General Election results: One Labour and two Liberal Democrats to represent the borough in Parliament

The results of yesterday’s General Election have revealed the three MPs who will represent the borough of Stockport in Parliament.

In the Stockport constituency, which includes the town centre, Edgeley, the Heatons and Reddish, Navendu Mishra was returned as MP with an increased majority of roughly 15,000.

In the Cheadle and Hazel Grove constituencies, the Liberal Democrats were victorious, retaking seats lost by the party to the Conservatives in 2015. Tom Morrison has been elected to represent Cheadle with a majority of over 12,000, while Lisa Smart will represent Hazel Grove, finishing 6,500 votes ahead of the Labour candidate, and the Conservatives pushed into third place.

Turnout across the borough was 62.9%, slightly above the national average of 60%.

Full results for all three constituencies in the borough, can be found on the Stockport Council website.

Nationally, voting returned a decisive Labour victory, with the party winning in 412 seats out of the 648 declared at time of writing, and Rishi Sunak conceded that Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, would become the next Prime Minister in a speech at his own election count in North Yorkshire.

The King is expected to invite Sir Keir Starmer to form a new government later today (5th July). Rishi Sunak has also announced his intention to step down as Conservative leader following his party’s defeat.

Labour made gains across the North and Midlands in so-called ‘Red Wall’ areas that it lost to the Conservatives in the previous General Election, reversing what was the party’s worst performance at the ballot box in its history to deliver a majority similar to Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide. The party also gained ground in Scotland against the SNP, and in commuter towns North of London.

Conversely, the Conservatives not only lost much of their 2019 gains to Labour, but also to the Liberal Democrats in the South West and South East of England, which have lead to the party suffering the worst electoral performance in its modern history. The Conservatives have lost 251 MPs, leaving the party with just 121 MPs on opposition benches, with many losses also attributed to an sharp swing towards Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The party also saw record losses among Cabinet ministers and well-known figures, with Defence Secretary Grant Shapps; Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt; former Business Secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg; and former Prime Minister, Liz Truss among those voted out by their constituents.

Of the smaller parties, the Liberal Democrats overtook the SNP to become Westminster’s third largest party, returning over 70 MPs. Leader, Sir Ed Davey, delivered party’s best results at the ballot box since the 1920s, primarily by retaking seats previously held by the party prior to 2015 such as those in Stockport, as well as building on previous local election gains in areas of the South East that had opposed Brexit.

Voters in Scotland returned 9 Scottish National Party MPs to Westminster, with the party losing 37 seats, largely to Labour. In Wales however, voters elected four Plaid Cymru MPs, a doubling of their 2019 performance when adjusted for significant boundary changes affecting Welsh constituencies. Northern Ireland also saw Nationalist Sinn Fein returned as the largest party, although its MPs do not take their seats in the Commons, while a scandal-hit Democratic Unionist Party lost ground to smaller unionist parties and the cross-community Alliance Party.

The Green Party added three additional MPs to its single representative in Parliament, coming fourth in the popular vote, while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK also won four seats in heavily Leave-voting areas, and will see Mr Farage sit as MP for Clacton-on-Sea in Essex after his eighth attempt to enter the House of Commons. Reform UK also ate into the Conservative vote share across large parts of the country, with the party winning over 4 million votes, outperforming the Liberal Democrats.

Independent politicians also had a strong showing, with former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, re-elected as an Independent. A number of other independent politicians standing in opposition to the Labour Party’s stance on the conflict in Gaza were also elected in a handful of seats with sizeable Muslim populations.