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Polls suggest Sir Keir Starmer will be Britain’s next PM. But he won’t be enthusiastically swept into power by the public
After a most unusual election campaign in the United Kingdom, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will still be in the job come the weekend.
Voters go to the polls on Thursday night Australian time, and the results for all 650 constituencies in the House of Commons will be clear on Friday.
Unless polls are wildly, monumentally, wrong, the Conservative Party is about to be brutally rejected at the polls after 14 years in power, and a new prime minister will be sworn in with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer coming to power with a thumping majority in parliament.
But it doesn’t seem he’ll be swept to power on a tide of enthusiasm. Rather, voters are flocking away from a deeply unpopular government.
In fact, the current polling raises the possibility that Labour could storm to victory with fewer votes than 2017, when it lost.
Paul Smith from research company YouGov says that’s because many Conservatives won’t turn up to vote in the non-compulsory election.
“There’s a great disillusionment with politics in Britain, because so many working people have felt that their lives have been going backwards,” he says.
“It’s a warning sign for major parties you can’t take for granted that people will always vote for you. You’ve got to offer something to make it worth their while.”
Ahead of the results being announced, here’s your guide to the UK election and what to watch for.
The campaign really hasn’t helped the government
Already languishing in polling, the Conservative government had hoped the heightened attention an election campaign brings — along with more scrutiny on Starmer — might help narrow the race.
It hasn’t.
Instead, Sunak has had to deal with a series of self-inflicted crises.
“We know it’s going to be a catastrophe [for the Conservatives], but we just don’t know the exact nature of the catastrophe until it unfolds on Thursday.”
After spending the first fortnight of the campaign unveiling policies that seemed designed to appeal to voters on the right, such as a plan to institute mandatory national service for young adults, he kicked an own goal when he left D-Day commemorations in Normandy early for a campaign TV interview .
Then, in the final weeks of the campaign, Sunak has had to deal with allegations that Conservative candidates and staff placed bets on the election date, just before the PM announced it.
The allegations are being investigated by authorities, and if it turns out Conservatives had made bets based on confidential information, that will be a potential criminal offence.
All of this comes after a chaotic five years in politics that saw three prime ministers and numerous scandals.
The “partygate” scandal, which saw then-prime minister Boris Johnson fined for breaking pandemic social distancing rules, was a turning point in public opinion. There was also Liz Truss’s brief but disastrous 49 days in the top job.
What do the polls say?
This is probably the most heavily polled election in British history, and those polls are consistently suggesting that the Conservatives are somewhere around 20 percentage points behind Labour in popular support.
A series of other polls designed to estimate the number of seats each party will win suggest the government could be reduced to somewhere between 50 and 150 seats in the 650 member House of Commons. Going into the election they held 344.
Even a number at the top of that range would be their worst ever result for the modern Conservative party. And it would likely see some senior figures in the party lose their seats.
Who are the other parties?
The other fascinating feature of this election is that — like in Australia — we’re watching a drift away from major parties and toward smaller parties.
While the gap between the major parties has stayed constant, it seems there’s been a small drift away from both the major parties and toward minor parties as the campaign has progressed
This election could see a record minor party vote, and some of those parties are hoping to translate that into a significant haul of seats.
The Liberal Democrats, in the political centre, are hoping their party room will grow back to the size they had in 2010, when they formed a coalition government with the Conservatives under David Cameron.
On the right, Reform UK is a spiritual successor to the euro-sceptic and populist UKIP party and is led by prominent Brexiteer Nigel Farage who is hoping to win a seat on his eighth attempt.
Public support for that party seems to have surged in recent months, and that has come largely at the expense of the Conservatives
Extraordinarily, the gap between Reform and the Conservatives in polling is now very small, and a few polls, like one from Whitestone published last week have even put the minor party ahead of the government.
The Greens have a smaller support base, but are trying to pick up a few more seats to add to the one they have, while the Scottish National Party (SNP) — which is in power in Scotland — looks likely to lose many of its seats.
Britain’s electoral system throws up a lot of uncertainty
While the expectation is that Labour will win this week’s election, there’s a lot more uncertainty over how big its victory will be, not just because of the rise of the minor parties, but because of the structure of the UK’s electoral system and who will even turn up to vote.
Unlike Australia, the UK does not use a preferential voting system. This means parties do not need to win majority support in each seat. The winner in each seat is simply the candidate with the highest number of votes.
That might be a negative for the Conservatives this time, as they’re losing votes on all flanks, including to Farage’s Reform UK — which is appealing to some conservative voters
Whereas in Australia most of those votes for Reform would flow back to the Conservatives as preferences, in the UK Farage and his Reform party could play a “spoiler” effect in marginal seats.
For example, if the Conservatives hold a seat on a 5 per cent margin over Labour going into the election, but it loses a significant number of votes to Reform, Labour could pull into first place without needing to increase its own vote share.
This method of voting also encourages people to consider voting “tactically”: rather than voting for their preferred party, some may vote for a candidate who is most likely to defeat a party they dislike.
Ipsos research suggests as many as one in five voters could vote tactically, and that could help determine the scale of a Labour victory.
All that might create quite a distorted result, where Labour wins a massive majority of seats with only about 40 per cent of the vote.
Britain has some big challenges ahead
No matter who wins, the next government of the UK has a long list of challenges ahead of it.
The 2019 election was all about Brexit, but now, voters when polled say the economy and cost-of-living pressures are at the top of the list of priorities.
The state of the National Health Service is of great concern to many voters, and immigration ranks highly as well, especially for Conservative and Reform voters.
But the electorate appears to be fragmenting, like we’re seeing in Australia and other countries around the world.
Keir Starmer is far more popular than the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, but still, not that popular.
Even if Starmer wins, and with a thumping majority in parliament, governing a country that’s so disillusioned with politics is becoming increasingly difficult.
“Wages and working conditions and public services are in such a bad shape that people expect something to be done quickly and the expectations are very, very high and the offer is currently very, very tepid,” Smith said.
“Unless they bridge that gap, they will find themselves also in a great deal of trouble in a very short period of time.”
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