2024-03-31 15:24:41
Rishi Sunak visits the BAE Systems factory in Barrow-in-Furness on March 25. Danny Lawson (via REUTERS)
For months now, UK politics has had the sound of the end of the cycle, and among conservatives there is a spirit of resignation after almost 14 years in power. The macro survey commissioned by the Best for Britain organization from the sociological company Survation, which consulted more than 15,000 Britons between March 8 and 22, predicts a historic victory for the Labor opposition and a bloody defeat for Rishi Sunak. With a percentage advantage of 19%, Keir Starmer would achieve a majority of 468 deputies (currently, the Labor Party has 203), compared to just 98 seats (today there are 365) for the Conservatives. When Tony Blair swept the polls in 1997, his New Labor obtained 418 representatives in the House of Commons, compared to the 165 of the until then Conservative Prime Minister, John Major.
“The survey shows that we are heading towards an electoral change of unprecedented proportions, with drastic changes in each constituency, in which the electorate is going to move away from the Tories [el nombre histórico con que se designa a los conservadores] in different directions,” explained Naomi Smith, the executive director of Best for Britain, an organization that emerged to try to stop Brexit, and that today denounces the internal and external decline of the United Kingdom.
By legal imperative, the next general elections cannot be held later than January 2025. The general consensus points to elections next November. Sunak himself has suggested that he is working with the idea of holding the polls in the second half of the year.
However, there are a series of milestones on the way to that date that point to the possibility of a surprise in the form of a preview. On May 2, municipal elections will be held throughout England, including the competition for mayor of London. It is very likely, as has been seen in the by-elections and local elections of recent months, that the defeat of the Conservatives will be colossal.
The Prime Minister could hardly justify staying in Downing Street for six more months in that situation. Especially since the noise coming from the right wing of his party, which has long been demanding a change in leadership, would be unbearable.
Sunak faces an economy that is barely overcoming a migration crisis that is impossible to solve—not a single one of the promised flights to Rwanda, where his government intends to deport irregular immigrants, has yet to take off—precisely two of the key promises. with which he started his mandate almost a year and a half ago.
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The resurgence of the Reform UK party, today led by Richard Tice but always under the shadow of Nigel Farage, the populist (and popular) politician who convulsed the United Kingdom with the defense of Brexit, complicates things even more for Sunak. The poll for Best for Britain gives the party heir to the Brexit Party and before that UKIP, all under the auspices of Farage, up to 10% support. But the survey also suggests that if the Reform UK candidates withdrew from the race in those constituencies where the battle against the left was tighter, as UKIP did in 2017 and the Brexit Party in 2019, the Conservatives could overcome the bad times. omens until exceeding 150 seats.
The conclusion of this data, defend Sunak’s enemies, suggests that the party must look for a new candidate more in line with Boris Johnson’s populism before it is too late.
The mechanism to overthrow a conservative leader – it would already be the fourth, after Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – requires that the leadership of the parliamentary group receive 53 “letters of withdrawal of confidence” from deputies, 15% of the current total figure. As those cards accumulate, the total number remains secret. It only becomes known at the moment the threshold is crossed. In the hotbed of rumors that British politics has become for months, the volume of criticism against the current prime minister has increased, and many sense that there could be a new internal rebellion, the umpteenth, in the Conservative Party.
“Sunak is a failed politician who is leading his party to defeat. But at this time, dispensing with him would only make the situation worse,” former minister David Gauke, who has been leading calls for the Conservative Party to return to the moderate and centrist path for a couple of years, has written in The New Statesman. The most obvious demonstration that the current prime minister has already lost most of the conditional support that he achieved when he arrived at Downing Street, when he managed to stop the economic collapse caused in just two months by his predecessor, Liz Truss.
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