Labour ‘virtually certain’ to win more seats than 1997 landslide, new MRP finds

Labour is “virtually certain” to win more seats at the general election than it did in the 1997 landslide, according to a new MRP analysis which predicted that Labour could win 484 seats and the Conservatives just 64.

Survation’s latest MRP analysis, released this evening, projected that Labour could win around 42% of the vote when Britons head to the polls later this week, just under 20 percentage points more than the Tories on 23%.

The MRP model – which used data from more than 30,000 respondents to make seat-level forecasts – predicted that Labour could win a majority of 318, with a “close race” between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats to form the official opposition.

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Survation’s model projected that the Lib Dems could win 61 seats, the SNP ten, Reform UK seven, Plaid Cymru three and the Greens three.

It predicted that both Labour and the Lib Dems could make “significant” gains from the Conservatives, forecasting that 248 seats could change hands from the Tories to Labour, more than four times the number of seats the Tories won from Labour at the 2019 general election.

The pollster also said Labour is “likely” to become the largest party in Scotland, with its model predicting that Labour could win 37 seats from the SNP and end the night with 38 of Scotland’s 57 seats.

READ MORE: UK general election poll tracker: Daily roundup on how polls look for Labour

Like earlier MRP analyses, Survation’s research projected that the Tories could see significant losses in the so-called ‘Blue Wall’, with the party forecast to hold on to just ten of the 52 seats categorised in that way. It suggested that Labour could gain 19 of the Blue Wall seats and the Lib Dems 23.

The model also suggested that Reform UK could become the third most-voted party while only winning around seven seats, which Survation said would carry “major implications for the proportionality of the electoral system”.

The polling company said the scale of Labour victory projected by its model was “unprecedented”, calculating that there is a probability greater than 99% that the party will win more seats than it won in 1997 under Tony Blair.

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