-Majority of voters want Brexit done
Following the Conservative’s landslide win in the election, it is likely the U.K. will begin the process to leave the EU at the end of January. Britain’s Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson said Friday that he wants to hold a new partnership with the EU.
Speaking in front of No 10. Downing Street, Johnson called on the U.K. “to find closure and let the healing begin.”
Johnson’s speech came after a brief meeting with the Queen following Thursday’s election victory, which gave him a majority of 80 seats -- 365 of 650 seats -- in the House of Commons.
Johnson announced that he had visited Buckingham Palace, would be forming a new government and that MPs would return to Westminster on Monday to form the new parliament.
He said he would “unite and level up” with his new majority to bring the country together and promised to work "flat out" to lead a "people's government."
The Conservative Party captured 43.6% of the votes -- a majority the party has not enjoyed since 1987 when Margaret Thatcher won her third term.
“This election means that getting Brexit done is now the irrefutable, irresistible, unarguable decision of the British people,” Johnson affirmed.
“And with this election, I think we put an end to all those miserable threats of a second referendum,” he added.
The election put an end to the months of indecisiveness over Brexit, with the result showing that the majority of voters in the U.K. are in favor of the U.K. leaving the European Union and a change to the immigration system. The knock-on effects will extend to the Northern Ireland border issue and the possibility of a second Scottish referendum that is due to take place in 2020 despite Westminster’s objections.
The fundamental difficulty is that the U.K., itself a union, wants to leave another union. The end of January will see the beginning of this process with the start of free trade deal talks with the EU. This process could take years to resolve if the talks follow the same lines as the EU-Canada deal that took eight years.
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who suffered a big defeat in the election with results that were recorded as the party’s worst since 1935, will likely resign. It is clear that the Labour party’s core voters did not accept the party’s policies and that Corbynism lost out.
Tactical voting to unseat the Conservatives failed and the Liberal Democrat's role of "kingmaker" also failed. The LibDem leader Jo Swinson's self-proclaimed leadership of remainers did not materialize and she even lost her own seat. Many lessons were learned and some are still to be discovered from this election, leaving the U.K. to undoubtedly face a very different political landscape from now on.