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Labour have won a landslide victory in the UK's General Election. The Conservative Party have lost two-thirds of their seats, ending up with only 121
Members of Parliament. This Labour win will transform Britain's political landscape ending 14 years of Tory rule, under 5 different Prime Ministers,
only two of which were ever chosen by the British electorate.
Labour have 412 MPs, a huge majority of 172 seats that gives our new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer scope to make much needed reforms with his new five year Government for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Moments after the previous Prime Minister resigned, Sir Keir Starmer was invited to Buckingham Palace for an audience with His Majesty The King and he was asked to form a new government. He then triumphantly took his place in No.10 Downing Street and announced the line-up of Cabinet Ministers for his new governmental team:
Angela Rayner - Deputy Prime Minister and | |
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During the Election Campaign the Labour leader unveiled a pledge card with six key policies, including delivering "economic stability" and providing 40,000 more hospital appointments each week.
His plans include making the UK the fastest-growing major economy, by the end of a first Labour term in government, and setting up the publically owned Great British
Energy in order to achieve clean power by 2030.
He's also pledged to set up a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings, deploy more neighbourhood police officers so as to reduce antisocial behaviour and recruit 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools. | 
London: City of Westminster Houses of Parliament by Lewis Clarke CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
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As dawn broke over London on Friday morning, the Labour leader addressed a cheering crowd of Labour activists at the Tate Modern art gallery. Sir Keir Starmer
said,
"We did it!
You campaigned for it. You fought for it. You voted for it. And now it has arrived. Change begins now. And it feels good, I have to be honest.
Four-and-a-half years of work changing the party. This is what it is for.
A changed Labour party ready to serve our country. Ready to restore Britain to the service of working people.
And across our country people will be waking up to the news, relieved that a weight has been lifted, a burden finally removed from the shoulders of this great nation.
And now we can look forward. Walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day, shining once again, on a country with the opportunity after 14 years to get its future back.”
For the Conservatives, this election result is a total disaster. Having lost the trust of the British people, they've now lost hundreds of MPs and a record number of Cabinet members have lost their seats:
Grant Shapps, Defence Secretary, Welwyn Hatfield The former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that he intends to stand down as leader of the Conservative Party, just as soon as they work out how to find somebody even remotely competent to take over. Given the record of this disgraced Tory party over the past 14 years and the loss of so many cabinet ministers in the election, that could take some time. So why was this election important for gay men? The last Government was a total failure - we all know that, but if you are LGBT you lost out even more than the average person. Our feature called 14 yrs of LGBT commitments, none of which were kept by this failed Tory Government highlighted the shortcomings of the last administration, and all the commitments that the Tories failed to keep. At this election we had a simple choice - another 5 years of their dereliction of duty, or a change of Government to something new. The British people opted for change. The Conservatives were deeply unpopular, and the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was every bit as unpopular as his party. Election polls were proved to be entirely correct and predictions by commentators in magazines like The Economist came true. They said it was going to be political "lunacy" for Sunak to go to the country, and clearly it was. Despite having won an 80-seat majority in the last election, Boris Johnson's shambolic "cheeky chappy" demeanor was attractive to some, but others saw straight through it. His administration imploded with more than 60 ministers resigning their positions, and the Prime Minister left standing on the steps of No.10 bumbling on about some obscure ancient figure called Cincinnatus. He was an old Roman politician in 5th Century BC who was in retirement, and when Rome was threatened with military invasion, Cincinnatus took up a dictatorship with sole power, and defeated the enemy. There was to be no such victory for Johnson. He destroyed the electoral prospects of the Tories - with partygate scandals, a failure to deliver what many people had voted for in terms of Brexit, and completely losing control of the Covid Pandemic which caused the death of hundreds of thousands of British people. His successor was Liz Truss who managed a feat of great political rarity - she made a bad situation much worse. Her 49 days in office in September and October 2022 brought new meaning to the phrase "crash and burn", with a radical free-market budget that proved utterly calamitous. She was forced to resign, making her the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. Famously her time in office was shorter than a rotting blonde-wigged iceberg lettuce, invented by the Daily Star newspaper, which became a viral sensation as it outlived the newly failed PM in the battle of survival. Then came Rishi Sunak. Nobody voted for him, and nobody wanted him. He'd already lost the party leadership vote to Liz Truss, but in desperation the Conservatives put him in charge. He and his party never recovered from the Johnson/Truss debacle. A majority of British voters blamed his party for making the cost of living crisis more painful than it should have been. £30 billion had been wiped off the economy by Tory incompetence. Their failed plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was beset by legal problems and cost us yet another £370 million, although many people claim the eventual cost is going to be even more. And what of Sunak himself? He announced the election on the steps of Drowning Street, in the pouring rain. He claimed he had a plan - although clearly that didn't involve an umbrella. At a campaign event in Wales he asked people if they were looking forward to the European Football Championships even though Wales haven't qualified. He went to Northern Ireland and chose the Titanic Quarter for his speech in Belfast, with one local journalist asking if he was in charge of a sinking ship. He was photographed on the plane coming home with Exit signs illuminated all around him. His panic announcements of National Service for young people, and tax cuts for pensioners did nothing to improve his fortunes in the polls. Then of course, the total political disasters of having some of his closest aides betting on the date of General Election and Sunak's decision to leave the D-Day commemorations in Normandy early, which have left even loyal members his party feeling total dismay and disgust. |
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Sunak and the Conservatives failed, and we can now look forward to a new Labour administration under Prime Minister Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB KC.
He has been Member of Parliament for Holborn and St Pancras since 2015, having previously been Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2014 New Year Honours and is a senior lawyer appointed by the monarch of the country as King's Counsel (KC). | 
Keir Starmer at the Labour Party hustings Photo: Rwendland CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
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It was vital that LGBT people made their voice heard in this election and it was heartening that so many did. If you want to know why, just look
back at the achievements of the last Labour Government in terms of LGBT rights, and compare that to the recent failures of the Tories.
since Tony Blair became UK Prime Minister since he stepped down after having won twice more. Since Labour lost power in 2010 we've had five Conservatives in No.10, and it was only at the insistence of one of them, David Cameron, that LGBT rights progressed at all and equal marriage became possible in the UK. | |
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There have been very few advances in other gay rights in the
and with the UK now having left behind the LGBT protections of the EU,
and the Tories still espousing traditional attitudes and values, it was always unlikely they'll be any more.
There's no question that the new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will be a strong campaigner for LGBT rights - he has been all his life. Now that he has made it to No.10 he will undoubtedly continue to support Human Rights reform and he could radically improve LGBT equality in the UK. |
Keir Starmer Labour Leader Photo: Rwendland CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
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It is however worth remembering that Tony Blair's decade as Prime Minister saw a sea change in gay
rights in the UK, with centuries of homophobic legislation removed from the statute
book. Most commentators acknowledge the massive advancements - though inevitably
the aftermath of the Iraq war still overshadows his record.
There is a whole new generation of LGBT people in the UK since those memorable days when Tony Blair became Prime Minister. Here are some enduring views from commentators of that time, looking back at the Blair era and his considerable LGBT legacy. | |
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Peter Tatchell Human Rights Campaigner "During Tony Blair's Prime Ministership, anti-gay laws that had existed for decades, or even centuries, were repealed. Nearly all homophobic legislation was removed from the statute books in less than a decade – a truly breath-taking pace of reform that has greatly improved the lives of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. These changes would not have happened if the Conservatives had remained in power. Congratulations and thanks to the Labour government– and to MPs from all parties who backed gay law reform. |
Prime Minister Tony Blair announces the date of his resignation. |
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"Tony Blair's legacy is not without its downside. He
was sometimes reluctant to repeal homophobic legislation. Soon after
he was elected Prime Minister in 1997, Labour ditched its
pre-election pledge to scrap the unequal age of consent and to end the ban on
gays in the armed forces. These reforms only happened because the
European Court of Human Rights ruled that this discrimination was
illegal; thereby forcing the UK government to introduce equality.
"The outlawing of homophobic discrimination in the workplace was not initiated by Blair's government. It was the result of a European Union Directive that the UK was compelled to make law in 2003. Previously, in 1998, Blair's government three times vetoed parliamentary amendments to protect lesbians and gay men against workplace discrimination."
Mary Ann Sieghart The Times
Polly Toynbee The Guardian
Michael Portillo Broadcaster, Former Conservative MP and Minister In the ten years from May 1997 to May 2007 Tony Blair oversaw a greater step forward in LGBT equality and human rights than in any other period in our history: civil partnerships; the right to adopt; an equal age of consent; the repeal of section 28; ending the ban on LGBT people serving in our armed forces; new laws on hate crime and the Gender Recognition Act. This list alone makes it hardly surprising that in 2014 Gay Times awarded Tony Blair the accolade of being one of the most influential Gay Icons of the last 30 years. We now look forward to that same accolade being associated to our new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. He has a lot of ground to catch up after the last 14 years of total incompetence. We wish him and his new government every good fortune. |
