While Britain is not guaranteed a new government this morning, a new generation of fresh-faced MPs will have been elected.

Labour were chasing 125 target seats last night and trade unionists were contesting some of the most winnable.

Cat Smith in Lancaster & Fleetwood and Nancy Platts in Brighton Kemptown needed single-figure swings to oust sitting Tories.

And Catherine West in Hornsey & Wood Green and Jo Stevens in Cardiff Central were tipped to unseat Lib Dem ministers Lyn

Featherstone and Jenny Willott.

The Star went to print before the polls closed, making it impossible to call the outcomes of the most marginal seats.

The only thing for certain is that with 3,971 candidates contesting the 650 seats, most Parliamentary hopefuls need not start packing for Westminster.

But here Luke James and Conrad Landin introduce you to four socialist shoo-ins.

RACHAEL MASKELL, YORK CENTRAL

Rachael Maskell enters Parliament with a clear mission — to “restore and repair” the NHS.

A physio who rose to become Unite’s head of health, Ms Maskell has a clinical understanding of the Tories’ dissection of the NHS and how the service can be stitched back together.

If Labour can muster a working minority, expect her to become part of Andy Burnham’s health team — she worked closely with him on the detail of a 10-year plan to merge health and social care.

But Ms Maskell is no policy wonk.

In November, she led 100,000 health workers represented by Unite in strike action over the Tories’ public-sector pay freeze.

Her final act as a union rep before being selected as a Labour candidate was to secure a pay rise for those members. And speaking to the Star following her selection, Ms Maskell was not about to forget them.

The Labour NEC member signalled that she is ready to challenge her party’s leadership over pay, saying “the living wage should be an absolute minimum.

“If we want good public services, we have to pay the staff,” she added. “I’ll be taking that challenge forward.”

CLIVE LEWIS, NORWICH SOUTH

A former BBC reporter and Territorial who served in Afghanistan, Clive Lewis was making waves well before he was selected to replace ousted Blairite Charles Clarke as Labour’s candidate in Norwich South. In 1996, he was suspended as vice-president of the National Union of Students by one Jim Murphy, then NUS president, for attending a debate on free education.

Since his selection, Lewis has batted off the pleas for caution that candidates face from the party bureaucracy and has been outspoken in his opposition to Trident and austerity.

“It’s a mistaken clamour for political survival, not humanity’s survival, that motivates the proponents of nuclear weapons within the Labour Party,” he wrote in 2013. “Elements cling to nuclear weapons like a religious mantra.

“Party policy must change on this matter if we are to have any hope of fulfilling our core desire for a better, fairer, safer world.”

Indeed, Lewis has displayed a refreshing honesty and individuality throughout the election campaign. It ran him into a farmyard brouhaha when he said his chances would be compromised if he were “caught with my pants down behind a goat with Ed Miliband at the other end.”

But in an age of caution and identikit soundbites, perhaps this is exactly what politics needs.

KATE OSAMOR, EDMONTON

Many saw Ms Osamor’s selection as sweet revenge on Neil Kinnock, who presided over the blocking of her mother Martha — who was branded “loony left” — as Labour’s candidate in the 1989 Vauxhall by-election.

But the 46-year-old GP surgery manager has rapidly made her own name as a passionate campaigner for the NHS and a champion of underdogs. At her second shot as a left candidate for Labour’s ruling NEC last year, she comfortably won her seat and wasted no time before visiting constituency meetings and campaign days.

Speaking in March, she called for the billions earmarked for Trident replacement to be redirected to fund university education and the NHS.

Osamor lives in Tottenham, which is adjacent to Edmonton and is where the shooting of Mark Duggan in 2011 sparked a summer of inner-city rioting. Writing shortly after, Osamor hit out at the treatment of the black community by the authorities and said the media saw community activism as “a threat to its exclusive power.”

“The community has felt that the policing was and remains of an oppressive and racist nature,” she wrote in an article jointly penned with her mother.

RICHARD BURGON, LEEDS EAST

“Leeds born and bred. Socialist. Trade unionist,” reads the description on Richard Burgon’s Twitter page. He’s not keen on political ambiguity. That has made and will make him a target for Tory smears and sneers.

But Mr Burgon takes pride and strength from the fact his campaign was backed by five trade unions with more than two million workers.

He earned their support through a decade working as a trade union lawyer in his home town, to which he returned after graduating from Cambridge.

“I’ve helped care workers, nurses, dinner ladies, bin men and other working people in East Leeds who face redundancy, discrimination, pay cuts they simply can’t afford,” he says.

Launching his campaign he was equally clear about how he was going to fight for his community as an MP, telling members that Leeds need “real Labour change, real socialist change.”

Like Dennis Skinner, who helped his launch, Mr Burgon is a proud reader of the Morning Star, which he described it as “a reader-owned newspaper very much worth supporting.”

Mr Burgon may also join Mr Skinner on the Labour whips’ list of rebels, having already declared his opposition to Trident.

But then, so have 75 per cent of Labour hopefuls. Mr Burgon’s election is proof that Labour’s tent is still big enough for outspoken socialists.