The United Kingdom is about to return power to the Labour Party after 14 years of the Tories

The United Kingdom is preparing to celebrate this Thursday general elections which polls show will return power to Labour after 14 years of Conservative rule, although Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is trying to play down a defeat that is expected to be devastating.

More than 45 million citizens in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, are called to the polls to vote on the composition of the 650-seat House of Commons (lower) of Parliament.

Politicians are making a final effort on Wednesday to convince the undecided, but polls on voting intentions are predicting a victory for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and also suggesting that this party could make history by achieving an absolute majority never seen before in the country.

According to a recent poll by the firm Survation, Labour could win more seats than it did in 1997, when the party was led by Tony Blair.

The firm, which polled 34,558 respondents online and by phone, predicted a Labour victory of more than 418 seats – the number won under Blair.

The simple majority electoral system

Under the country’s single-member majoritarian electoral system, Labour will take power without having to form a coalition if it wins the target number of 326 seats, one more than the other parties.

During the election campaign that ends today, as there is no day of reflection in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party has repeated the word “change” to get the country out of its economic and social stagnation, due to the lack of growth, the endless waiting lists for health care, the lack of affordable housing, the increase in crime or the requests from different sectors for higher salaries.

The Tories, for their part, are coming into this election, called by Sunak on 22 May, with a lot of wear and tear behind them, after the marathon Brexit negotiations, the pandemic, the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, the scandals that plagued Boris Johnson’s management – in power between 2019 and 2022 – due to “partygate” (the parties in Downing Street during Covid), but above all due to the crisis in the cost of living and the increase in immigration – both legal and illegal.

Conservatives admit defeat

As polls are rarely wrong in the UK, many Conservatives have already admitted defeat, even though Sunak insisted he would fight to the end for every vote.

One of his most loyal ministers, the Minister for Work and Pensions, Mel Stride, anticipated this fall today by stating that it is likely that Labour will obtain “the largest majority any party has ever achieved.”

“I have accepted the polls as they are at the moment, and it seems very unlikely that they are very wrong, because they have been consistently in the same place for some time, (so) it is very likely that tomorrow we will find ourselves with the largest majority that any party has ever achieved.“, the minister added.

“If you look at the polls, it’s pretty clear that Labour is heading for a landslide and extraordinary victory on a level that’s probably never been seen before.“, he acknowledged.

The last few chaotic years of internal struggles within the Conservative Party, which in just three years had three different prime ministers (Johnson, Liz Truss and Sunak), favoured the rise of the right-wing populist party Reform UK, led by the controversial Nigel Farage.

This anti-immigration and anti-European politician claims that the conservatives are “finishes“and that the real opposition will be led by Reform UK.