Nigel Farage takes aim at the UK’s dominant parties with hefty gains in local elections
LONDON (AP) — The hard-right party Reform UK led by Nigel Farage snatched a seat in Parliament from the governing Labour Party and won hundreds of local council seats from the opposition Conservatives in elections that Farage hailed Friday as a turning point towards ending the two parties’ political dominance.
Reform’s Sarah Pochin was declared winner of the seat of Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by six votes after a recount, defeating Labour candidate Karen Shore by the narrowest of margins.
It was a significant defeat for Labour, which easily won the district in last year’s national election. The special election was held because Labour lawmaker Mike Amesbury was forced to quit after he was convicted of punching a constituent in a drunken rage.
Farage said that “it’s a very, very big moment indeed” that shows Reform can win against both Labour and the right-of-center opposition Conservatives.
“This marks the end of two-party politics as we’ve known it for over a century,” he said.
The Runcorn victory gives Reform, which garnered about 14% of the vote in the 2024 national election, five of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, compared to 403 for Labour and 121 for the Conservatives.
But Reform appears to have momentum. National polls now suggest its support equals or surpasses that of Labour and the Conservatives, and it hopes to displace the Conservatives as the country’s main party on the right before the next national election, due by 2029.
A rebuff to Labour
The local elections held Thursday in many areas of England were a sobering rebuff to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s center-left Labour government, 10 months after it was elected in a landslide.
Farage’s party is targeting working-class voters who once backed Labour. Starmer’s popularity has plunged as his government struggles to kick-start a sluggish economy. The government has raised the minimum wage, strengthened workers’ rights and pumped money into the state-funded health system — but also hiked employer taxes and cut welfare benefits.
Starmer said that he understood why many voters are discontented.
“My response is: We get it,” he said. “I am determined that we will go further and faster on the change that people want to see.”
A blow to the Conservatives
The results were an even bigger blow to the Conservatives, whose voters switched to Reform in droves.
Reform, which didn’t exist when these areas last voted four years ago, won more than 600 seats in the elections for 1,600 seats on 23 local councils, mostly at the Tories’ expense. Reform won control of several county-level local authorities, including previous Conservative strongholds Staffordshire and Lincolnshire in central England, Durham in the north and Farage’s home county of Kent in the southeast.
Farage told supporters that the Conservatives “are over, they are finished, they have literally been gutted in these counties.”
Reform candidate Andrea Jenkyns, a former Conservative lawmaker, was elected mayor of the Greater Lincolnshire region of east-central England, and Reform also took the mayoralty of neighboring Hull. Labour retained three other mayoralties and the Conservatives won one.
The victories will bring pressure for Reform to deliver on transport, garbage collection, potholes and all the other unglamorous demands of everyday politics.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who could now face a party revolt, said voters, who ejected the party from power last year, “are still not yet ready to trust us.”
Fragmented politics
The results give only a partial snapshot of voter sentiment. Many areas, including London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, didn’t hold elections. Turnout for local polls is typically much lower than in a national election.
And Reform isn’t the only story. The centrist Liberal Democrats made big gains in south and southwest England by winning more affluent, socially liberal voters away from the Conservatives.
Reform UK is the latest in a series of parties led by Farage, a veteran populist politician who was crucial in taking Britain out of the European Union through a 2016 referendum. He is a charismatic but divisive figure who has said that many migrants come to the U.K. from cultures “alien to ours.”
Reform blends Farage’s long-standing political themes — strong borders, curbing immigration — with policies reminiscent of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. Farage said that he plans “a DOGE for every county” in England, inspired by Elon Musk’s contentious spending-slashing agency.
University of Strathclyde political scientist John Curtice said that the results showed that politics in Britain, long dominated by the two big parties, has fragmented.
“Reform is now posing a big threat to both Conservative and Labour,” he told the BBC.
As to whether two-party dominance will continue, “the question mark on that has just got three or four times bigger,” Curtice said.
By JILL LAWLESS
Associated Press
