For those unfamiliar with British politics, back in 2011 the then coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats introduced the Fixed Term Parliament Act, which in short meant that all terms lasted 5 years and the only way to circumvent that was:
2/3 majority vote in the House of Commons.
overall majority vote on a vote of no confidence in the current Government.
As the two major parties have pledged their support for an early election, it seems inevitable that it will go through.
A little background as far as my knowledge goes, the current ruling party is the Conservatives, they hold a slender current working majority of 17 MPs and will be hoping that their strong polling figures will give them a stronger majority, this will be seen as a boon to Theresa May who has come under criticism as an unelected Prime Minister, taking over after David Cameron's resignation in late 2016 after the EU referendum.
The main opposition the Labour party are currently led by long term backbencher Jeremy Corbyn, a centre-left socialist who currently enjoys high level of support from Labour members, whose leadership has seen the party grow to the largest political party in Europe but often faces criticism from the media and even his own MPs, often referred to derogatorily as 'Blairites' (A reference to more right leaning Labour MPs who would have typically supported previous leader, Tony Blair).
The third major party in the mix are the Liberal Democrats who would be looking to make headway after a disastrous 2015 General Election result left them with just 9 MPs. They are now led by Tim Farron who is very pro-EU and would seek a second EU referendum based on the terms of the Brexit deal itself, he hopes to gain support as the only major party to be officially opposing Brexit. The Liveral Democrats are typical seen as the more centrist option.
The final major party, who gained massive grounds in the 2015 General Election are the Scottish National Party. As their name suggests, they only contest Scottish constituencies of which they won all but 3 in the last General Election, this performance in particular was particularly damaging to the Labour Party who previously were a major force in Scotland.
This place was getting too American lately anyway ;)
General Election is scheduled for June 8th.