Britain’s opposition Labour Party is on course to win a landslide victory at a national election expected next year, according to an opinion poll published yesterday. Most polls put Labour, which gathers in northern England this weekend for its annual conference, about 20 points ahead of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s governing Conservatives, although commentators say the lead is potentially fragile.
The Survation poll, carried out for campaign group 38 Degrees and published by the Observer newspaper, questioned more than 11,000 voters between Sept 11-25 and then used a model to generate constituency-by-constituency results.
Its central projection was that Labour would win 420 seats, the Conservatives 149 seats and the Liberal Democrats 23, leaving Labour, who have been out of power since 2010, with a 190-seat majority in parliament’s lower House of Commons.
It predicted a range of 402-437 seats for Labour, and 132-169 seats for the Conservatives. At the last national election in 2019, the Conservatives won 365 seats and Labour 203. Survation used modelling known as multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) to reach constituency-level findings.
Pollsters using the method successfully predicted the 2017 UK election result.
The Observer said under the projected results, 12 of Sunak’s cabinet ministers, including deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden and defence secretary Grant Shapps, faced losing their seats. The polling, which took place before the Conservatives’ annual conference this week, found that in every constituency, the cost-of-living crisis and the state of the National Health Service were the two most important issues to voters.
Britain’s opposition Labour Party gathers in northern England over the weekend for its annual conference seeking to cement its huge lead in opinion polls as it boasts of record business interest in its convention.
On Friday it won a bigger-than-expected victory in an election for a parliamentary seat in Scotland, a result heralded by leader Keir Starmer as “seismic”.
However, despite its commanding position in the polls, commentators say the lead is potentially fragile and Sunak, who became the Conservatives’ fifth prime minister in six years last October, could mount a comeback.
It is not just in the polls Labour has been doing well, but also its fundraising, attracting millions in donations as some executives and investors switch allegiance from Sunak’s “Tory” party.
The Conservatives have traditionally positioned themselves as the party of business, but after the turmoil which saw former Prime Minister Liz Truss ousted after 44 days and policy U-turns, Labour has sought to woo companies, promising stability and the conditions needed to grow the economy.
The party said its exhibition and conference fringe were its most successful in terms of income and increase in numbers, while tickets to its Business Forum sold out in record time.
“The Tories’ legacy is national decline - a nation levelled down and starved of hope,” said Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner, who will officially open the conference today.
“While the Tories have stolen Britain’s future, it’s Labour that will give it back with our plan to make working people better off by securing growth for all people and in all places.”
At his own party’s conference last week, Sunak sought to portray himself as a tough decision maker and an agent of change, seeking to distance himself from decisions made by his predecessors during the Conservatives 13 years in power. “I’m just looking to the future. The choice of the next election is a choice between Keir Starmer and me,” he told LBC radio on Friday. “It’s not about what happened in the past. It’s about who’s going to change this country for the better in the future.”