2015 United Kingdom general election
election of members to the House of Commons in 2015
A general election was held in the United Kingdom on 7 May 2015 to elect 650 members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons. The Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, won an unexpected majority victory of 10 seats; they had been leading a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. It was the last general election to be held before the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU) in June 2016. It was the first of three general elections to be held under the rules of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. Local elections took place in most areas of England on the same day and is to date the most recent general election to coincide with local elections.
Opinion polls and political commentators had widely predicted that the election would result in a second consecutive hung parliament whose composition would be similar to the one elected at the previous general election in 2010. Potential coalitions and agreements between parties were intensively discussed; as a result, smaller parties received much more attention during the campaign than in previous UK elections. However, opinion polls underestimated the Conservatives, as they won 330 of the 650 seats and 36.9 per cent of the vote, giving them a small overall majority. The opposition Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, saw a small increase in vote share to 30.4 per cent, but it returned 232 MPs, 26 fewer than in 2010 and their fewest since the 1987 general election, when it had 229 MPs. Labour lost significant ground in Scotland to the Scottish National Party (SNP) who enjoyed a huge surge, winning 56 of the 59 Scottish seats, becoming the third-largest party in the House of Commons and the largest party in Scotland, knocking Labour from the status which it had held since 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “2015 United Kingdom general election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.