Reuters, London :
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party has a 14 percentage point lead over the main opposition Labour Party ahead of a June 8 election, according to an ICM opinion poll published in the Sun newspaper on Sunday.
The poll put the Conservatives on 46 percent and Labour on 32 percent, little changed from the previous ICM poll on May 22 which put the Conservatives on 47 percent and Labour on 33 percent.
Other polls published since Monday’s suicide attack in Manchester have shown May’s lead narrowing.
ICM said support for the Liberal Democrats was at 8 percent and the UK Independence Party at 5 percent.
Prime Minister Theresa May is offering voters a retreat from globalization in one of the most significant developments in recent British political history, former finance minister George Osborne said on Saturday.
Osborne, who was sacked by May as finance minister after the June 23 Brexit vote, criticized May’s plan to cut annual net migration to the tens of thousands and said her pre-election social care proposals were clearly badly thought through.
May rejected “untrammeled free markets” and promised to rein in corporate excesses in pre-election pledges earlier this month.
The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has pledged to nationalise water, mail and rail companies.
“Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are offering, in very different ways, a retreat from international liberalism and globalization,” Osborne, who now edits the Evening Standard newspaper, told the BBC.
“And that’s quite a development in British politics, and I think there are quite a lot of people who are uncertain whether that is the right development,” he said.
May last year praised free markets and free trade in a speech to party activists but also said that she would be prepared to intervene where markets were dysfunctional or where companies were exploiting the failures of the market.
On his first day as a newspaper editor earlier this month, Osborne taunted May over her snap election strategy and “unrealistic” Brexit stance.
Once considered a potential future prime minister, the 46-year-old was dismissed last year by fellow-Conservative May after helping to lead the doomed campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union.
