British opinion polling on voter intention continues to upend centuries of established convention as traditional party of government the Conservatives fall to a fresh low, polling fourth nationwide.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party has come out on top of another UK poll, with YouGov putting them at 29 per cent, the level they have hovered around for the month of May. Meanwhile the legacy parties, Labour and the Conservatives, continue to fall.
The Tories suffered a fresh humiliation from the polling, which placed them on just 16 per cent — their lowest ever — and in fourth place, behind Reform, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats. It is a remarkable decline given just five years ago, in 2020, the Conservatives under Boris Johnson were polling as high as 53 per cent while what was then Farage’s Brexit Party languished on one per cent.
Given the Tories have led the British government longer than any other party in British political history, their rapid descent into electoral insignificance after 14 years of promising border control and failing to deliver on it is significant.
Pollster Luke Tryl remarked that the polling results “would have once seemed mind blowing” given the political landscape has now been “upended”, but noted of the Conservatives’ fourth-place finish that it was well within the margin of error in its closeness to the Liberal Democrats.
Polling aside, it is still nearly four years until the next UK general election, and much can change until then. Collapsing support or not, the Labour Party managed to grasp a very considerable parliamentary majority at the last election on a record-low vote share and consequently enjoy complete, unchallenged control of the British state.
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