Two weeks before the British general elections, two new polls on Wednesday put Labour on track for a historic victory over the Conservatives, who have been in power for 14 years. According to a survey by the YouGov institute, as the elections stand, Labour (centre-left) would win 425 of the 650 seats in the British Parliament on 4 July. “the largest figure in the history of the party”with 39% of the vote. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservatives would retain 108 seats, losing 257 MPs compared to the current composition of Parliament.

The Savanta Institute, for its part, even increases the number of seats won by Keir Starmer's Labour to 516, double the number won by Tony Blair during the Labour victory in 1997. The Conservatives would then fall to just 53 seats, a crushing and unprecedented defeat for the party. Worse still, the Savanta study, for the newspaper The TelegraphIt even results in the Conservative Prime Minister losing his seat in Richmond, Yorkshire (northern England), to Labour, a situation never before seen for a head of government.

Most are retreating

According to these two polling institutes, leading figures in the majority, such as Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps or Parliamentary Relations Minister Penny Mordaunt, could even lose their seats. Behind them, the (centrist) Liberal Democrats could strengthen and become the third force in Parliament with 67 seats, according to YouGov. They would thus overtake the Scottish separatists of the SNP, who are struggling against the Labour Party, which would only have 20 seats in Westminster.

The Reform UK party, which has been making progress since Brexit champion Nigel Farage's surprise entry into the race in early June, is expected to win its first five seats with 15% of the vote, including Clacton in eastern England, where the party leader is standing, YouGov continues. Savanta, on the other hand, believes that the party should not win any seats due to the single-round voting system in constituencies, thus recording Nigel Farage's eighth defeat in the count. Savanta points out, however, that more than a hundred seats have such narrow margins that it is difficult to predict the result on July 4 at the moment. This is the case in Richmond, where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is standing.