Labour Party leader Keir Starmer poses for a photograph as he visits the Vale Inn on June 27, 2024 in Macclesfield, UK. In the final week of the campaign, the Labour Party outlined plans to expand opportunities for young people.
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LONDON — There has been one dominant narrative since Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a general election in May — that the opposition Labour Party would win by a landslide.
While the polls may vary in size and methodology, the results point in one direction, with the centre-left Labour Party leading the Conservatives by around 20 points. The Labour Party is predicted to win around 40% of the vote while the Conservatives will take around 20%. Sky News poll tracker.
Reform UK, led by Brexiteer Nigel Farage, is forecast to win 16% of the vote, after taking the Conservatives’ support, while the Liberal Democrats are forecast to win around 11% and the Greens 6%. The Scottish National Party is forecast to win 2.9%.
Labour candidates and leader Keir Starmer are keen to downplay the party’s current popularity, fearing voters will become complacent and appear “to have won” — a stance that could lead to voter apathy and lower turnout, or a backlash from conservative-leaning sections of the electorate.
“Labour wants to convince voters that it is extremely important that they vote, otherwise the Conservatives will win, and the Conservatives are very keen for people to think that they still have a chance, and therefore it is very worthwhile to vote,” leading UK pollster John Curtice told CNBC.
Question marks have been raised in the past about the accuracy of British voter polls, with previous predictions overestimating or underestimating support for different political parties. Errors are often due to inadequate sampling or to factors that are harder to control, such as voters being “shy” about being polled about which party they intend to support.
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer speaks ahead of the UK general election on 4 July 2024.
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This year, however, experts tend to agree that the polls show a big shift to Labor, and even if the scale of support is wrong, the overall result is the same: a convincing victory for the opposition party.
“My attitude is [that] “Polling should be done but not inhaled,” says Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research.
“The thing is, you shouldn’t look at them for absolute accuracy, they should give you a reasonable indication of where to go.”
“That happened because this was an election where one party was clearly leading by a lot, as much as [it was] “In 1997, the polls might have been quite different — but no one would have noticed,” he noted, referring to the year Labour won a landslide victory over the Conservatives, ending the party’s 18-year rule.
The ‘pivot’ of the Labor Party?
The Labor Party itself was also keen to downplay the significance of the polls, with a spokesperson telling CNBC that the party does not comment on projections “because they change and fluctuate.”
“Instead, we are working to get the message of change to voters ahead of the only important vote on July 4,” the spokesperson said.
On Monday, Keir Starmer said no vote should be taken lightly and urged his supporters to continue campaigning until polling stations closed on Thursday.
“The fight for change is for you, but change only happens if you vote for it. That’s the message we have to take door to door in these final hours and days until 10pm Thursday night.”
“Nothing is taken for granted, every vote has to be won. Polls don’t predict the future, we have to get out there,” he told campaign supporters in Hitchin.
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer on a visit to Hitchin, Hertfordshire, as part of the general election campaign. Photo taken: Monday 1 July 2024.
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Former Labour Party director of communications and campaigns Alastair Campbell, one of the key strategists behind the party’s rebranding in the 1990s as ‘New Labour’ ahead of its landslide 1997 election victory, told CNBC he doubts current voter polling.
“I’m really worried about the way the election debates are going right now, almost everything in the debates right now is about polls,” he told CNBC two weeks ago.
“Apart from a few postal votes, no one has voted. And I don’t believe the Conservative Party will be completely wiped out, I don’t believe that,” he said.
“I just think there’s something very, very wrong with these polls, I could be completely wrong, and it’s true that Labour is always ahead. But I just wish that, in election time, we would talk less about the polls and more about what the parties are saying.”
Pollster Matt Beech, director of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull, said Campbell’s stance was designed to persuade voters who were inclined to support the Labour Party to vote.
“They want to make sure they get the biggest majority possible. They’re all very aware of that. [the lead-up to the election in] In 1992, with the “shy Conservative” phenomenon, when polls showed that Labour would win but in reality it didn’t…. [But] They’re really not really worried about it. They want a tsunami like in 1997,” Beech told CNBC.
So if you keep beating that drum, he added, [that the polls are not correct]You would say to Labour-leaning voters, ‘go out and vote.’ But not ‘we’re really scared that we won’t win, we’ll win comfortably. But we want a majority that allows us to push through our agenda and we want this win to mean we’re there for two terms.’“
