"With five weeks to go to the general election, they gained more than 500 seats and seized 11 extra councils.
The gains mainly came at the expense of Labour, which came third in Scotland, and UKIP, which lost all of its seats. The Lib Dems failed to make headway.
Polling expert John Curtice puts the Tories' national vote share at 38%, Labour 27%, Lib Dems 18% and UKIP 5%"
Tories is currently winning the vote; I believe they will win the vote.
Pulled from a third party website; for more information regarding what will happen if Tories win, go to https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/wha ... -find-out/
There are few things more predictable than people talking about the unpredictability of politics. We live in an age, we are told incessantly, in which anything can happen politically — and regularly does. Yet there is one exception. Westminster is already sure about the result of the next general election: a majority for Theresa May. One long-serving Tory MP tells me the party has never been more certain of victory in his lifetime.
The Tories, with their 15-point poll lead, do look far better placed today than they did, say, 18 months before either of the Thatcher landslides, in 1983 and 1987. It isn’t just the Tory tribe who are convinced they’ll win, either. Labour MPs are looking for jobs now to beat the rush that they suspect will follow the next election.
What’s the explanation for this paradox? Well, it used to be Jeremy Corbyn. The view was that he was unelectable and that the more the British public found out about him, the more unelectable the party he led would become. There was a lot of truth in this. But even if Corbyn were to go in the coming months, that wouldn’t change people’s assumptions about the result.
Corbyn is no longer Labour’s biggest problem. The biggest problem is how to reconcile the two sides of the Labour coalition — what one might crudely call metropolitan Labour and Northern Labour. Metropolitan Labour is staunchly pro-EU, and deeply disappointed with Jeremy Corbyn for whipping his MPs to vote for Article 50. Northern Labour saw its constituencies vote for Brexit, worries about the Ukip threat and doesn’t want to look like it is trying to obstruct the referendum result. It is hard to see how these two positions could be reconciled even by a new, and more politically adept, leader.
But if Labour is too weak to succeed, then it is also too strong to fail. David Miliband has told visitors in New York that, although Labour can’t win a general election, it is too big to be dislodged as the opposition party. In other words, it is a political bed-blocker: a party in chronic decline that can still stop anything from taking its place. Combine this with our first-past-the-post electoral system and a Tory victory in 2020 is close to a racing certainty.
Such certainty has both good and bad effects. Those involved in drawing up this week’s Housing white paper say both No. 10 and ministers are now more prepared to countenance building on some of the green belt, a necessary step to alleviate the housing crisis. Previously, it would have been thought that because of the lag between the announcement and any houses getting built, you would get the pain but not the gain from the policy by the time of the general election. Now, though, Tories are confident that they’ll reap the political rewards of this before the next tight general election campaign in seven or eight years’ time.
But there is a danger that certainty breeds complacency — something the Tory party is always prone to — and sloppiness. Several Conservative backbenchers suggest that the botched proposals on school funding were an example of complacency creeping in. Someone should have spotted, they say, that there were too many losers and not enough winners.