Boris Johnson Hails 'Great Stonking Mandate'

Conservatives win historic victory in UK election
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 13, 2019 3:37 AM CST
Boris Johnson Hails 'Great Stonking Mandate'
British opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, right, waits for the declaration of his seat in the 2019 general election in Islington, London, Friday, Dec. 13, 2019.   (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is celebrating what he calls a "huge great stonking mandate" to deliver Brexit after a landslide win for his Conservative Party in Thursday's election. The party won a majority of at least 76 seats in Parliament, its biggest since the 1980s, while the Labour Party saw its share of the vote collapse in its "red wall" of supposedly safe seats in northern England and the Midlands, the BBC reports. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose party lost 59 seats, said he would stay on for now, but he would not be leading the party in "any future general election campaign." Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson resigned after losing her own seat to a Scottish National Party candidate.

In his victory speech, Johnson vowed to take Britain out of the European Union by Jan. 31, "no ifs, no buts, no maybes." "This election means that getting Brexit done is now the irrefutable, irresistible, unarguable decision of the British people," he said. But the Conservative landslide did not extend to Scotland, where SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon plans to campaign for a second referendum on Scottish independence, the Guardian reports. "There is a mandate now to offer the people of Scotland the choice over our own future," she said. "Boris Johnson may have a mandate to take England out of the EU. He emphatically does not have a mandate to take Scotland out of the EU." (More Boris Johnson stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X