Conservatives will take nine seats from Labour in Yorkshire and the Humber to win 68-seat majority, major poll predicts

A major new poll has suggested the Conservatives could sweep to an election victory with a 68-seat majority next month, taking nine Labour-held seats in Yorkshire and the Humber in the process.
Watch more of our videos on Shots! 
and live on Freeview channel 276
Visit Shots! now

The poll, conducted by YouGov for The Times newspaper, also suggests Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party could win just 211 seats.

If the election were held this Thursday, YouGov’s poll puts the Tories on 359 seats, a gain of 42 on 2017, while Labour would lose 51 seats and the Lib Dems would gain just one to secure 13 constituencies.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The SNP would win 43 seats, a gain of eight, while Wales’ Plaid Cymru and the Green Party would remain static with four seats and one seat respectively.

Read More
Universal Credit claimants in Yorkshire have resorted to GoFundMe campaigns to m...

YouGov said it had interviewed around 100,000 people over the last seven days.

Using a technique called Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification, it predicts that Labour-held Don Valley, Great Grimsby, Penistone and Stocksbridge, Keighley, Scunthorpe, Wakefield, Dewsbury, Rother Valley and Colne Valley will turn blue, while Sheffield Hallam will be won by the Liberal Democrats.

Boris Johnson on a recent visit to The Yorkshire Post. Pic: Chris EtchellsBoris Johnson on a recent visit to The Yorkshire Post. Pic: Chris Etchells
Boris Johnson on a recent visit to The Yorkshire Post. Pic: Chris Etchells

Chris Curtis, Political Research Manager at YouGov, said many of the seats making up the Tory majority would be taken across the North and Midlands. He said: “The only silver lining for Labour is that there are still 30 seats where they are currently five per cent or less behind the Tories.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“If they can manage to squeeze the gap over the coming fortnight they may be able to paste over the cracks in their so-called Red Wall. But with just two weeks to go, time is running out for Labour.”

A Labour source told The Yorkshire Post: “Polls are polls and should be taken with a pinch of salt, but people should now be very alert to the danger of Boris Johnson returning to Downing Street. If that happens we can kiss goodbye to our NHS.”

Among the most notable predicated gains are in South Yorkshire, where a Tory MP has not been elected since 1992.

Rother Valley has been a Labour seat since 1918, Don Valley since 1922 and Penistone & Stocksbridge since it was formed in 2010.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

In Sheffield Hallam, the seat was won by Labour's Jared O'Mara in 2017 before he left the party and stood as an independent.

The YouGov poll also predicts that the Conservatives will hold onto Pudsey and Calder Valley, their two most marginal seats, with much more comfortable winning margins than in 2017.

But Labour would hold onto Halifax, where it held a majority of 5,376 from 2017.

YouGov's model draws on the data collected from about 100,000 panellists questioned on their voting intention over the course of the last seven days, and uses a recently-developed technique called multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP).

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Mr Curtis said: "Traditional polling can tell us what happens at a national level, but it doesn't answer the question of what might be happening in each of the constituencies across the country.

"MRP is a polling technique aimed at solving that problem, a way of using large sample sizes to project figures onto smaller geographical areas.

"It works by using an extremely large sample to model people's vote preferences based upon their demographics (their age, gender, education, past vote and similar factors) and the local political circumstances (are they living in a Conservative or Labour seat? Is it a pro-Brexit area? Is there an incumbent MP?).

"Once this model has been developed it is applied to the demographic make-up and political circumstances of each of the 632 constituencies in Great Britain, providing projected vote shares for each and every seat.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

"YouGov used the same method in the 2017 General Election, when our model accurately predicted the results in 93% of constituencies, and pointed towards a hung Parliament, when many other election predictions were pointing towards a Conservative majority."