This is a CBS Island World. I'm John Bachelor. I welcome Joseph Sternberg,

member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. He's in London. He writes the political economics

column and we turn now to political economics of the United Kingdom. Joe, a very

good day to you. I believe I've seen headlines these last days from either the Telegraph or the Times or the Guardian or all three

That at the moment polling in the United Kingdom for the next general election shows the Tories with

something like 100 seats. What does that mean Joe? Translate that for me to

understand the scale of labor victory and the scale of labor of victory and the scale of Tory defeat after 13 years in power.

Good evening to you.

Hi, John.

Well, the important thing to understand about this political earthquake that hit Britain over the weekend in the form of this opinion poll is that the parliament has somewhere around 650 seats in it.

So if this poll is projecting that the Conservative Party,

which is currently running the government

because they had a majority in Parliament, if this poll is projecting they are going to get down to a hundred seats or less that would imply that

the current governing party is going to shrink to less than one-six sixth of the parliament after this election.

And I think that that would be a devastating rebuke to the conservatives.

It would signal that the voters have completely washed

confidence and patience with them and I think that it would probably trigger a

dark night of the soul for the conservatives because they would have to spend years

Figuring out exactly what has gone wrong over the past few years. I mean remember as recently as 2019 they were winning what then was

billed as a historic victory under Boris Johnson so now only five years later

we're projecting it's going to be a bruising historic defeat and I think

that that is going to really shake up British politics in a very big way for many years

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