UK Labor is set to sweep into power with a huge majority, according to a Reuters poll

By Andrew MacAskill, Elizabeth Piper and Alistair Smout

LONDON (Reuters) – Keir Starmer will become Britain’s next prime minister on Friday and his Labor Party is expected to win a parliamentary election, an exit poll said, predicting a historic loss for Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives.

Centre-left Labor would take 410 of the 650 seats in parliament, a dramatic reversal of fortunes from five years ago when it suffered its worst performance since 1935.

The result will give Labor a majority of 170 and will bring down the curtain on 14 years of increasing turmoil in the Conservative-led government.

“If what we’ve seen so far is anything to go by, it’s clear that the British people voted for change,” said Labour’s Rachel Reeves, who will be Britain’s first female finance minister.

“In the coming hours, after 14 years, people will wake up to the hope of a new government: the first Labor victory in almost two decades, a page turned, a new chapter started, a chance to look forward to a brighter future. It seemed a long time ago,” Reeves said after winning his seat.

Sunak’s party was predicted to win just 131 seats, the worst election in its history, as voters punished them for the cost of living crisis, as well as years of instability and infighting that has seen five different prime ministers since the Brexit vote. in 2016.

The centrist Liberal Democrats were predicted to take 61 seats and the far-right Reform UK party, led by Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage was predicted to win 13, far more than expected.

Early results confirmed that Labor and the Lib Dems were taking seats from the Conservatives, while Reform also claimed its first victory, and pushed the Conservatives into third place in many constituencies.

“The reform did well tonight and I know that some of my colleagues will react accordingly,” one Conservative lawmaker, who declined to be named, told Reuters. “But Labor won this election in the middle and we have to remember that lesson.”

Overall, exit polls have shown that British voters have shifted their support to left-wing parties, unlike in France where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party made history in last Sunday’s election.

It wasn’t just the Conservatives whose vote was predicted to fall. The pro-independence Scottish National Party was expected to win just 10 seats, its worst since 2010, after chaos saw two leaders resign in the space of a year.

“If this exit poll is correct, then this is a historic defeat for the Conservative Party,” Keiran Pedley, director of research at Ipsos, which conducted the poll, told Reuters.

“It looked like the Conservatives were going to rule for 10 years and everything has fallen apart.”

SUNAK ‘FALL GUY’

Sunak surprised Westminster and many in his party by calling an election earlier than needed in May when the Conservatives trailed Labor by 20 points in opinion polls.

He had hoped that the gap would narrow as was the case in the British election, but instead he had a disastrous campaign.

It got off to a rough start for him as it rained outside Downing Street as he announced the vote, before aides and Conservative candidates were embroiled in a gambling scandal, and Sunak’s early departure from D-Day commemorations in France fueled criticism.

If the exit polls prove correct, it would represent a dramatic turnaround for Starmer and Labour, which critics and supporters say is facing a crisis three years ago when it appeared to have lost its way after its 2019 breakthrough.

But a series of scandals – particularly revelations of factions in Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdown – humiliated then-prime minister Boris Johnson and his poll lead collapsed.

Liz Truss’s disastrous six-week leadership, which followed Johnson’s ouster at the end of 2022, has cemented the decline, and Sunak has made no mistake in leading Labor polls now.

“We deserved to lose. The Conservative Party seems tired and out of ideas,” Ed Costello, chairman of the Grassroots Conservatives, which represents senior members, told Reuters.

“But it’s not all Rishi Sunak’s fault. It was Boris Johnson and Liz Truss who led the team to disaster. Rishi Sunak is just a young man.”

Labour’s predicted result will not match the record levels achieved by the party under Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001 when the party took 418 and 412 seats respectively.

“The electoral mountain that Labor needed to start is bigger than the one that Tony Blair had to climb and he (Starmer) has already climbed it,” Peter Sloman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, told Reuters.