LONDON — The Labour Party of the United Kingdom is on track to achieve a landslide win in the general election, according to an exit poll published after voting ended on Thursday night.
The exit poll showed Labour, headed by Keir Starmer, would win 410 seats, enough for a comfortable outright majority in the 650-seat parliament. Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, which have ruled for 14 years, are forecast to win 131 seats, Liberal Democrats 61 seats, and Reform UK 13 seats.
The exit poll, commissioned by three broadcasters — the BBC, ITV and Sky — has a good track record of accurately forecasting the outcome of the last four elections held in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.
Official results will be declared in the early hours of Friday.
The projected landslide victory for Labour is in sync with the sustained double-digit lead it maintained over the Tories in all opinion polls in the months leading up to the voting day.
Disenchanted voters in the UK have grown increasingly impatient with the ruling party as it struggled to address the concerns of the ordinary people. Their trust in the Conservative-led government has diminished amid a host of scandals. Voters also doubted the stability and consistency of Downing Street’s leadership during the political chaos in the summer of 2022, which saw the UK install three different prime ministers in two months.
“I’m interested in more stability in government. We’ve had too much infighting within parties, too much turnover. And I think that creates a lot of stopping and starting of progress,” London resident Nicole told Xinhua outside a polling station.
“I think that this will be a big step forward just to have a much more functional, consistent government. It’s more like wanting competency, wanting things to work better, wanting concentration from our government in terms of public services and progress,” she said.
Starmer’s Labour Party has campaigned around the theme of “Change,” promising to rebuild Britain and make it serve the interests of working people. Among Labour’s key pledges are to kickstart economic growth, implement tough spending rules, cut NHS waiting times, recruit thousands more teachers, return law and order to British streets, and enhance border security to contain illegal immigration.
“The challenges are going to be absolutely enormous (for Labour),” Professor Stuart Wilks-Heeg, political expert at the University of Liverpool, told Xinhua. “It’s really difficult to see how they can progress fast on any of these things now.”
The “honeymoon period” that voters have given to Labour will be “very, very short,” and it is critical for Starmer to use whatever goodwill he’s got to try and fix problems in this period, he added.
