Labour on track for 140-seat majority at next election but Reform could cause hung Parliament, poll says

Labour is on track to win a 140-seat majority at the next election under new constituency boundaries which come into effect when the UK next goes to the polls.

In the first MRP poll under the new boundaries, conducted by Focaldata for Best for Britain, Labour would win 35 per cent of the vote while the Conservatives would win 23 per cent.

Based on these shares, Labour would win up to 470 seats, giving the party a 140-seat majority, while the Conservatives would get 123 seats and SNP would get 26.

The polling also applied education profiles to the 12 per cent of voters who stated “don’t know” on how they would vote, which adjusted Labour’s seat share to 370 and the Conservatives to 232.

In another scenario, assuming that Reform UK stand aside for the Conservatives in marginal seats, Labour would win 401 seats to the Tories’ 202.

A combined scenario of Reform UK standing down and education profiles provided to undecided voters put Labour on 316 seats and the Conservatives on 286 – meaning there would be a hung Parliament.

“Our analysis of that data is that actually Labour could more plausibly be looking at 370 seats, and even that might be at the high end that we’re predicting, with the Conservatives on 232,” Naomi Smith, the CEO of Best for Britain, told a press conference in London.

“Neither of those scenarios has to happen independently of one another. They can both happen at the same time. And if they do, if a lot of those undecided voters break back to the Conservatives and we see Reform UK pulling candidates, then we’re back in hung Parliament territory.”

Leading pollster Sir John Curtice told the conference that both “Partygate” and Liz Truss’s mini-Budget “had very substantial impacts on the overall levels of support” for the Conservatives, who have fallen behind Labour in the polls since autumn 2021.

He added that there had been “bit of narrowing over the since last October” in Labour’s lead since Prime Minister Rishi Sunak entered Downing Street, but that Labour was still on average about 15 per cent ahead.

He added that while “other issues clearly matter but that doesn’t mean to say that Brexit has necessarily disappeared from our politics”.

Sir John claimed that “the idea that voters have accepted it doesn’t really tally with any statistical evidence”, and that on average around 57 per cent of people would vote to rejoin the EU while 43 would vote to stay out.

Among those who did not or could not vote in 2016, the vast majority support being inside the EU, and have moved “even more decisively in that direction” since 2019.

The polling also found that 206 of 632 seats in Great Britain (not including Northern Ireland) are marginal, meaning there is less than a 5 per cent gap between the lead and second place parties.

Out of these 206 marginal seats, Labour are either the first or second place candidate in 197 seats – suggesting the party has a greater chance of taking those where they are in second place.

154 of the 206 marginal seats are Labour-Conservative marginals, while three of them are Liberal Democrat-Labour marginals.