Who's ahead in the British polls?

Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, surprised many by calling a general election for July 4th. Polls show his Conservative Party is in dire straits. The opposition Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, entered the campaign with a commanding lead. If they can keep it, our forecast suggests they will win a landslide victory. Here you can find the latest national voting intention based on our average of the polls, and explore who is driving the political shifts with our build-a-voter tool.

Britain has become a country that increasingly votes by age. Labour enjoys a healthy lead in the polls among the young. Two-thirds of voters aged 65 and above voted Conservative at the last general election in 2019; Labour will need to bring many of them onside if they are to win a big majority at the next one.

Boris Johnson upended one of the old rules of Britain’s political landscape: that the north votes Labour. In 2019 the Conservatives won 45 “red wall” seats from Labour, mostly in the Midlands and north of England. After being nearly wiped out in Scotland in 2019, Labour are polling competitively there again after the near-implosion of the Scottish National Party.

There is only a small gender gap between the voting intentions of men and women in Britain. Women tend to be more frequent supporters of Labour. Whereas Reform UK, an insurgent party fiercely critical of mass immigration, owes a lot of its gathering support to men, particularly older ones.

As the 2016 EU referendum fades into the distance the Conservatives’ grip on voters who chose “Leave” becomes ever weaker. In 2020 the Tory party could count on four-fifths of Brexit voters; today that proportion is less than half. Labour’s stance, seeking closer relations with the EU but doing nothing to bring Brexit itself into question, has brought many Leave voters back into the fold.

Nearly half of Tory voters in the 2019 election now prefer other parties, notably either Labour or Reform UK. Labour’s support, by contrast, has remained robust, which suggests that Sir Keir’s purging of the hard-left bit of his party has not repelled many voters and helped to win over plenty of others.