UK Labour set to surpass 1997 landslide in election: poll

A woman carries electoral leaflets for Nigel Farage's Reform UK party in Clacton-on-Sea, England. (AP)

• Such a scenario would see its leader Keir Starmer replace the Conservatives’ Rishi Sunak as prime minister

LONDON: The UK Labour party is 99 percent “certain” to secure more seats in Thursday’s general election than when it won a landslide victory in 1997, a major new poll said on Tuesday.
The center-left opposition party — out of power since 2010 — is predicted to claim 484 out of a total of 650 seats in what would be an unprecedented victory in modern British history, pollster Survation said.
Meanwhile, the right-wing ruling Conservatives and the centrist Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) are in a close race to come a distant second and form the country’s official opposition, it added.
The prediction is the latest in a series of so-called MRP polls — which use large national samples to forecast results for every UK constituency — that estimate Labour will win emphatically on July 4.
Such a scenario would see its leader Keir Starmer replace the Conservatives’ Rishi Sunak as prime minister.
Labour has led the Tories in the polls by double-digit margins for nearly two years, and the gap has failed to narrow during a six-week election campaign widely seen as having gone badly for Sunak.
Survation said its data indicated that Labour would win around 42 percent of the overall vote, ahead of the Conservatives on 23 percent.
However, due to the UK’s winner-takes-all electoral system in each of its 650 constituencies, that would see the Conservatives capture just 64 seats, with the Lib Dems predicted to claim 61.
Labour’s estimated 484 seats would exceed the 418 won by ex-prime minister Tony Blair in 1997, and even top the Tories’ landslide haul of 470 in 1931.
The pollster also predicted that Labour would again become the largest party in Scotland, winning 38 of its 57 seats and supplanting the Scottish National Party (SNP), which it estimated would secure just 10 seats.
The pro-independence SNP won 48 Scottish constituencies at the last election in 2019.
The Conservatives are “virtually certain” to win a lower share of the vote than at any past general election, according to Survation.
Meanwhile, it forecasted that Reform UK, the anti-immigration party founded by Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage, would only win a handful of seats despite taking the third-largest overall share of the vote, again due to the electoral system.
The Survation prediction, based on nearly 35,000 electorate interviews, is likely to intensify warnings by Sunak in the final hours of the campaign that voters should be weary of voting Labour and handing it a so-called “super-majority.”
Starmer has accused his Conservative rivals of running “an increasingly desperate, negative campaign.”