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Nationalists Win Third Term in Scotland, as Labour Suffers Sadiq Khan Is Elected Mayor of London
(about 11 hours later)
LONDON — The independence-minded Scottish National Party has won a third term to lead the Scottish government after elections to Parliament in Edinburgh, as votes continued to be counted on Friday in contests across Britain, including one that could result in London’s first Muslim mayor. LONDON — Sadiq Khan, a son of a bus driver from Pakistan, was declared the winner of London’s mayoral election on Saturday, becoming the first Muslim to lead Britain’s capital at a time of rising Islamophobia in the West.
Although the party’s leader, Nicola Sturgeon, called the victory in the elections on Thursday “historic,” the S.N.P. lost its majority while the Labour Party finished in third place, a humiliating performance in a region where it was once dominant, behind the Conservatives. The victory of Mr. Khan, a former human rights lawyer and a Labour member of Parliament, makes him one of the most prominent Muslim politicians in the West. It was also his party’s biggest boost in a series of elections on Thursday in which Labour further lost its grip on Scotland, once a stronghold, and clung, in some cases just barely, to seats in England and Wales.
The S.N.P. won 63 seats, down from 69 and two short of the 65 required for a majority in the 129-seat Parliament, but it was far ahead of its rivals. The Conservatives captured 31 seats, and Labour had 24. Mr. Khan won with 56.8 percent of the vote, versus 43.2 percent for Mr. Goldsmith. The results were not final until Saturday morning because in London’s system voters are allowed a first and second preference, and Mr. Khan had not won an outright majority in the first round.
Labour did find success elsewhere, including victories in some important municipalities in England and in two parliamentary by-elections, as well as in the contest for the Welsh Assembly. The overall performance was probably enough to stabilize the position of the party’s left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn. London, a global center of finance, is hardly representative of Britain: About a quarter of its residents are foreign-born, and an eighth are Muslim. And Mr. Khan is not the first Muslim to win a prominent office in Europe: Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, has had a Muslim mayor since 2009, and a Muslim Conservative lawmaker, Sajid Javid, is the British secretary of state for business.
Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate in the London mayoral elections, is the front-runner in that race, and a victory that would make him the first Muslim to lead the city. The results in that contest will not be declared until Friday evening. Nonetheless, Mr. Khan, 45, won a striking victory after a campaign dominated by anxieties over religion and ethnicity. Britain has not sustained a large-scale terrorist attack since 2005, and its Muslim population, in contrast to France, is considered well assimilated. But an estimated 800 people have left Britain to fight for or support the Islamic State. Dozens of assaults on British Muslims were reported after the Paris terrorist attacks in November.
Mr. Corbyn, who was elected overwhelmingly last year as Labour leader by party members and supporters, is at odds with many of his lawmakers, most of whom did not vote for him, and he found himself dealing with another crisis last week after revelations about anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks. The Conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith, attacked Mr. Khan’s past advocacy for criminal defendants, including his opposition to the extradition of a man who was later convicted in the United States of supporting terrorism. Mr. Goldsmith said Mr. Khan had given “oxygen and cover” to extremists. When the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, repeated those assertions in Parliament, he was accused of racism.
As the votes were being counted, a BBC analysis suggested that support for Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party was down in southern England. That helped Labour retain control of municipalities in areas such as Crawley, Southampton, Norwich and Hastings, where the party had been thought vulnerable. Mr. Khan defended his work as a human rights lawyer, and has said he hoped Donald J. Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential candidate who has called for barring Muslims from entering the United States — “loses badly.”
According to the BBC analysis, Labour’s share of the vote declined about 6 percent on average compared with 2012, the last time this set of English seats was contested. The party’s losses were limited, however, because of a 4 percent increase in crucial areas when compared with its unsuccessful performance in the general election last year. Mr. Khan’s campaign focused on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of housing and transportation. He drew strong support from labor unions and kept a careful distance from his party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist who has an ardent base among young voters but faces heavy resistance among fellow Labour lawmakers.
Labour retained its seats in two by-elections to the British Parliament, for the constituencies of Sheffield Brightside and Ogmore, and Joe Anderson of the Labour Party won a second term as mayor of Liverpool, one of several cities electing civic leaders. In the past week, the Labour Party was distracted by a dispute over anti-Semitism that led to the suspension of a lawmaker, Naseem Shah, and a former London mayor, Ken Livingstone.
In Wales, Labour was on course to remain the biggest party in the Welsh Assembly, where the U.K. Independence Party, which has taken a firm stance against immigration and European Union membership, won its first seats. Mr. Khan argued that, as an observant Muslim, he was well placed to tackle extremism. “I’m a Londoner, I’m European, I’m British, I’m English, I’m of Islamic faith, of Asian origin, of Pakistani heritage, a dad, a husband,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times.
Mr. Corbyn’s troubles have taken away the focus from the Conservatives, who are deeply divided over a June 23 referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union. The fifth of eight children, Mr. Khan was born in Tooting, South London, to recent immigrants from Pakistan, and grew up in a public housing project. His father drove a bus, and his mother was a seamstress.
Given that Mr. Cameron’s government has recently faced a crisis over the steel industry and industrial action by junior doctors, the party’s performance will most likely be enough to satisfy him. Elected to Parliament in 2005, Mr. Khan was appointed a junior minister for communities in 2008, and minister for transport in 2009, under the last Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown. Although he was not one of the highest-ranking ministers, he became the first Muslim to attend cabinet meetings regularly and was admitted to the Privy Council, a largely ceremonial body in which induction which normally requires taking an oath to the queen.
Mr. Cameron’s party staged a recovery in the elections to the Scottish Parliament, where it had won 16 seats to Labour’s 11 as of Friday morning, emphasizing the collapse of support for Mr. Corbyn’s party among Scots, who used to vote solidly for Labour. “The palace called me and said, ‘What type of Bible do you want to swear on?’ ” Mr. Khan told the magazine The New Statesman. “When I said the Quran, they said, ‘We haven’t got one.’ So I took one with me.”
As London’s mayor, he will have significant power over transportation and planning — as well as responsibilities for the police, civil defense and fire services — in a city with an acute shortage of affordable homes and a creaking, overcrowded mass transit network.
Mr. Khan will succeed Boris Johnson, a Conservative who has held the post since 2008 and is a leading figure in the campaign for Britain’s departure from the European Union. That vote will take place on June 23. Mr. Johnson is seen as a possible successor to Mr. Cameron as leader of the Conservatives, particularly if Britain votes to leave; Mr. Cameron is campaigning for Britain to remain.
Within Britain, the news of the collapse of the Labour Party in Scotland was almost as big as Mr. Khan’s victory.
The Scottish National Party won its third straight victory in the Scottish Parliament — a triumph that its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, called historic, even though the party narrowly lost its majority. The Labour Party fell to a humiliating third place, behind the Conservatives, who won seats in part by appealing to Scots opposed to independence. Scots rejected independence in a 2014 referendum, but there is speculation that a new referendum could be called, particularly if Britain leaves the European Union.
The S.N.P. won 63 seats, down from 69 and two short of the 65 required for a majority in the 129-seat Parliament, but it was far ahead of its rivals. Ms. Sturgeon said she planned to lead a minority government rather than seeking a coalition with smaller parties. The Conservatives captured 31 seats, and Labour 24.
“The Labour Party have completely lost touch with the hard-working people they’re supposed to represent,” Mr. Cameron, the prime minister, said.
In Wales, Labour remained the biggest party, though the U.K. Independence Party, which favors leaving the European Union, entered the Welsh Assembly for the first time, winning seven seats.
In England, Labour won two by-elections to the British Parliament, and a Labour mayor, Joe Anderson, won a second term in Liverpool. Labour also kept control of local councils in crucial English communities like Crawley, Southampton, Norwich and Hastings, where the party had been thought vulnerable.
Nonetheless, Mr. Corbyn’s troubles have taken the focus from the Conservatives, who are deeply divided over the June 23 referendum on European Union membership.
Given that Mr. Cameron’s government has recently faced crises over the steel industry and a strike by junior doctors, his party’s gains in Scotland were sorely needed good news.
As for Mr. Corbyn, he said that Labour had defied its critics and “hung on” in England, though he conceded that there was “a lot of building to do in Scotland.”