Exit polls: Cameron’s party still on top
Opposition leaders in Britain dispute surveys of voters
LONDON — British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party appeared to handily defeat Edward Miliband’s Labour Party in national elections Thursday, according to exit polls, almost certainly enough for Cameron to remain in power and a surprising turnaround from pre-election polls that had the parties neck and neck.
The Conservatives captured 316 seats in Parliament, compared with Labour’s 239, exit polls showed late Thursday. Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats took just 10 seats, a precipitous drop from the 57 seats that brought it into a coalition with the Conservatives at the last election, according to the polls.
But opposition leaders quickly threw cold water on the exit polls, which came shortly after polls closed at 10 p.m. and before any official results had been tallied.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown said “I will publicly eat my hat” if the exit polling proved accurate.
And Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman said that even if the numbers turned out to be correct, “The question is, of the (members of parliament) that have been elected tonight, does the coalition still have a majority?”
The Conservatives, however, were offering some cautious optimism about their apparent victory.
“I believe it could be right, yes, and if it is right then it means the Conservatives have clearly won this election and Labour have clearly lost it,” said Michael Gove, the Conservative Party chief whip. “It would be an unprecedented vote of confidence in David Cameron’s leadership.”
A near-certain winner Thursday was Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party, which according to the exit poll will take 58 out of a possible 59 seats — up from just six in 2010. Even if the exit poll proved generous, it still marked a striking comeback, with the party taking nearly all of Labour’s 41 seats in the country’s northern region.
The SNP victories also set up a situation in which nearly 60 members of Parliament will come from a party of Scottish separatism — operating in a potential government that fiercely opposes those ambitions.
Leading up to election day, neither the Conservative Party nor the Labour Party were forecast to garner much more than one- third of the 650 seats in Parliament, meaning leaders would need to form a coalition to run the country. The election was considered among the most important in decades, with issues including austerity policies and health care funding.
Experts said that the exit poll was far from conclusive — indeed, though it was highly accurate in 2010, it had missed the mark in the 1992 election.
“There’s still some room for doubt,” said Patrick Dunleavy, a politics professor at the London School of Economics. “But it certainly looks as if some voters shied away from the thought of change at the last minute.”
He said if the numbers were correct, Cameron would not need any other major party to form a government, instead allying with several smaller pro-Conservative Irish parties to get the few necessary additional seats.