Some of the seats LAB needs to win for a Commons majority
By my reckoning Starmer’s LAB needs to gain in excess of 123 seats at the next election in order to secure a majority. The table from above from the excellent Election Polling site lists some of the seats that the party taking in order to achieve power.
I’ve selected the segment from target seat 113 because that gets us into the area of potential gains that Starmer’s party needs to be making if there is any chance of securing a majority.
The final column in the table is the swing that will be required in each target from what happened at GE2019 in order for LAB to make a gain.
This, of course, should change in 2023 with the new boundaries and, no doubt, we will see published notional outcomes for GE2019 so we can make comparisons.
What we do know is the new boundaries are, if anything, going to make Labour’s task more challenging.
Essentially I cannot envisage the circumstances in which LAB was making the necessary gains. But we were saying something like that ahead of GE2017 when at one stage TMay’s Tories touched a poll lead of 25%. Within two months at the election the CON lead in real votes was down to just 4%.