Britain’s Labour Party is 99 percent “sure” it will win more seats in Thursday’s general election than it did in 1997, when it won a landslide victory, a major new poll said on Tuesday.
According to pollster Survation, the left-wing opposition party – which has been out of power since 2010 – is projected to win 484 out of a total of 650 seats, which would be an unprecedented victory in modern British history.
Meanwhile, the right-wing ruling Conservatives and the centrist Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) are in a tight race to come second and become the country’s official opposition.
This forecast is the latest in a series of so-called MRP surveys – which use large national samples to forecast the result for every constituency in Britain – that predict the Labour Party will win clearly on July 4.
In such a situation, its leader Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister, replacing Rishi Sunak of the Conservative Party.
Labour has been leading the Tories by double digits in the polls for nearly two years, and the gap has not narrowed during a six-week election campaign that is widely seen as bad for Sunak.
Survival said its figures indicated Labour would get about 42 per cent of the total vote, while the Conservatives would get 23 per cent.
However, due to the winner-takes-all electoral system in Britain’s 650 constituencies, the Conservatives will only win 64 seats, while the Liberal Democrats are projected to win 61 seats.
Labour’s projected 484 seats would exceed the 418 won by former prime minister Tony Blair in 1997, and also exceed the Tories’ landslide victory of 470 seats in 1931.
The pollster also predicted that the Labour Party would again become the largest party in Scotland, winning 38 of the 57 seats and ousting the Scottish National Party (SNP), which is predicted to win only 10 seats.
The pro-independence SNP won 48 Scottish constituencies in the last election in 2019.
According to SurveyStory, the Conservatives are “almost certain” to get fewer votes than in any previous general election.
Meanwhile, it predicted that Reform UK, the anti-immigration party founded by Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage, would win only a handful of seats despite getting the third-largest share of the overall vote, also due to the electoral system.
The poll’s predictions, based on interviews with about 35,000 voters, are likely to add fuel to Sunak’s warnings in the final hours of the campaign that voters should tire of voting for Labour and giving it a so-called “super-majority”.
Starmer has accused his Conservative rivals of running “a desperate, negative campaign”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)