10 June, 2017
A defiant Prime Minister Theresa May vowed on Friday to form a government to lead Britain out of the European Union despite losing her majority in a snap general election and facing calls to resign.
"What tonight is about is the rejection of Theresa May's version of extreme Brexit", said Keir Starmer, Labour's policy chief on Brexit, Reuters reported. As the Tories received 318 seats (42.3% of the vote) to Labour's 261 (40%), the DUP's 10 seats would provide the Conservatives with a governing majority. Based on current seat projections, Labour and its potential allies fall short of the 326 required to form a majority.
Instead of a projected landslide in her favour, May ended up throwing away the small majority that the former David Cameron-led party had won in the 2015 general election.
May, who took over after the June 2016 Brexit referendum, began the formal two-year process of leaving the European Union on March 29, promising to take Britain out of the single market and cut immigration.
Earlier in the day, she said the minority government would be supported by the DUP to bring stability to the future of Britain in the future of Brexit.
With Brexit talks due to start in just 10 days, Brussels appeared to be braced for them to be pushed back. "That's what the national vote was about and therefore we need to get on with that".
Conservative MP Nigel Evans told CNN his party shot itself "in the head" with an "irrelevant" manifesto, which was peppered with "arsenic".
The British PM, however has shown no inclination to resign and is trying to form a minority government with the help of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
Based on interviews with voters leaving polling stations across the country, the poll is conducted for a consortium of United Kingdom broadcasters and regarded as a reliable, though not exact, indicator of the likely result. "Nothing implies that it has to be the Prime Minister who negotiates, there is a minister for Brexit, so we can expect him to take care of this case", Faucher said.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, an old school left-winger widely written off at the start of the campaign, has drawn thousands of people to upbeat rallies and energized young voters with his plans to boost public spending after years of Conservative austerity.
"She put her party before her country". One can nearly hear the death knell ringing in Edinburgh as stalwarts of the Scottish independence movement, including the former First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond, lost their seats to unionist candidates. Hard Brexit would have been anathema to many of them. Whoever is the prime minister by then is unlikely to have a strong parliamentary mandate.
I have just been to see Her Majesty the Queen. But the attacks have forced her to defend the government's record on terrorism, and this week she promised that if she wins she will crack down on extremism - even at the expense of human rights.