London: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party fell behind Britain’s anti-immigration reform party for the first time in a YouGov poll, calling the development a “seismic shift”.
New polls released on Wednesday and Thursday show reformist Brexiteer Nigel Farage will have 19 percent support for next month’s national election, compared with 18 percent for the Conservatives. Both are behind the centre-left Labor Party.
YouGov “notices that these figures are within the margin of error – we cannot say for sure whether Reform will maintain or improve its position compared to the Conservatives”.
However, “Nigel Farage’s party being neck and neck with the ruling Conservatives is a seismic shift in the polls,” he said.
In opinion polls, Keir Starmer’s Labor Party has a 37 percent lead, up from a 20-point lead for almost two years, according to other polls.
Starmer is expected to be the next Prime Minister, given that the election is big and ongoing.
But he is still struggling to overcome Conservative claims that his party will spend more carefully on public finances and raise personal taxes – a perennial point of hostility from the right.
Farage, who struck a deal with the Conservatives to avoid splitting the right-wing vote in the last general election in 2019, said on Thursday that he now represents the main opposition party for reform, not the Conservatives.
Sunak, who is in Italy for a meeting of G7 leaders, downplayed the poll by saying the election campaign was only half over.
“The only poll was conducted on July 4,” he said.
It’s unclear how the polls would fare if polled on election day, with a winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post system favoring the larger party.
Some commentators have suggested that the Conservatives, who are on the back foot after 14 years of horror and a life-saving crisis marked by Brexit, Covid, have quietly accepted that the election is unwinnable.
Senior Conservatives have taken to the airwaves in recent days to warn voters to give Labor an “emergency” in Parliament for the next five years.
Questions are growing about what will happen to the Tories after the election, which will see Sunak under pressure if Labor wins by a landslide.
Any Tory leadership contest is likely to be an ideological battle between the centre-right and the vocal right, who are increasingly critical of the party’s stance on immigration.
This led to talk of Farage joining the Conservatives.
But after seven failed attempts, the former MEP, who is in his eighth term as a British MP, has said he wants to take over the party.
In 14 years, the Conservatives have had five prime ministers, including three in four months in 2022.
Much of this is a result of Brexit.
But there are self-inflicted wounds, such as the chaos of Boris Johnson’s leadership and the short tenure of Liz Truss, while unfunded tax cuts hit markets and caused sterling to crash.
Labour’s starmer, who campaigned on a promise to boost growth and restore “stability” to the economy, is keen not to lose the party’s massive vote by campaigning hard to end the Tory “chaos”.
