Britain’s Labour Party is set to sweep to power with a record number of seats at Thursday’s national election, a forecast by polling company Survation showed on Tuesday.
Survation’s central scenario showed Keir Starmer’s Labour winning 484 of the 650 seats in parliament, far more than the 418 won by the party’s former leader Tony Blair in his famous 1997 landslide win and the most in its history.
The Conservatives, who have been in power for the last 14 years, were predicted to win just 64 seats, which would be the fewest since the party was founded in 1834.
The right-wing Reform UK party were projected to win seven seats.
The Survation analysis used the Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification (MRP) technique that estimates public opinion at a local level from large national samples. Pollsters describe it as a model that uses polling data, rather than a poll itself.
Other MRP analyses have shown smaller margins of victory for Labour, but none have shown a different overall outcome.
Earlier, a regular poll by Redfield and Wilton Strategies which measured vote share nationwide showed a slight narrowing in Labour’s lead, but still put the party on course for a comfortable victory.
Starmer only entered the House of Commons in May 2015. After the July 4 election results are tallied, he’s widely expected to bring about an end to 14 years of Conservative-led government — a feat all the more remarkable given that on the last occasion Britons went to the polls, in December 2019, Labour suffered its worst defeat in nearly a century.
Starmer’s first five years in parliament were spent observing Labour’s then-leader, Jeremy Corbyn, dragging the party to the far left.
Elected to replace Corbyn in early 2020, Starmer has spent the second half of his parliamentary career ridding Labour of the far left’s legacy of extremism and racism and planting his party’s flag firmly in the electoral center.
Indeed, Starmer’s much-vaunted “changed Labour party” no longer even counts Corbyn as a member.
When the Equality and Human Rights Commission delivered its brutal verdict on antisemitism in the Labour Party in November 2020 — the equalities watchdog had launched the unprecedented probe while Corbyn was still in office — Starmer showed his ruthlessness. Shortly after his predecessor issued a statement on the EHRC’s findings — in which he claimed that the scale of the problem had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons” — Starmer removed Corbyn from the Labour parliamentary party, forcing him to sit as an independent.
Despite the entreaties of the left’s dwindling band of supporters in the party, Starmer refused to let Corbyn back into the Labour tent, leaving him to defend his Islington North constituency as an independent at this week’s election.
@Reuters
