A number of high-profile Conservative and Labour MPs have lost their seats as Rishi Sunak conceded that his party had been defeated in the general election and Sir Keir Starmer declared a historic victory.

Conservatives Liz Truss Seat: South West Norfolk Lost to: Labour

Truss served as UK prime minister for 49 days in 2022 and was previously foreign secretary and trade secretary. She was forced out of office after her government’s “mini” Budget spooked financial markets and triggered a crisis in the pensions sector. First elected to parliament in 2010, Truss becomes the first former premier for almost 90 years to lose their seat in a general election.

Penny Mordaunt Seat: Portsmouth North Lost to: Labour

A former Royal Navy reservist, the House of Commons leader ran in the 2022 Tory leadership contest as a moderate and had been tipped as a future contender to lead the party if she held on to her seat. Her sword-bearing role at King Charles’s coronation raised her national profile, but she lost to Labour by about 780 votes.

Penny Mordaunt © Ben Stevens/Shutterstock Alex Chalk Seat: Cheltenham Lost to: Liberal Democrats

A respected legal advocate, the ousted justice secretary is expected to return to practice at chambers 6KBW College Hill. Chalk had the tough task of managing a government department with an unprotected budget as it reeled from severe cuts. But he helped push through legislation to exonerate sub-postmasters caught up in the Horizon scandal.

Gillian Keegan Seat: Chichester Lost to: Liberal Democrats

The education secretary lost out in a three-way battle for the seat she first won in 2017. Keegan faced the unenviable job of closing more than 100 schools during her tenure over the use of unsafe concrete in their construction and was captured on a microphone complaining she received no praise for doing a “fucking good job”.

Grant Shapps Seat: Welwyn Hatfield Lost to: Labour

A veteran cabinet minister, Shapps was frequently turned to as a “safe pair of hands” by Sunak. A strong media performer and “attack dog” for the Conservative government, he rose to prominence in 2012 after it emerged he operated a business while an MP under the pseudonym Michael Green.

Grant Shapps at his Welwyn Hatfield count © James Shaw/Shutterstock Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg Seat: North East Somerset and Hanham Lost to: Labour

A prominent Brexiter, Rees-Mogg entered parliament in 2010. He served in the governments of Truss and Boris Johnson, holding positions including business secretary and Brexit opportunities minister. The social conservative repeatedly urged his party to enter a pact with Reform UK in this year’s general election.

Sir Liam Fox Seat: North Somerset Lost to: Labour

Having served in cabinet, Fox fell from grace under prime minister Boris Johnson and sat on the backbenches for the duration of the last parliament. He was embroiled in the expenses scandal in 2009 and stood down from his role as defence secretary after he allowed a close friend and lobbyist into confidential meetings.

Mark Harper Seat: Forest of Dean Lost to: Labour

A reliable figure for Sunak during his time in government, the former transport secretary was one of the few MPs not to be caught up in the expenses scandal. He resigned as immigration minister in 2014 after he discovered his cleaner was in the UK without proper documentation. This paved the way for his return to government less than six months later.

Michelle Donelan Seat: Melksham and Devizes Lost to: Liberal Democrats

Donelan decided to become a politician aged six. The former science minister was a strong proponent of a “culture war” strategy in government. Having served for nearly a decade, she gained attention when taxpayers footed her £15,000 legal bill after she falsely accused an academic of supporting or sympathising with Hamas.

Labour Jonathan Ashworth Seat: Leicester South Lost to: Independent

Ashworth was shadow paymaster-general on Starmer’s opposition front bench. First elected to parliament in 2011, he served as shadow health secretary during the pandemic and was regarded as a strong media performer. But he was pushed into second place in his constituency by an independent candidate running on a pro-Palestinian ticket.

Thangam Debbonaire Seat: Bristol Central Lost to: Greens

The shadow culture secretary had represented the now-reshaped seat of Bristol West since 2015 after ousting the Liberal Democrats. But on Thursday she lost to Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green party. Previously shadow housing secretary and shadow Commons leader, Debbonaire is a former professional cellist and had been backed by figures in the arts world.

From the BBC:

* Includes Speaker

Turnout: 60% (-7.6% from 2019)

Currently waiting on South Basildon and East Thurrock (Should be out later) and Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (delayed to Saturday). Will update when they're out.

We are past midnight, so all campaigning is over. The polling stations open at 7:00 (and close at 22:00). So it's time for the voting thread.

It's trickier this year because of voter ID requirements but gov.uk have all the details. However, note this: "You can still use your ID even if it has expired." So an out-of-date passport, for example, will work as long as the name is the same and the photo still looks like you. Don't forget that there are other polling stations rules.

There have been problems in some areas with people getting their postal vote on time but if you haven't got yours and you aren't on your holidays, it's not too late. Details on what to do.

Tactical voting can make a difference in some places and there are a number of sites to help with this. They'll largely be similar but check a couple before committing:

• Get Voting - which also has ID info and a boundary checker
• tactical.vote
• StopTheTories.vote
• Win As One has broader aims to change the voting system

If you want your vote to count you can try SwapMyVote.uk.

Other things you can do:

• Offer lifts to people so they can get out and vote - contact your party of choice

If you have any other resources then throw them in below. If you have any questions then ask away and, hopefully, someone can rummage the answer up for you. edit: If I've cocked up, then let me know.

NB: we aren't endorsing any links, so you will have to use your best judgement on who you trust with your details.

The 2024 Labour manifesto may be titled ‘Change’, but it underscores the paucity of ambition in the economic plans of the government-in-waiting. Consisting of a few minuscule tweaks to tax provisions and loopholes and some pocket change in terms of additional expenditure — around £10bn annually, or just 0.4 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the economic programme they have laid out is modest in the extreme.

[…] [Labour argues] that, because the Tories have so damaged the economy, resources aren’t available immediately to do all the things that are needed — that the country can’t afford a transformative programme, and that public spending increases will have to wait for (and be predicated on) future increases in economic growth. Hence the straitjacket into which they have willingly placed themselves with their ‘fiscal rules.’

This argument is economically illiterate and historically obtuse. Britain is the sixth richest country in the world today — and one of the wealthiest societies in all of human history. Despite the dire state of the country, the problem is not a shortage of resources, but rather that plentiful resources are hoarded at the top. After more than four decades of neoliberalism, the situation is one of vast private affluence amidst widespread public squalor. That Britain does not feel affluent is a result of the extremes of growing inequality and the diversion of wealth and productive capacity away from public goods and services to elite private accumulation and consumption.

[…] Even if had Labour maintained their now-abandoned £28 billion-per-year green investment pledge, that would have represented only 1.3 per cent of GDP, or — as has been pointed out — around half of the annual increase in wealth of the top 200 families in Britain since the start of COVID-19 pandemic.

It is not only the scale of Labour’s economic programme that falls short, but also the underlying approach to economics it represents. We are told that we lack sufficient resources to make the public investments that are required, and that we must therefore avoid frightening the horses with taxation or nationalisation and instead create the stability business craves, delivering an economic strategy that will encourage increased private sector investment and result in growth (‘wealth creation’) that will benefit all.

Everything about this approach is wrong — especially the backwards causal relationship between public investment and growth — and its name is ‘trickle-down economics.’

But it gets worse. In the absence of public investment, Labour is betting the house on attracting more expensive private capital. What meagre additional public funds are to be made available will largely go to ‘de-risking’ (whereby the public agrees to absorb the greater part of any risk of losses on highly favourable terms for private capital), which will supposedly help fill the public investment gap through forms of public-private partnership — a model we have seen in the past in the form of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) under the Blair/Brown era New Labour governments. At the heart of all this will be the financial sector — whom both Starmer and Reeves have encouraged, publicly and privately, to get their ‘fingerprints’ all over Labour’s economic policy.

Starmer’s Labour, we are told, is ‘set to land billions in new investment from banks and international firms within months, as part of a plan to use private finance’ for infrastructure investment and the green transition — PFI on steroids! One of the journalists who broke this story described Labour’s plan as being akin to ‘getting BlackRock to rebuild Britain.’

Here we find the most momentous of Labour’s economic policy commitments, a pledge to privatise and mortgage the future through handing over infrastructure investment and the green transition to private finance so they can monopolise, profit, and extract from the next economy as well as our present one. This is the polar opposite of the Green New Deal. It’s not new, it’s a terrible deal, and the danger is that, in elevating financial returns over environmental ones, it won’t be green either.

The real term for the Starmer/Reeves approach, properly situated in the recent history of Britain’s political-economic development, is ‘financialisation’. Financialisation (to borrow a definition from economists Michael Hudson, Dirk Bezemer and Howard Reed) is the diversion of financial flows away from the real economy of production and consumption and towards asset markets in pursuit of capital gains.

Financialisation is a complex phenomenon, but has enormous explanatory power as to the causes of Britain’s highly unequal and dysfunctional economy of growing poverty in the midst of plenty. Far from boosting productivity and increasing efficiency in the non-financial economy, the growth of the financial sector functions as a subtraction from the real economy, as ‘financial flows are diverted to unproductive uses and… the resulting revenue flows benefit a minority. As financialisation gathers pace, rising wealth and debt detract from income for the majority.’

In such an economy, what is counted as ‘growth’ matters a great deal. Every financial asset is at one and the same time someone else’s financial liability — and as the holdings of the financial sector have increased, so too has the debt held by households and businesses in the non-financial economy. This process helps explain the squeeze-play of recent years, whereby nominal economic growth has in reality been experienced as reduced income through increased extraction and indebtedness.
[…]
The financial sector, then, is extractive from the real economy. And given that all income groups are paying ever more into the finance sector in fees and interest charges and for underlying assets while the payouts from the sector are even more concentrated than those of the economy as a whole, the finance sector has also become the locus of the production of increased inequality in the UK economy.

This, then, is the economic engine that Labour has installed at the heart of its economics — a machine that lowers not increases growth, and concentrates the returns amongst the wealthiest asset owners, driving inequality and indebtedness.

The plan now is to deploy this machine for financial extraction increasingly in public services, including the NHS, and in energy markets and infrastructure to supposedly drive the green transition. It will be a veritable bonanza for finance capital — and a very costly exercise for the rest of us. Astonishingly, Starmer and Reeves have effectively doubled down on one of the principal causes of Britain’s poor, uneven, and unequal economic development and rebadged it as the solution.

Nigel Farage has said he is part of a “similar phenomenon” to the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, as he claimed that there were forces in society trying to “stop young men from being young men”.

The Reform UK leader used the last day of campaigning before the general election to appear alongside Derek Chisora, the controversial boxer and Reform UK supporter, in a boxing gym in Clacton, where Farage is making his eighth bid to be elected as an MP.

Farage used the visit to speak about what he described as the feelings of “emasculation” among young men, saying: “Look at the football. You know, they’re told: Go to Germany. Please don’t drink more than two pints of beer. You what? Don’t chant at the football matches. You what? Oh, and don’t tell jokes that might offend the Germans. I mean, come on. We are trying to stop young men being young men.

“That’s why Tate got the following he got. So maybe I’m part of a similar phenomenon,” he said. Since December 2022, Tate has been facing charges in Romania of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, which he denies.

...

The Reform UK leader’s comments come against the backdrop of concerns about the rise of role models and influencers associated with a model of toxic masculinity.

A poll of 200 people by JLP found earlier this week that Reform UK was the top choice of political party among 23% of those aged 16 to 17. However, among young men it was on level pegging with Labour, on 35%.

...

Farage defended his appearance alongside Chisora, who was given a 12-week suspended prison sentence in 2010 after being found guilty of assaulting his then girlfriend.

The Sun newspaper has backed Labour at the General Election providing a huge blow to Rishi Sunak’s chances.

The tabloid has said “It’s time for a new manager” hours before Britain is set to go to the polls.

The paper also famously backed Tony Blair’s Labour Party when he won a landslide victory in 1997, switching sides after more than 20 years of unswerving support for the Tory party. It has previously backed Tory candidates for the past 15 years helping David Cameron and Theresa May enter Downing Street.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper wrote: It’s time for change. The insurmountable problem faced by the (Conservatives) is that - over the course of 14 often chaotic years - they have become a divided rabble, more interested in fighting themselves than running the country.

“By the time Rishi Sunak moved into No10, Britain had had five Prime Ministers in just 12 years. In 2022 alone, there were four Home Secretaries, four Chancellors, and five Education Secretaries.

“All this upheaval, backstabbing and mayhem came at a price.”

It added: "There are still plenty of concerns about Labour ... But, by dragging his party back to the centre ground of British politics for the first time since Tony Blair was in No. 10, Sir Keir has won the right to take charge."

Rishi Sunak has confided to members of his inner circle that he is fearful of losing his Yorkshire constituency at the general election, the Guardian has been told.

The prime minister, who would be the first sitting leader of the country to lose his seat, told confidants before a Conservative rally on Tuesday that he thought the vote in Richmond and Northallerton was too close to call.

In 2019, he won the seat with a majority of more than 27,000 and 63% of the vote.

...

No incumbent prime minister has ever lost their seat, and only 12 serving cabinet ministers have lost their seats since 1974, according to the Institute for Government.

Polls have varied, with most suggesting Sunak should retain his seat even amid a landslide victory for Labour across the country. Savanta and Electoral Calculus analysis for the Telegraph suggested he could lose it, however.

Conservative activists working in Sunak’s constituency had been particularly alarmed by a drop-off in support among the farming community, some of whom had cited challenges arising from Brexit to their businesses and a failure to control illegal immigration, sources said.

Some proper knife edge seats in there.

Ashford on a 0.08%. If 40000 people turn up, that's a margin of 32 people.

Or is that 16, since it's a swing? Either way, 10pm onwards will be interesting!