The UK will hold its first national election in almost five years on Thursday, with opinion polls suggesting that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party will be punished for failing to deliver on promises made during 14 years in power.
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00:00On May the 22nd, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took the country by surprise
00:04when he stood here in Downing Street, in the pouring rain, without an umbrella,
00:08and announced that there would be an election on July the 4th.
00:11Now is the moment for Britain to choose its future.
00:15To decide whether we want to build on the progress we have made
00:18or risk going back to square one with no plan and no certainty.
00:22He had until the end of the year to name the date
00:25and most people had expected he would wait until the fall.
00:28Sunak is urging voters to back the Conservative Party, which he leads
00:31and which has been in office since 2010 under five different Prime Ministers.
00:35The left-of-centre Labour opposition has lost four straight elections,
00:39but under its leader Keir Starmer it has had a steady lead in opinion polls
00:43for more than a year and is widely expected to win on Thursday.
00:47This is an election dominated by the cost-of-living crisis,
00:49which has seen mortgage rates soar, the prices for food and energy spike,
00:54and has left millions of people in the UK struggling to pay their bills.
00:58The Conservative Party, which presided over this cost-of-living crisis,
01:03is arguing that its economic plan is now working.
01:06Interest rates have gone way down.
01:08They are just over 2% after reaching 11% in late 2022,
01:12and they claim that a Labour government will raise people's taxes.
01:15Labour, in contrast, insists that it wouldn't raise personal taxes
01:19and says it would invest heavily in infrastructure and green energy
01:24and get the economy growing, and that would raise more taxes
01:27and allow it to invest more in public services.
01:29Other major issues include the struggling National Health Service
01:32and the high rate of immigration to the UK,
01:34which is symbolised by the tens of thousands of people each year
01:37who try to reach this country in small boats across the English Channel.
01:41The promise to stop the boats has been key to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's premiership.
01:46He developed a contentious plan to send some asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda.
01:51That has yet to happen, and his failure to live up to that plan
01:54may well hurt him at the polls.
01:56The Conservative campaign got off to a pretty inauspicious start
01:59with that rain-soaked announcement by Sunak, and it hasn't really taken off.
02:03Sunak has made a number of unforced errors,
02:06most notably leaving commemorations for the 80th anniversary of D-Day in France early
02:11so that when world leaders including President Biden and French President Macron were standing there,
02:16he was nowhere to be seen, but Keir Starmer did attend.
02:20Lately there has also been a growing scandal over gambling
02:25with the Gambling Commission and police investigating reports
02:28that Conservative candidates and people close to the government
02:31made bets on the date of the election before it was announced,
02:35which potentially could mean some insider knowledge.
02:39Labour has taken an extremely cautious approach to the campaign.
02:43It's often likened to Keir Starmer being like a man carrying a very expensive vase
02:48across a highly polished floor and not wanting to drop it.
02:51They just want to preserve that lead that they have in opinion polls
02:55and get to polling day without messing things up.
02:59Critics say that's led them to be very cautious to avoid big promises
03:03and generally to have a kind of uninspiring campaign.
03:06There are almost 50 million people eligible to vote in this election.
03:09On Thursday they can go to the polls and elect a lawmaker for their local district.
03:13There are 650 seats in total in the House of Commons
03:17and the party that either gets a majority or can form a coalition to command the majority
03:22will form a government. Their leader will become Prime Minister.
03:26It is almost certainly going to be either Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer.