2015 United Kingdom general election

The 2015 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 7 May 2015 to elect 650 Members of Parliament (or MPs) to the House of Commons. It was the only general election held under the rules of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. Local elections took place in most areas of England on the same day. Opinion polls and political commentators had predicted that the results of the election would cause a second consecutive hung parliament whose composition would be similar to the previous Parliament, which was in effect from the previous national election in 2010. Opinion polls turned out to have underestimated the Conservatives, however, as they won 330 of the 650 seats and 36.9% of the votes, giving them a majority of ten seats (not including the Speaker, who cannot vote or debate and must remain impartial). This won them the right to govern the country alone and the right for their leader, David Cameron, to continue as Prime Minister. The Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, saw a small increase in its share of the vote to 30.4% but won 26 fewer seats than in 2010. This gave them 232 MPs. This was the fewest seats the party won since the 1987 general election, when it had 229 MPs returned. Many senior Labour MPs, such as Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy, lost their seats. The Scottish National Party won a landslide victory in Scotland, mainly at the expense of Labour, who had held a majority of Scottish seats in the House of Commons at every general election since 1964. The SNP won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats and became the third-largest party in the House of Commons.