London: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party braces for heavy losses in their first major local council elections slated for Thursday, since he assumed charge of office amidst chaotic weeks last year.
Amidst the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades, the BBC said, the local council polls across England will shed light on the Conservative Party and its main rival Labour Party’s standing ahead of the countrywide general election next year.
At the last parliamentary clash before the vote, opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer on Wednesday pressed on Tory sores after the party ditched Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss in quick succession last year.
Nearly two million Britishers would end up paying more on their home loans “because Conservative Party used their money as a casino chip”, Starmer told PM Sunak, referring to Truss’s calamitous tenure, when financial markets sank.
In national polls, Labour had built a double-digit lead over the rival Conservatives and was treating the local council elections as a referendum on the Tory rule.
Sunak attempted to recast the council elections, for more than 8,000 seats across 230 English districts, back onto local issues.
In contrast to what Sunak said Labour’s “broken promises”, his government was getting on with delivering with minimum council tax and crime and fewer (road) potholes”.
The prime minister also defended an innovation introduced by his government for council elections, requiring elegible voters to show photo identification for the first time, a move criticized by Labour as an attempt to overwhelm the vote.
‘Shambles’
Inflation rates in the double digits and the crisis devouring Britain’s prized National Health Service, where doctors and nurses sometimes go on strike for higher pay, were two issues that polls indicated Britons were extremely concerned about.
Labour is progressing towards recapturing its former strongholds in northern England that Johnson turned Tory in the 2019 general election on a vow to “get Brexit done”.
Although London will not be voting this time, the centrist Liberal Democrats targeted Conservative strongholds on the outskirts of the city, including those in UK parliamentary districts where members of Sunak’s cabinet have been elected.
In general, pollsters predicted that the Conservatives would lose 1,000 council seats in all of England’s voting regions on Thursday.
Conservatives assert that a vote count of fewer than 1,000 would constitute a victory, while Labour and the Liberal Democrats were similarly managing expectations for their expected victories.
The public’s apprehension over the new voter ID requirement might significantly reduce turnout in local elections in Britain, where participation rates are already low.
The Kingdom will celebrate King Charles III’s coronation on Saturday, thus the results won’t be known until Friday and the following days.
Even though Sunak tends to perform better personally, voters in one pre-election focus group already had a damning opinion of the Conservatives.
The focus group’s responses were “broken,” “shambles,” “mess,” “struggling,” and “crisis”, when asked by the research tank More in Common to sum up the UK in one word.
