U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak talks at a campaign event at the National Army Museum on July 2, 2024 in London, England. Mr. Sunak is expected to hold on to his seat of Richmond and Northallerton in northern England.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

The U.K. general election on Thursday is expected to deliver the most diverse Parliament in the country’s history, including in the number of parliamentarians of Indian heritage likely to be elected from across the nation.

According to an analysis by the British Future think tank, the Labour Party is set to have by far the largest number of ethnic minority MPs if the party wins an overall majority and even more in a landslide scenario.

With around 14% of MPs coming from an ethnic minority background this time, the analysis finds that the new Parliament will be closer than ever to reflecting the diversity of the British electorate.

“This election will see the biggest rise in ethnic minority representation and the most diverse Parliament ever,” said Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future.

“In the space of 40 years, we’ll have gone from zero to one in seven MPs being from an ethnic minority background. Britain is closing the gap between the diversity of Parliament and the electorate much faster than anyone thought possible,” he said.

The last general election in 2019 resulted in 15 MPs of Indian heritage crossing over the line, many of whom are contesting again alongside several first-timers.

Conservative Party MP Alok Sharma and Labour veteran Virendra Sharma are among the most high-profile British Indians not seeking re-election this time, from Reading West and Ealing Southall, respectively.

The latter constituency, with a large Punjabi electorate, has two British Sikh candidates contesting as Independents – Sangeet Kaur Bhail and Jaginder Singh.

Some of the key British Indian candidates to watch in Thursday’s polls include Praful Nargund, who is contesting for the Labour Party in Islington North – the seat of the party’s now-suspended former leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is contesting as an Independent candidate.

Jas Athwal is contesting in another Labour stronghold of Iford South, while Baggy Shanker in Derby South, Satvir Kaur in Southampton Test, and Harpreet Uppal in Huddersfield are contesting more marginal seats for the party.

Rajesh Agrawal, the Indore-born former Deputy Mayor of London for Business, is fighting to become a first-time MP from Leicester East and is up against a fellow British Indian Conservative candidate, Shivani Raja.

This constituency, representing a large Indian heritage electorate, will be keenly watched as its former long-term Goan-origin MP, Keith Vaz, is also in the race as an Independent candidate.

British Sikhs, including solicitor Warinder Juss from Wolverhampton West in central England and Gurinder Singh Josan from Smethwick, will be hoping to make gains for Labour, as will Bihar-born Kanishka Narayan contesting in Vale of Glamorgan – hoping to be elected as the first Indian-origin MP from Wales, and Sonia Kumar hoping to overturn a Tory majority in Dudley.

For the Conservative Party, Chandra Kanneganti in Stoke-on-Trent Central and Ameet Jogia in Hendon are facing a tough fight in a race consistently forecast in favour of the Opposition Labour Party.

“A diverse parliament brings different perspectives to its work, which can lead to more effective policy-making. MPs who come from different backgrounds can be role models for their communities, inspiring young people to vote and get involved in politics,” says Jill Rutter, British Future Associate Fellow who led the think tank’s analysis.

Of the sitting MPs, the British Indians most vulnerable to a Labour swing in the election include Tory MPs Shailesh Vara from North West Cambridgeshire, Gagan Mohindra from South West Hertfordshire and Claire Coutinho from East Surrey.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is expected to hold on to his seat of Richmond and Northallerton in northern England, as are former Cabinet colleagues Priti Patel in Witham in Essex and Suella Braverman in Fareham and Waterlooville.

With a series of retirements and exits, largely from the incumbent Tories, the new Parliament elected on Friday will see around 158 new MPs in the House of Commons.

People attend the Reform UK party’s rally at the NEC in Birmingham, Britain, June 30, 2024. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

As Britain’s election campaign enters its final stretch, the work of opinion pollsters is back in the spotlight with several recent projections of a record victory for the opposition Labour Party grabbing the headlines.

Labour’s ample 20-point opinion poll lead has hardly budged since Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the July 4 election last month, shifting the focus to the question of how big Keir Starmer’s win will be rather than whether it will happen.

Also Read : U.K. General Election: Polls predict massive majority for Labour Party

But Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system means the number of seats each party wins does not closely reflect the national share of vote they receive, so pollsters use so-called MRP modelling in a bid to more accurately estimate the result.

WHAT IS MRP & HOW DOES IT WORK?

MRP stands for Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification and it is used by pollsters to estimate public opinion at a local level from large national samples. Pollsters describe it as a model that uses polling data, rather than a poll itself.

Pollsters construct a statistical model which summarises how voting intention differs depending on the characteristics of survey respondents and where they live. This will take into account factors such as age, income, educational background and past voting behaviour.

This model is then used to produce estimates of the voting intentions among different types of people living in different areas of the country.

Pollsters combine that with official data on the numbers of people of each type living in each area to generate an estimate of overall voting intention for the constituency.

The exact model used to predict voter behaviour varies from pollster to pollster.

HOW DOES IT DIFFER FROM OTHER POLLING METHODS?

Conventional polling methods often apply a uniform national swing to predict how many seats a party will win.

This assumes there will be the same change in vote share for each party throughout the country, which is rarely the case, meaning it can overestimate the performance of a party in some areas and underestimate it in others.

MRP sample size is also much higher. Typical political polls rely on between 1,000 and 2,000 responses, while MRP modelling uses data from tens of thousands of voters.

HAVE THEY BEEN RIGHT IN THE PAST?

MRP is a relatively new technique. After polling companies miscalled an election in 2015 and underestimated support for Brexit in the 2016 referendum, many looked to use more sophisticated data analysis to come up with seat-by-seat results.

MRP was used by YouGov in 2017 to accurately predict Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May would fall short of an overall majority. YouGov said its model called 93% of seats correctly that year.

The method had some success in 2019, with YouGov’s MRP predicting a clear majority for the Conservatives although underestimating the scale of it.

WHAT ARE THE LIMITATIONS?

British voters have become more unpredictable, with Brexit scrambling traditional political allegiances.

More voters switched between the two main parties at a 2017 election than in any ballot dating back to 1966, according to research by the British Election Study. The more people change their minds, the harder it is to draw a representative sample.

“MRP only works when there is a strong link between, on the one hand, the characteristics of individuals and areas and, on the other, the opinion being modelled,” the British Polling Council says on their website.

Pollsters describe MRP as an estimate of the range of possible results.

Savanta’s MRP published on June 19 projected Labour could win a whopping 516 seats in the 650-strong House of Commons, with the Conservatives on 53. But it also noted nearly 200 seats had less than 7.5 percentage points between the parties in first and second place, deeming them as ‘too close to call’ and meaning the end result could be very different.

YouGov’s MRP published on the same day gave Labour 425 seats and the Conservatives 108, but classified 109 constituencies as “tossups” with fewer than five points between the parties in first and second place.

There may also be specific issues at play in individual seats which MRP modelling is unable to capture.