The political shape of the UK looks very different this morning.

In terms of seats, the Labour party has won a 1997-style majority, but this seismic change was based on a collapse in the Conservative vote and a massive realignment away from the SNP in Scotland.

The Liberal Democrats took an astonishing 71 seats – largely making gains from those nominally held by the Conservatives and SNP. Among smaller parties the Greens, Reform, and Plaid Cymru all had their best ever results (both now with 4 seats), while the SNP didn’t manage to get into double figures.

Labour lost 5 seats to independents and only 8 seats in total. A microtrend saw independent candidates in Muslim areas take four seats from Labour – the other independent was Jeremy Corbyn.

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This dashboard shows the results and vote shares for every seat where data is available in England, Wales, and Scotland (there are currently two sheets yet to declare). You can use the “region” filter to explore areas of the UK, and the highlighter to find individual constituencies on the map (which can be either geographic or proportional as you prefer). Mouse over a constituency to show the vote share and winner on the right. The chart at the bottom right is the overall result in terms of seats.

And here how the seats changed hands:

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Cast of characters

The new Prime Minister is Keir Starmer – Rishi Sunak kept his Richmond and Northallerton seat but is to stand down as Conservative leader.

High-profile seat losses relating to the higher education sector included:

• Michelle Donelan, former Secretary of State for Innovation Science and Technology, former universities minister, and (very briefly) former Secretary of State for Education
• Gillian Keegan, former Secretary of State for Education, former skills minister
• Luke Hall, former universities minister
• Andrea Jenkyns, former universities minister
• Amanda Solloway, former science minister
• Carol Monaghan, former SNP education spokesperson
• Liz Truss, never actually an education minister, despite it being rumoured numerous times over the past 14 years.

Of the current higher education team only science minister Andrew Griffith held his seat.

Higher education and voting

The Reform vote in a given constituency in England and Wales negatively correlates moderately well with the likelihood of young people in the constituency to enter higher education (as measured in TUNDRA). HESA’s SEISA measure of deprivation (which is built on the likelihood of a person to hold a low-skilled job, and/or a low level of education – averaged out to constituency level) is also a useful indicator here – broadly speaking the more “deprived” on this measure a constituency, the higher the Reform vote. (As you may expect, the two measures correlate better with each other)

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And in terms of student seats – no seat in England or Wales with more than 12 per cent students (based on economic activity, as a proportion of all residents where this measure is applicable) is held by the Conservatives, while no seat with more than 5 per cent students is held by Reform. Interestingly, there are no Russell Group universities in Conservative-held seats – with the exception of Bristol (Bristol Central, Green) and Oxford (Oxford West and Abingdon, Lib Dem) all have main campuses in seats held by Labour.

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