labour has moved into a wafer-thin one-point lead in the final pre-election Guardian/ICM poll, leaving the country on a knife-edge with the markets starting to jitter.
On Wednesday, ICM released provisional numbers which showed the two main parties deadlocked on 35% each. But the telephone fieldwork continued into evening, and the final figures - based on the full sample of 2,000 interviews — find labour holding steady on 35%, while the Conservatives slip to 34%.
An 11% share for Ukip, 9% for the lib Dems and 5% for the Scottish Nationalists are all confirmed from the provisional poll, but in the final tranche of interviews the Greens picked up a point, climbing from 3% to 4%. The difference is still within the margin of error, but every poll is now indicating a hung parliament and the tightest election in decades.
london shares suffered a sharp sell-off on Thursday morning, just as voting got under way. Fears that Britain is set for a second hung parliament added to a global market sell-off triggered by the US Federal reserve chairman Janet Yellen warning that share valuations could be dangerously high.
The last results from the Guardian/ICM polls ahead of the election add to signs of a last-minute move in labour’s direction after the Tories have clawed back ground in the second half of the campaign.
In the final days and hours of the campaign, the polls - which had on average been registering a modest Tory advantage over the past fortnight - have been converging on a dead heat.
The Guardian’s final poll projection, which takes the full range of recent data into account, suggests that labour and the Tories could be perfectly balanced in the new House of Commons, with 273 seats each.