Can Labour win a majority?

Labour are now odds-on to win a majority at the next general election. Is that a huge over-reaction to the latest polls?

The latest Electoral Calculus projection would result in an incredible 292 seat majority for the Labour party.

This would be a Tory wipeout of historic proportions - even in the Blair landslide of 1997 they held on to 165 seats. The list of potential Conservative losses would be fairly extraordinary in this scenario: Kwasi Kwarteng in Spelthorne, Esther McVey in Tatton, Matt Hancock in Suffolk West and Sajid Javid in Bromsgrove would all be out. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab would be swept away with ease.

Current polling leaves no doubt that a general election now would result in a massive Labour majority, but we could be more than two years away from a vote (January 2025 is the last possible date). What's the minimum Labour need to do to get to 325 seats? The maths suggest they need about a 10.5% swing across the UK  - the reality is that it's probably going to be slightly harder than that in England & Wales, given that it will not easy for Labour to make much progress in Scotland whilst the SNP remains fairly strong. Rob Ford sums this up nicely in a recent Guardian piece.

Assuming the SNP support stays fairly stable, Labour are probably going to need around a 9pt lead in GB votes to get to 325 seats. The very latest average at Politico has them about 25pts ahead. When Truss took over as PM, the gap was 11pts, so Labour were ahead of target for a majority even at that stage. The current odds at Smarkets now rates the probability of a majority at around 51%.

Smarkets prices 12 Oct 2022

On balance, I think I'd still rather be a layer rather than a backer here. There is a lot of time for things to change, not least the very strong possibility that the Tories will have a new leader by the time an election comes around. It seems hard to believe that won't make things a little less bad for them. Events outside of Truss's control could easily make a big difference, most notably developments in Ukraine. Also, there is some historical precedent for governments to recover from seemingly hopeless positions: the Conservatives were polling at under 30% in early 1982 but went on to win easily at the 1983 general election and not everyone thinks that was just down to the Falklands War.