To shed light on the matter, TVP World invited Professor Ian Begg from the European Institute at the London School of Economics.
Polls indicate that Labour enjoys much greater support than the Conservatives, but most importantly the single-seat constituency with a first-past-the-post system means that, according to Begg, “it's perfectly possible that Labour could win a massive majority with less than 40% of the aggregate votes, because of the way the distribution of votes happens.”
Furthermore, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party competes with the Conservatives for the same voter base.
“If reform takes 10 or 12 or 15 percent of the votes, most of those votes will come from the conservative voters. And that means that the Conservatives have a much lower chance of winning against Labour,” Begg said, which may lead to the Tories with hardly any seats in the House of Commons.
There is a caveat, however, as Labour’s high results in polls may result in some voters who would support the party deciding to stay at home, following the line of thinking that “They [Labour Party] are going to win anyway and it's not going to make any difference if I do vote.”
But on the other hand, “Many traditional conservative seats are very vulnerable to the three-way contests, or even four-way contests, if you count the centrist Liberal Party, because they will squeeze the non-Labour vote in a way which gives a victory to Labour.”
Begg assessed that at the end of the day, however, “it's an infinitesimally small probability that Labour won't win a big victory.”
Regarding U.K.’s foreign policy, including support for Ukraine, Begg believes that it can be simply summarized as “No change.”
“He [Labour leader Keir Starmer] has made it very clear that he continues to have a strong position,” said Professor Begg, adding that “Much of foreign policy is unlikely to change,” and that this would be the case in many areas, such as the commitment of both parties to maintain a strong health service.
“So it's more on some of the economic policies and in certain other social policies that you will see the differences between the parties,” Begg said, with one example given being Labour’s commitment to building more public housing projects, and that “It may well be that we're sending recruiting teams to Poland to try to bring back the Polish bricklayers and builders who left the U.K. after Brexit.”
However, he also pointed out that while the need for more housing is widely recognized, there is always the issue of people referred to as NIMBYs, standing for Not In My Back Yard, who “oppose new developments, and that’s one of the things that Labour hopes it can change to make it far more difficult to oppose new developments.”
As for the possibility of the U.K. returning to be a part of the European Union, the situation is much more clear-cut, with Starmer clearly stating that “he cannot see any prospect of rejoining the European Union or even the single market in his lifetime.”
“He’s 60, so you can make your own calculation about how long that means,” Begg said.
