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Conservative wave wipes out Miliband, Clegg and Farage | France24 |
Labour’s Ed Miliband, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, and UKIP’s Nigel Farage all resigned
as party leaders on Friday after the Tories won a stunning election victory in Britain.Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron overturned poll predictions that the vote would be the closest in decades to sweep easily into office for another five years, with his Labour opponents in tatters.
Labour leader Ed Miliband admitted it had been “a very disappointing and difficult night” for his centre-left party, in which it lost about two dozen seats, including one held by finance spokesman Ed Balls.
At a press conference in London, a dejected-looking Miliband said he had called Cameron to congratulate him and would now step down to allow someone else to rebuild the party.
“Britain needs a strong Labour Party. It’s time for someone else to take leadership of this party,” Miliband told supporters in his resignation speech.
Stunning victory
The margin of victory was a surprise even to Cameron, who said he “never quite believed we’d get to the end of this campaign in the place we are now.” That means Cameron no longer needs the Liberal Democrats, with which he has governed since 2010.
The centre-left party, heir to one of the most storied liberal parties in Europe, was crushed, reduced to single digits after winning 57 seats five years ago. Its leader, Nick Clegg , held his own seat but resigned as party chief.
“It is simply heartbreaking,” he said of the losses. “Clearly the results have been immeasurably more crushing and unkind than I could ever have feared.”
Despite surging into third place in the overall vote tally, UKIP failed to yield a strong presence in parliament. The anti-immigration party racked up scores of second place finishes across the country but, in the end, it lost one of its two seats in the House of Commons. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage , announced his resignation after failing in his seventh attempt to be elected as an MP.
Political map redrawn
The nationalists’ historic landslide in Scotland is also likely to redraw the British political map and increase pressure for a fresh referendum on Scottish independence. The Scottish National Party (SNP) took 56 out of a possible 59 seats, while Labour was almost wiped out in Scotland.
- ○ How ‘shy Tories’ confounded the polls and gave David Cameron victory
○ UK election polls were wrong before, notably in the UK general election of 1992
