Parliament changing hands, delivering the Conservatives the worst defeat in their nearly 200-year history.

The Labour Party gained seats across the country. That was most apparent in postindustrial areas of the Midlands and North of England known as the “red wall,” where many longtime Labour seats switched to the Conservatives in the previous election in support of their hard-line position on Brexit.

The Scottish National Party, which has dominated Scottish politics for more than a decade, lost more than 30 seats. And the centrist Liberal Democrats gained dozens of seats, mostly across southern England, at the expense of the Conservatives.

The Conservatives lost more than half their seats

After 14 years in government, voters delivered a damning result to the Conservatives, who lost nearly two-thirds of their seats. Most went to the center-left Labour Party, but 60 went to the centrist Liberal Democrats.

This shift could provide the Labour government with the opportunity to steer the country in a markedly different direction.

The Conservatives won the lowest vote share in their modern history

The Conservative Party has never performed as poorly in an election since the United Kingdom assumed its modern form in 1922.

But the election was also historic in another way: The country’s smaller parties have also never performed as well as they did on Thursday. That continues a decades-long shift away from a two-party system, and means that Labour’s position may be more fragile than it looks on the surface.

Support for the hard right surged

Labour picked up some of the voters who deserted the Conservatives, receiving about two percentage points more of the national vote share than it did in 2019.

But Reform U.K., a hard-right, anti-immigrant party led by Nigel Farage, a force behind Brexit, saw the night’s biggest jump in vote share. His party won more than 14 percent of the national vote, up 12 percentage points from 2019, when its predecessor party withdrew candidates in more than 300 Conservative-held seats.

Labour won a landslide with just a third of the vote

The Labour Party won one of the largest majorities of seats in Britain’s electoral history on the lowest share of votes of any election winner.

The vote showed widespread support for smaller, ideological parties across the country that didn’t translate to significant seat gains.

On the right, Reform won more than 14 percent of the vote, but won just four of the 650 seats in Britain’s Parliament. The Green Party also won four seats with around 7 percent of the vote. And Labour lost four seats to pro-Palestinian independent candidates in seats with large Muslim populations.

Conservatives had the biggest drops in vote share where Reform performed the best

During the campaign, the Conservatives repeatedly warned their voters that abandoning the party to vote for Reform would result in more Labour victories. That turned out to be true.

The Conservatives lost the most support in seats where Reform surged. In many seats where Labour won, Reform came in second place, delivering on Mr. Farage’s pledge to position the party well for the next general election, expected in 2029.

Conservative support dropped across the board — and Labour fell back among young people

The Conservatives have beaten Labour among older voters in every election since Labour’s landslide victory in 1997. Despite still performing best in the oldest areas of the country in this election, the Conservatives’ support dropped across the board.

But Labour’s performance in the youngest areas of the country also reveals its weakness among its core voters.

Its vote share in the youngest seats — including many educated urban areas with large student populations — dropped from 51 percent at the previous election to 44 percent, as many voters flocked to smaller parties, the Green Party on the left and Reform U.K. on the right, or to independent candidates.