United Kingdom to vote and polls open from 7am (8am in Italy) until 10pm today for the elections that – at least according to the polls – could see the Labour Party secure a major victory after 14 years. There are 48.7 million British citizens called to vote, distributed across all Commonwealth countries.
Sunak’s responsibilities
“Of course…I am the leader of the party”, the words of the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunakwho on the eve of the vote responded in the meantime to journalists who asked him if he will take full responsibility for the outcome of the election, now taking the debacle for granted for the Conservatives. The prime minister also argued that the outcome is not as obvious as it seems: “Many people want to say that the conclusion is foreseen, I don’t have this approach”. In the meantime, however, Sunak – prime minister from October 2022 and the last of the five Conservative prime ministers who have succeeded each other in Downing Street since the approval of Brexit in 2016 – has led an election campaign mainly aimed at urging not to give Keir Starmer’s Labour “the blank cheque” that it would receive from a super majority in the Commons.
Labour triumphs in the polls
In the outgoing Parliament, Labour had 206 seats, but according to recent national projections by the Guardian, with today’s vote they could in fact get 424 of the 650 seats in the Commons, much more than the 326 required for a majority.
But the measure of the extent of the defeat that Sunak seems to be inevitably heading towards is given by the fact that latest polls they put the Conservatives not only 20 points behind Labour – 18% against 38% – but also behind, according to some surveys, Reform UK, the new, still populist and far-Right face of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Starmer and the ‘voter suppression’ alarm
For his part, Labour leader Starmer complained on the eve of the vote that the emphasis on how Labour will win a landslide victory before the polls even open is a last-minute, desperate strategy by the Tories to “try to convince people not to vote”. Starmer spoke of attempts at “voter suppression”, commenting on the words of Conservative minister Mel Stride who said there was a “high probability” of Labour winning the largest majority in modern history in the election, after weeks of warnings by the Conservatives of the risks of a “supermajority”.
Interviewed by the BBC, Stride warned about “the kind of opposition and government control we could have”. “This is really voter suppression”, Stammer replied, accusing Stride of “trying to keep people at home instead of going to vote”.
“If you want change you have to vote for it,” he continued while campaigning in Carmarthenshire. “I know there are swing districts across the country, I don’t take anything for granted, I respect the voters and we have to win every vote until 10pm.”
Before Stride, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman also said in an article published in The Telegraph that the election is “already over” and that the Tories “must prepare for the reality and frustration of the opposition”, predicting a post-election marked by “a fight for the soul of the Conservative Party” and for its very survival. A fierce critic of Rishi Sunak, Braverman is considered a possible new leader of the party after the announced defeat.
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