Johnson Election Victory Propels Britain Towards Swift Brexit

SCOTLAND REJECTS BREXIT

But it was a very different picture in Scotland, where the anti-Brexit, pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) won 48 out of 59 Commons seats by thrashing both the Conservatives and Labour.

“Boris Johnson may have a mandate to take England out of the European Union. He emphatically does not have a mandate to take Scotland out of the European Union,” said Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and first minister of Scotland.

With Sturgeon emboldened to step up her campaign for an independence referendum, and Irish nationalists performing strongly in Northern Ireland, the integrity of the United Kingdom looks more precarious than it has for centuries.

Overall, the election results were most damaging for Labour and its veteran socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn, who announced he would step down after a “process of reflection”.

Once a fringe figure on Labour’s far left, Corbyn unexpectedly won the party leadership in 2015 on a wave of grassroots enthusiasm for his radical policies, especially among some young people.

But voters on Thursday unambiguously rejected his programme of nationalisation and colossal state spending, delivering Labour’s worst result since 1935.

The party now faces a brutal internal battle between Corbyn’s followers, who are determined to stick to their socialist agenda, and his critics, who want the party to return to the centre ground it occupied under former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In a symbol of Labour’s failure, Blair’s old parliamentary seat of Sedgefield fell to the Conservatives.

It was also a bad night for the strongly anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, the only party that proposed cancelling Brexit without holding a second referendum.