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As people prepare to vote on Thursday, the Labour Party appears headed for a landslide victory in the general election, but the latest opinion polls suggest there could still be more than 100 seats to be contested.
Three seat-by-seat surveys show Sir Keir Starmer’s party is on track to win a majority of at least 200 seats, which would be its best ever result.
IThe final opinion polls ahead of the general election showed the Conservative Party’s popularity recovering slightly but Rishi Sunak warned it was “coming too late” for him.
Mr Kiir stressed that he was “ready to govern” and instructed his team to “get to work immediately”, but the prime minister said “millions” of voters were still undecided about which party to support.
BMG Research poll I Labour holds a 17-point lead over the Conservatives and is set to win a landslide victory in the House of Commons.
Labour’s vote share has fallen slightly over the course of the election, while the Conservatives have gained a few points in the past fortnight but are still lower than at the start of the election after Reform UK’s surge.
Three MRP polls, which use advanced statistical methods to predict outcomes for each UK constituency, predict that Labour will win more than 400 seats and the Conservatives will be reduced to 126 or fewer, a stunning reversal from the last general election, in which Boris Johnson won with an 80-seat majority. The projections would see most cabinet ministers fear for their seats and give Labour its largest majority as a single party since the advent of mass democracy in the early 19th century.
But all three pollsters – YouGov, FocalData and More in Common – found that around 100 constituencies remain undecided, with either party predicted to win a majority of less than 5%, suggesting that last-minute decisions and differences in voter turnout in dozens of seats are likely to determine the outcome.
“I am ready to take charge,” Sir Keir said on a flight to a Labour rally in Redditch, Worcestershire, his final campaign event, adding: “Nothing is going to be easy. Almost everything is pretty terrible, but we have to be ready and I am confident we can. So we’re not getting ahead of ourselves, but honestly we’ve been preparing hard on the assumption that we need to start well from day one. That’s our intention.”
He continued: “I’m really pleased that we’ve been able to run such a positive campaign. This was no easy task so I’m really pleased that four and a half years of hard work has paid off.”
“When I became leader of the Labour Party, optimists said it would take 10 years to turn this party around and get it back in power and pessimists said we would never turn this party around and it would never be in power again. We set out a three-part strategy, we stuck to it and we’re in a pretty good position on the eve of the election.”
Mr Sunak said: “There are many people who are still undecided – millions of people. I ask those who go to vote tomorrow to separate their dissatisfaction with me and with the party in the past from what a Labour government would mean specifically for their families.”
Reform Party leader Nigel Farage claimed “British politics will collapse within the next five years” and said that if he became the MP for Clacton he would provide a “bridgehead” for the right-wing movement.
SNP leader John Swinney also said: “The outcome of the English general election is a given. The Conservatives have lost, but not surprisingly. Labour will win and Keir Starmer will become prime minister. The only remaining talking point from this election is Scotland, where every seat in the country is closely contested.”
Polling will open at 7am and close at 10pm, with exit polls released shortly after. Results are expected to be known by around 4am tomorrow, Friday, with party leaders giving speeches in the early hours.