Boris Johnson claims ‘powerful new mandate’ for Brexit

LONDON (AP) — Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party
appeared on course Friday to win a solid majority of seats in Britain’s
Parliament— a decisive outcome to a Brexit-dominated election that
should allow Johnson to fulfill his plan to take the U.K. out of the
European Union next month.

With about half the results declared,
Johnson said it looked like the Conservatives had “a powerful new
mandate to get Brexit done.”

The victory will make Johnson
the most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret
Thatcher, another politician who was loved and loathed in almost equal
measure. It would be a disaster for left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who faced calls for his resignation even as the results rolled in.

Corbyn
called the result “very disappointing” for his party and said he would
not lead Labour into another election, though he resisted calls to quit
immediately,

Results poured in early Friday showing a substantial
shift in support to the Conservatives from Labour, after an exit poll
predicted the Conservatives would get 368 of the 650 House of Commons
seats to Labour’s 191. In the last election in 2017, the Conservatives
won 318 seats and Labour 262.

It would be the biggest Tory majority since Thatcher’s 1980s’ heyday, and Labour’s lowest number of seats since 1935.

The
exit poll also projected 55 seats for the Scottish National Party — a
big increase — and a lackluster 13 for the centrist, pro-EU Liberal
Democrats. Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson lost her own Scottish seat.

The
Conservatives took a swathe of seats in post-industrial northern
England towns that were long Labour strongholds. Labour’s vote held up
better in London, where the party managed to grab the Putney seat from
the Conservatives.

The decisive Conservative vindicates Johnson’s
decision to press for Thursday’s early election, which was held nearly
two years ahead of schedule. He said that if the Conservatives won a
majority, he would get Parliament to ratify his Brexit divorce deal and
take the U.K. out of the EU by the current Jan. 31 deadline.

Speaking
at the election count in his Uxbridge constituency in suburban London,
Johnson said the “historic” election “gives us now, in this new
government, the chance to respect the democratic will of the British
people to change this country for the better and to unleash the
potential of the entire people of this country.”

That message
appears to have had strong appeal for Brexit-supporting voters, who
turned away from Labour in the party’s traditional heartlands and
embraced Johnson’s promise that the Conservatives would “get Brexit
done.”

“I think Brexit has dominated, it has dominated everything
by the looks of it,” said Labour economy spokesman John McDonnell. “We
thought other issues could cut through and there would be a wider
debate, from this evidence there clearly wasn’t.”

The prospect of
Brexit finally happening more than three years after Britons narrowly
voted to leave the EU marks a momentous shift for both the U.K. and the
bloc. No country has ever left the union, which was created in the
decades after World War II to bring unity to a shattered continent.

But
a decisive Conservative victory would also provide some relief to the
EU, which has grown tired of Britain’s Brexit indecision.

Britain’s departure will start a new phase of negotiations on future relations between Britain and the 27 remaining EU members.

EU Council President Charles Michel promised that EU leaders meeting Friday would send a “strong message” to the next British government and parliament about next steps.

“We are ready to negotiate,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

The
pound surged on the exit poll’s forecast, jumping over two cents
against the dollar, to $1.3445, the highest in more than a year and a
half. Many Investors hope a Conservative win would speed up the Brexit
process and ease, at least in the short term, some of the uncertainty
that has corroded business confidence since the 2016 vote.

Many voters casting ballots
on Thursday hoped the election might finally find a way out of the
Brexit stalemate in this deeply divided nation. Three and a half years
after the U.K. voted by 52%-48% to leave the EU, Britons remain split
over whether to leave the 28-nation bloc, and lawmakers have proved
incapable of agreeing on departure terms.

On a dank, gray day with
outbreaks of blustery rain, voters went to polling stations in schools,
community centers, pubs and town halls after a bad-tempered five-week
campaign rife with mudslinging and misinformation.

Opinion polls
had given the Conservatives a steady lead, but the result was considered
hard to predict, because the issue of Brexit cuts across traditional
party loyalties.

Johnson campaigned relentlessly on a promise to
“Get Brexit done” by getting Parliament to ratify his “oven-ready”
divorce deal with the EU and take Britain out of the bloc as scheduled
on Jan. 31.

The Conservatives focused much of their energy on
trying to win in a “red wall” of working-class towns in central and
northern England that have elected Labour lawmakers for decades but also
voted strongly in 2016 to leave the EU. That effort got a boost when
the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage decided at the last minute not to
contest 317 Conservative-held seats to avoid splitting the pro-Brexit
vote.

Labour, which is largely but ambiguously pro-EU, faced
competition for anti-Brexit voters from the centrist Liberal Democrats,
Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, and the Greens.

But on the
whole Labour tried to focus the campaign away from Brexit and onto its
radical domestic agenda, vowing to tax the rich, nationalize industries
such as railroads and water companies and give everyone in the country
free internet access. It campaigned heavily on the future of the
National Health Service, a deeply respected institution that has
struggled to meet rising demand after nine years of austerity under
Conservative-led governments.

It appears that wasn’t enough to
boost Labour’s fortunes. Defeat will likely spell the end for Corbyn, a
veteran socialist who moved his party sharply to the left after taking
the helm in 2015, but who now looks to have led his left-of-center party
to two electoral defeats since 2017. The 70-year-old left-winger was
also accused of allowing anti-Semitism to spread within the party.

“It’s
Corbyn,” said former Labour Cabinet minister Alan Johnson, when asked
about the poor result. “We knew he was incapable of leading, we knew he
was worse than useless at all the qualities you need to lead a political
party.”

For many voters, the election offered an unpalatable
choice. Both Johnson and Corbyn have personal approval ratings in
negative territory, and both have been dogged by questions about their
character.

Johnson has been confronted with past broken promises,
untruths and offensive statements, from calling the children of single
mothers “ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate” to comparing Muslim
women who wear face-covering veils to “letter boxes.”

Yet, his energy and determination proved persuasive to many voters.

“It’s
a big relief, looking at the exit polls as they are now, we’ve finally
got that majority a working majority that we have not had for 3 1/2
years,” said Conservative-supporting writer Jack Rydeheard. “We’ve got
the opportunity to get Brexit done and get everything else that we
promised as well. That’s investment in the NHS, schools, hospitals you
name it — it’s finally a chance to break that deadlock in Parliament.”

___

Gregory
Katz, Sheila Norman-Culp and Jo Kearney in London, and Angela Charlton,
Raf Casert and Adam Pemble in Brussels contributed.