Labour forecast to win landslide of over 400 seats, as YouGov poll predicts Tory wipeout at election
Labour could be swept into power with a landslide of more than 400 seats at the next general election, according to the latest YouGov mega poll.
The survey of 18,000 people predicts Sir Keir Starmer’s party will win a parliamentary majority of 154 – almost double what the Conservatives achieved with Boris Johnson in 2019.
The poll forecasts Labour will win 403 seats, a gain of 201, while the Tories will crash to just 155 seats – a loss of 210.
Follow live: The big Tory names forecast to lose their seats
If correct, the result would be a worse defeat for the Conservatives than under Sir John Major in 1997, when the rise of Sir Tony Blair‘s New Labour left them with just 165 MPs.
Key Conservatives projected to lose their seats include Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, cabinet ministers Grant Shapps and Penny Mordaunt and former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
A loss for Ms Mordaunt would be particularly embarrassing as she has been already a two-time contender for the party leadership, and has been touted as a potential successor to Rishi Sunak.
Other cabinet ministers set to lose their seats include Transport Secretary Mark Harper, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, Science Secretary Michelle Donelan and Wales Secretary David TC Davies.
There is also bad news for the SNP, which is forecast to lose 29 seats, with most of them going to Labour.
That would mean Labour once again becoming the largest party in Scotland, having been virtually wiped out north of the border in 2015.
Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, who are targeting Conservative heartlands in southern England, are forecast to gain 38 seats, giving them 49 in total.
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‘We’re ready – just call an election’
This includes in Mr Hunt’s new Godalming and Ash constituency (formerly South West Surrey), where he has a majority of 8,817 votes.
The poll was conducted by YouGov between 7 and 27 March, and it used a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) process to model constituency-level results.
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It is generally considered one of the most accurate forms of polling due to the number of interviews conducted, which enables pollsters to examine voting intentions in very small geographical areas.
It is the latest in a series of disastrous polls for the Conservative Party ahead of a general election expected in the second half of this year.
Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith, who is projected to lose his seat to Labour, posted on X that the polling model is “clearly flawed and fails to factor in my infectious charm and charisma”.
Politicians are often sceptical about opinion polls, and many of YouGov’s predictions will no doubt by queried by MPs and party officials in the coming days.
Despite a double-digit lead in the polls for some time now, Sir Keir Starmer has imposed an iron discipline on his shadow cabinet about the danger of complacency.
While some pundits predict the next election will be a repeat of the party’s 1997 landslide victory, there are fears within Labour of a 1992 false dawn – when Neil Kinnock lost what was believed to be an “unlosable” election.
The 154-seat Labour majority in the new poll is edging towards the 179-seat majority won by Tony Blair in 1997, though well short of a 254-seat majority suggested in another MRP-style poll in mid-February.
If Labour were to win the next election, it would bring an end to 14 years of Conservative government under five prime ministers.
German law enforcement seized 34 million euros ($38 million) in cryptocurrency from eXch, a cryptocurrency platform allegedly used to launder funds stolen after Bybit’s record-breaking $1.4 billion hack.
The seizure, announced on May 9 by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and Frankfurt’s main prosecutor’s office, involved multiple crypto assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Dash (DASH). The move marks the third-largest crypto confiscation in the BKA’s history.
The authorities also seized eXch’s German server infrastructure with over eight terabytes of data and shut down the platform, the announcement added.
eXch exchanged crypto without AML
In the statement, the BKA described eXch as a “swapping” service that allowed users to exchange various crypto assets without implementing Anti-Money Laundering (AML) measures.
The platform had operated since 2014 and reportedly facilitated about $1.9 billion in crypto transfers, some of which were believed to be of “criminal origin,” including assets laundered during the Bybit hack.
“Among other things, a portion of the $1.5 billion stolen from the Bybit crypto exchange, which was hacked on Feb. 21, 2025, is said to have been exchanged via eXch,” the authorities wrote.
Multisig, FixedFloat among laundering cases
According to a post by crypto sleuth ZachXBT, eXch was also involved in laundering millions of funds from other crypto thefts and exploits, including Multisig, FixedFloat and the $243 million Genesis creditor theft.
Those were in addition to “countless phishing drainer services over the past few years with refusal to block addresses and freeze orders,” ZachXBT said.
ZachXBT was among the first security analysts to report on eXch’s links to laundering $35 million of crypto assets stolen from Bybit soon after the hack was confirmed.
Related: Hacken CEO sees ‘no shift’ in crypto security as April hacks hit $357M
“Lazarus Group transferred 5K ETH from the Bybit Hack to a new address and began laundering funds via eXch (a centralized mixer) and bridging funds to Bitcoin via Chainflip,” ZachXBT wrote in a Telegram post on Feb. 22.
eXch announced termination of services by May 1
After initially denying involvement in laundering funds from the Bybit hack, eXch eventually announced it would cease operations by May 1 in a Bitcoin Talk post published in mid-April.
“Even though we have been able to operate despite some failed attempts to shut down our infrastructure […], we don’t see any point in operating in a hostile environment where we are the target of SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] simply because some people misinterpret our goals,” it wrote.
Addressing the seizure, senior public prosecutor Benjamin Krause stressed the importance of action against “quick and anonymous opportunities for money laundering for any amount.”
“Crypto swapping is an essential component of the underground economy, used to conceal incriminated funds from illegal activities such as hacking or trading in stolen payment card data, thus making them available to perpetrators,” he said.
Magazine: Finally blast into space with Justin Sun, Vietnam’s new national blockchain: Asia Express
Politics
Red Wall MPs should focus on two-child benefit cap rather than winter fuel, Harriet Harman says
Red Wall MPs should push for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted rather than a reversal of the winter fuel payment policy, Baroness Harriet Harman has said.
Baroness Harman, the former Labour Party chair, told Sky’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast that this would hand the group a “progressive win” rather than simply “protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer” over winter fuel.
Earlier this week, a number of MPs in the Red Wall – Labour’s traditional heartlands in the north of England – reposted a statement on social media in which they said the leadership’s response to the local elections had “fallen on deaf ears”.
They singled out the cut to the winter fuel allowance as an issue that was raised on the doorstep and urged the government to rethink the policy, arguing doing so “isn’t weak, it takes us to a position of strength”.
Labour’s decision to means test the policy has snatched the benefit away from millions of pensioners.
But Baroness Harman said a better target for the group could be an overhaul of George Osborne’s two-child benefit cap.
The cap, announced in 2015 as part of Lord David Cameron’s austerity measures, means while parents can claim child tax credit or Universal Credit payments for their first and second child, they can’t make claims for any further children they have.
Labour faced pressure to remove the cap in the early months of government, with ministers suggesting in February that they were considering relaxing the limit.
Baroness Harman told Beth Rigby that this could be a sensible pressure point for Red Wall MPs to target.
She said: “It could be that they have a kind of progressive win, and it might not be a bad thing to do in the context of an overall strategy on child poverty.
“Let’s see whether instead of just protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer, they can build a bridge to a new progressive set of policies.”
Jo White, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw and a member of the Red Wall group, suggested that her party’s “connection” to a core group of voters “died” with the decision to means test the winter fuel payment for pensioners.
“We need to reset the government,” she told Electoral Dysfunction. “The biggest way to do that is by tackling issues such as winter fuel payments.
“I think we should raise the thresholds so that people perhaps who are paying a higher level of tax are the only people who are exempt from getting it.”
Pic: AP
A group of MPs in the Red Wall, thought to number about 40, met on Tuesday night following the fallout of local election results in England, which saw Labour lose the Runcorn by-election and control of Doncaster Council to Reform UK.
Following the results, Sir Keir said “we must deliver that change even more quickly – we must go even further”.
Some Labour MPs believe it amounted to ignoring voters’ concerns.
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One of the MPs who was present at the meeting told Sky News there was “lots of anger at the government’s response to the results”.
“People acknowledged the winter fuel allowance was the main issue for us on the doorstep,” they said.
“There is a lack of vision from this government.”
Another added: “Everyone was furious.”
Downing Street has ruled out a U-turn on means testing the winter fuel payment, following newspaper reports earlier this week that one might be on the cards.
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