On the road across Britain as 'political earthquake' looms

Polling stations across the UK have opened as voters prepare to cast their ballots in a general election for the first time since December 2019.

The Conservatives have been in power for 14 years, but most election watchers expected Labour, led by Keir Starmer, to win power.

The current parliament was formally dissolved on 30 May when current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called for an early election.

Whatever happens over the next 24 hours, major political change is expected, and Prime Time's Fran McNulty has travelled from Edinburgh to London to talk to candidates and voters about the key election issues.

Labour will win big, the Liberal Democrats could win more seats than the Conservatives, and Nigel Farage seems confident that his Reform UK party will pick up several seats in the House of Commons.

This is the Westminster election in one line.

The leader of the UK's Reform Party, Nigel Farage, was all smiles when we met outside an amusement arcade in his stronghold of Clacton, a tired seaside town in Essex in southeast England.

“We are doing well, we will get millions of votes,” he told Prime Time.

Mr Farage did not agree to be interviewed in advance, but we spotted him smoking a cigarette at the top of the emergency staircase at his campaign headquarters.

“We’re heading to the airport,” I shout as we prepare to rush to Stansted Airport at the end of a whirlwind tour of some of the key battlegrounds of the general election.

An exchange of words ensued, which we will not mention here, and he agreed to speak to us on camera.

The former UKIP leader is confident he will be elected in his eighth attempt at parliament, but his confidence does not end there.

“We will win some seats in Parliament,” he told me before trying to fend off questions about his divisions and the controversy over the language used by supporters of the UK Reform Party during his election campaign.

Instead, he is keen to focus on the theme of “change” by contrasting the issues at stake in Ireland with some of the key talking points of his election campaign.

“There is a real desire for change and at a time when Ireland is having a big debate, our population has increased by 10 million since 2000. People can’t get GP appointments. Children can’t get housing. Rents now take up more than half of many workers’ income,” Farage said.

“We can’t live with this population explosion yet. Neither major party seems willing to deal with it.”

Nigel Farage has been saying the same thing every day for the past few weeks, and his supporters continue to repeat the same lines.

They talk about Australia protecting its borders and no one has a problem with that. Frankly, his populism is likely to win the party a lot of votes and could cost his opponents several seats in the House of Commons.

UK Reform Leader Nigel Farage

Conservative voter revolt

Since Mr Farage took over as leader of the UK Reform Party on June 3, his party has been doing well in the polls. The party is expected to be in a strong race to win at least 18 seats, according to a poll published on Thursday.

Most of these votes are expected to come from voters who traditionally vote along conservative lines.

In the north-west English town of Bolton, the shift against the Conservative Party is most evident in the most unexpected of places – the Dunscar Conservative Club – a place where Conservative voters come to socialise.

The club was opened by former Conservative MP Enoch Powell in 1973.

Powell's speech on immigration in the late 1960s still resonates in Dunscar and elsewhere in the UK.

This rhetoric is similar to that which has support among sections of the electorate for the Reform Party in the UK led by Nigel Farage.

“I would probably vote for Farage,” one Conservative Dunscar Club patron tells me, before adding that the reason he might vote for him is “because he says it like it is”.

Another supporter says he has voted Conservative all his life, but will back the UK Reform Party on Friday because their leader “says things the public wants to hear”.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's call for an early election has taken the Conservatives in Bolton by surprise.

Mark Logan, the outgoing MP for Bolton North East, has defected to Labour, and local Conservative councillor Adele Warren, who is running in his place, sees herself as the “underdog” in her bid to stand.

Ms Warren says she is unlikely to be a Conservative candidate because she grew up in council housing and worked as a carer to put herself through university.

We join her on a canvas where people criticise former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and her party leader Rishi Sunak.

“At the last door I was talking to, there was a sense that the party was sometimes out of touch, especially in the Northwest,” Ms. Warren said. “And a little out of touch with the general public.”

“But I'm a normal person and I'm not [out of touch]And I think that's why it's important to have the right people in the right places at the right times, doing the right job.

In Bolton, and elsewhere, the Conservatives could be crushed, according to Professor Paul Whiteley of the University of Essex.

“It could be a political earthquake if some of the new polls are to be believed. One of them says the Conservatives will get fewer seats than the Liberal Democrats. Labour will have a big lead,” Professor Whiteley told Primetime.

The rise of the Reform movement in the UK is changing the political landscape, says a professor of government at the University of Essex.

“The reform is a real threat and the polls suggest they could get the same share of the vote as the Conservatives. They won’t get the same share of seats because our electoral system is very different to the Irish system, but they could get the same share of the vote. In that case the Conservatives will suffer something they’ve never suffered before,” said Professor Whiteley.

Professor Paul Whiteley

Revival of the Labour Party

If Labour dominates today's election, as Professor Whiteley predicts, one former MP who will return to Westminster is Duncan Alexander.

Alexander, who served in the cabinet under prime ministers Tony Blair and Jordan Brown, was among 40 seats Labour lost in Scotland in the 2015 general election.

This time, he is targeting the East Lothian seat currently held by Alba Party leader Kenny MacAskill.

“The bottom line is that we need to win as a Labour Party if Keir Starmer is going to be prime minister on Friday morning,” Alexander told me as he campaigned in the small market town of Haddington, about half an hour from the Scottish capital, Edinburgh.

Like Nigel Farage and the Reform movement in the UK, Duncan Alexander also expects Labour to benefit from voters defecting from the Conservatives.

“I'm encouraged by the response we're getting,” the former cabinet minister said. “We've found former Scottish nationalists are coming to Labour and former Conservatives are coming.”

Part of the reason for this shift in voter allegiance is that voters want a change in direction, according to Mr. Alexander.

He believes that after a decade in which politics was dominated by topics such as “identity” and “culture,” there is a strong desire to focus more on the economy.

“My feeling going into this election is that the economy is back in the spotlight. That's one of the reasons why Labour is in a very strong position going into the polls,” he said.

Labour candidate for East Lothian Douglas Alexander

The change Douglas Alexander is talking about is an ongoing reiteration of Labour across the UK.

But given the expected decline in the Conservative vote, what is Rishi Sunak's party doing to stem the tide?

Election campaigns using big data

Elections here are different from Ireland – there are no posters adorning every second lamppost, and candidates use a data bank to determine who has voted for their party in the past and who might vote for them in the future, and knock on those doors.

Focus tends to target people you know will vote for your party rather than people who are undecided.

Nadeem Muslim is a Conservative Party councillor in Bolton and his party's election agent in the area.

“We have a mobile app that has all the information we need. The app tells us how regularly people vote, when was the last time we surveyed them, and what their intention is to vote. This then gives us more information that we can use to target the right people,” said Muslim.

The 2024 general election has been described as a digital election. According to local councillor Muslin, big data is driving the election campaigns.

“I think we and the Labour Party have learned a lot from [Barack] Obama [presidential] “They did a campaign in 2012,” a Bolton council representative told Prime Time. “A lot of the work they did on that campaign was imported into the UK, so it’s better to use social media, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as using mobile apps rather than just doing everything on paper.”

Tactical Voting

Another party looking to benefit from the Conservatives' expected loss of seats is the Liberal Democrats.

Tactical voting sites advise voters on how best to vote to ensure the current government is ousted, a strategy popularized by liberal Democrats.

It is set to be one of the most hotly contested seats in the newly formed Bicester Woodstock constituency in Oxfordshire in south-east England.

Parts of the constituency were previously areas that elected former Conservative prime ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson, but are being targeted by the Liberal Democrats this time despite their traditional association with the Conservative Party.

Councillor Callum Miller, Liberal Democrat

Party leader Ed Davey has visited here twice in the past few weeks. The party is hoping to elect Callum Miller, a senior fellow at Oxford University's School of Government and a former senior civil servant in the Cabinet Office, Foreign Office and Treasury.

There is a good chance that he will be elected to parliament along with many other LDP members.

“We hope to do much better than last time and I think the polls will back that up,” Councillor Miller, a member of Oxfordshire County Council, told Prime Time.

Councillor Miller added: “We were very disappointed to only get 11 seats in the last round. We got four seats in the by-election, but we were looking for a much higher total this time. Our aim is to return to being the third largest party in British politics.”

Fran McNulty and producer Sallyanne Goodson's report will be broadcast on the 4 July edition of Prime Time on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2024/0704/1458141-on-the-road-through-britain-as-a-political-earthquake-looms/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

What Are The Main Benefits Of Comparing Car Insurance Quotes Online

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 24, 2020, / Compare-autoinsurance.Org has launched a new blog post that presents the main benefits of comparing multiple car insurance quotes. For more info and free online quotes, please visit https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/the-advantages-of-comparing-prices-with-car-insurance-quotes-online/ The modern society has numerous technological advantages. One important advantage is the speed at which information is sent and received. With the help of the internet, the shopping habits of many persons have drastically changed. The car insurance industry hasn't remained untouched by these changes. On the internet, drivers can compare insurance prices and find out which sellers have the best offers. View photos The advantages of comparing online car insurance quotes are the following: Online quotes can be obtained from anywhere and at any time. Unlike physical insurance agencies, websites don't have a specific schedule and they are available at any time. Drivers that have busy working schedules, can compare quotes from anywhere and at any time, even at midnight. Multiple choices. Almost all insurance providers, no matter if they are well-known brands or just local insurers, have an online presence. Online quotes will allow policyholders the chance to discover multiple insurance companies and check their prices. Drivers are no longer required to get quotes from just a few known insurance companies. Also, local and regional insurers can provide lower insurance rates for the same services. Accurate insurance estimates. Online quotes can only be accurate if the customers provide accurate and real info about their car models and driving history. Lying about past driving incidents can make the price estimates to be lower, but when dealing with an insurance company lying to them is useless. Usually, insurance companies will do research about a potential customer before granting him coverage. Online quotes can be sorted easily. Although drivers are recommended to not choose a policy just based on its price, drivers can easily sort quotes by insurance price. Using brokerage websites will allow drivers to get quotes from multiple insurers, thus making the comparison faster and easier. For additional info, money-saving tips, and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/ Compare-autoinsurance.Org is an online provider of life, home, health, and auto insurance quotes. This website is unique because it does not simply stick to one kind of insurance provider, but brings the clients the best deals from many different online insurance carriers. In this way, clients have access to offers from multiple carriers all in one place: this website. On this site, customers have access to quotes for insurance plans from various agencies, such as local or nationwide agencies, brand names insurance companies, etc. "Online quotes can easily help drivers obtain better car insurance deals. All they have to do is to complete an online form with accurate and real info, then compare prices", said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company. CONTACT: Company Name: Internet Marketing CompanyPerson for contact Name: Gurgu CPhone Number: (818) 359-3898Email: [email protected]: https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/ SOURCE: Compare-autoinsurance.Org View source version on accesswire.Com:https://www.Accesswire.Com/595055/What-Are-The-Main-Benefits-Of-Comparing-Car-Insurance-Quotes-Online View photos