Coventry professor predicts big win for Labour following General Election
The Prime Minister announced a General Election on 4 July
A political scientist in Coventry predicts a "big win" for the Labour party, following the general election.
On Wednesday (22 May), Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced polls will open on 4 July.
Professor Matt Qvortrup, from Coventry University, believes one reason why the election is being called now is damage limitation.
He said: “Mr Sunak knows that his party is going to lose, and lose big, and therefore he does not want to be the last Conservative Prime Minister in history. His ambition is to minimise losses to make sure that the Conservative party will at least be the main opposition party. And if he were to have waited any longer that could have been more bad news, which would have made life much worse for him.”
Mr Qvortrup continued: “The likely result in the general election is a big win for the Labour Party. There will be some tactical voting which will probably make the Liberal Democrats also considerably larger than they are. We can't really expect, due to the electoral system where you have to win in a constituency, that the Reform Party will do particularly well, though they will probably get a larger share of the votes than the Liberal Democrats.
“The Conservative Party will lose out because of tactical voting. They will probably be the second largest party overall in terms of vote share, but because of the distribution of the votes under the first past -the -post electoral system, the Conservative Party might even fall behind the Liberal Democrats, which would be historically very significant.”
Some experts are comparing the election to 1997 when Tony Blair, the Labour leader, won a majority of 179 seats.
Matt Qvortrup said: “I think it could possibly be even worse for the Conservative Party. They’re in the same situation as the Liberals were in 1918, where they had fought a pandemic, they'd fought a war, and yet they were reduced from 256 seats to barely a dozen, and they never recovered from that.”