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News > World

UK's Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn Scores 8 Point Lead over PM

  • Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, leaves after addressing an anti-austerity rally in Parliament Square, London, UK, July 1, 2017

    Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, leaves after addressing an anti-austerity rally in Parliament Square, London, UK, July 1, 2017 | Photo: Reuters

Published 6 July 2017
Opinion

Latest poll is being seen as another turnaround in the party's fortunes.

Jeremy Corbyn’s U.K. Labour party now has an eight-point lead over the Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives.

RELATED:

Corbyn Overtakes May in UK PM Polls

May's Tories are on 38 per cent and Labour on 46 according to the Yougov poll for The Times newspaper.

The Liberal Democrats were on six per cent of the vote, while Ukip support dropped to four per cent. 

In the last month, pollster ICM put Labour two points ahead of the Tories while another firm, Opinium, found Labour had a six-point lead. 

The remarkable turnaround in Labour’s position in the polls comes almost one month to the day since the U.K.'s inconclusive general election.

May lost her parliamentary majority and was forced to seek a contentious supply-and-confidence agreement with Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party in a bid to cling to power.

Labour achieved a 40 per cent of the share of the vote and won an extra 33 seats in the ballot. 

The Conservatives alliance with the DUP is said to be far from stable, with Tory objections over the Belfast party's opposition to LGBT rights and abortion key sticking points.

There are also concerns over the Northern Irish Peace agreement.

Jonathan Powell, the former U.K. chief government negotiator on Northern Ireland, wrote in a recent article in The Observer, “Since 1990, the British government has been neutral in Northern Ireland, backing neither the unionists nor the nationalists”.

Powell added “If Mrs. May depends on the DUP…to form a government, it will be impossible for it to be even-handed. The other parties in Northern Ireland will know that the unionists can pull the plug at any stage and hold the government hostage.”

If the alliance does collapse, Corbyn would still have some way to go before he assumes the nation's helm.

His party needs to clear several constitutional hurdles to have a chance of forming a government. 

The Fixed Term Parliament Act makes it unlikely that the Tories would be forced from power.

Even if that happened, a Labour-led coalition wouldn’t have sufficient political backing from the other parties, nor would it have the numbers to make such a deal work as it stands.

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