UK Conservatives lead Labour by 5 points in new pre-election poll

(Adds Sun details)

By Kylie MacLellan and Kate Holton

LONDON, April 30 (Reuters) - Britain's ruling Conservatives took a five point lead over Labour in an Ipsos (Paris: FR0000073298 - news) -MORI survey on Thursday, the latest poll to show David Cameron's party gaining an edge just seven days before a knife-edge election.

The Conservatives and Ed Miliband's opposition Labour Party have been neck-and-neck in most polls since the start of the year, but by Thursday seven of the 10 pollsters covering the May 7 election had Cameron's Conservatives ahead by varying degrees.

In a poll for London's Evening Standard newspaper, Ipsos MORI put that lead at five points, after the Conservatives gained two percentage points to hold 35 percent support and Labour dropped five percentage points to 30 percent.

The results helped to keep sterling near a two-month high against a weak dollar.

The election, which could determine Britain's place in the European Union and Scotland's future in the United Kingdom, is the closest since the 1970s with neither of the two main parties able to open up a big enough lead to rule alone.

Surveys show that, instead, millions of voters are flocking to once-marginal parties, especially in Scotland where the Scottish National Party (SNP) looks set to make major gains, and in England where both big parties are losing votes to the anti-EU UKIP.

At a briefing in London, Gideon Skinner, Head (Other OTC: HEDYY - news) of Political Research at Ipsos MORI's Social Research Institute, said the poll had picked up on the recent trend of the Conservatives gaining momentum but that there were too many moving parts to make a definite prediction.

Skinner said that due to the way Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system works, Labour could win an overall majority with a 3.5 to 5.5 percentage point lead, while the Conservatives would need a lead of between 8.5 and 10 points.

However the strong growth in the smaller parties could still undermine those traditional rules.

"In Scotland Labour will pile up votes in second place in an awful lot of seats but win almost no seats, so their vote nationally will become much less efficient than it has been," said Philip Cowley, Professor of Parliamentary Government at the University of Nottingham.

The SNP has surged in popularity north of the border since it failed to win September's independence referendum and now looks set to emerge from the UK-wide election as a key player in Westminster.

An Ipsos-MORI poll of Scottish voters on Wednesday predicted it could win all Scotland's seats next week and wipe out Labour in what was once its stronghold.

Highlighting the complexity of the election, Rupert Murdoch's The Sun newspaper urged voters in England on Thursday to back the Conservatives to keep out the SNP, while endorsing the SNP in his Scottish edition. (Writing by Kate Holton; additional reporting by Costas Pitas, editing by Stephen Addison)