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Election results: Conservatives on brink of majority


David Cameron has returned to Downing Street with the Tories poised to defy polls and win the general election.
The Conservatives made gains in England and Wales and are forecast by the BBC to secure 331 seats in the Commons, giving them a slender majority.
Sources say Ed Miliband is expected to stand down after Labour was all but wiped out by the SNP in Scotland.
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has already said he will quit, with his party set to be reduced from 57 to eight MPs.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage is also quitting after he failed to win Thanet South, losing by nearly 2,800 votes to the Conservatives.
In other election developments:
Mr Cameron is set to form a majority Conservative government, without the need for a coalition or the formal support of other parties.
The finishing line needed to form an absolute majority is 326, but because Sinn Fein MPs have not taken up seats and the Speaker does not normally vote, the finishing line has, in practice, been 323. In this election, Sinn Fein kept four seats.
Mr Cameron all but declared victory in a speech after being returned as MP for Witney, in which he set out his intention to press ahead with an in/out referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union and to complete the Conservatives' economic plan.
"My aim remains simple - to govern on the basis of governing for everyone in our United Kingdom," he said.
"I want to bring our country together, our United Kingdom together, not least by implementing as fast as we can the devolution that we rightly promised and came together with other parties to agree both for Wales and for Scotland.
"In short, I want my party, and I hope a government I would like to lead, to reclaim a mantle that we should never have lost - the mantle of One Nation, One United Kingdom. That is how I will govern if I am fortunate enough to form a government in the coming days."
Mr Cameron has returned to Downing Street with his wife Samantha and is expected to hold an audience with the Queen later on Friday.
Chancellor George Osborne said the Conservatives had been "given a mandate to get on with the work we started five years ago" and would follow the "clear instructions" of the British public.
However, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith acknowledged that governing with a small majority was difficult.
"Whatever else we now do we keep it simple, we keep it focused and we absolutely stick to our manifesto commitments," he told the BBC.
He said the party would deliver an EU referendum as it was a "red line".

Analysis by Nick Robinson

Not since the fall of Thatcher or the Blair landslide has there been a political moment quite like this one.
Personal triumphs for David Cameron and Nicola Sturgeon will not just reshape British politics but could perhaps reshape the future of the United Kingdom itself.
Bitter disappointment for Ed Miliband and a political disaster for Nick Clegg may lead to both men quitting, and is sure to lead to months of soul searching for their parties as they mourn the loss of some of their most famous faces - felled by a brutal electoral firing squad.
If UKIP's Nigel Farage fails to win his seat, as many expect, he promised too that he would resign. His party amassed millions of votes in England, more than the SNP in Scotland, but they have struggled to convert them into seats.
The future, though, belongs to David Cameron who defied all those - including at times himself - who doubted that he could ever increase his party's support.
Read Nick's analysis in full here
Although it won a number of seats in London, Labour failed to make the headway it wanted in the South of from the Conservatives.Speaking in Doncaster, where he retained his seat, Labour leader Ed Miliband said; "Clearly this has been a very disappointing and difficult night for the Labour Party.
"We haven't made the gains we wanted in England and Wales and in Scotland we have seen a surge of nationalism overwhelming our party."
He said the next government had a "huge responsibility" and a difficult task to "keep our country together".
After his own defeat, one of the most surprising results of the night, Mr Balls said he had a "sense of sorrow" about his party's disappointing performance but he was "confident that Labour would be back" as a "united and determined" political force.
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