Nigel Farage said two-party politics in Britain “has just died in front of our eyes” after his Reform UK produced a stunning performance in local and mayoral elections in England, leaving Labour and the Conservatives scrambling in its wake.
Reform also beat Labour in a crucial Westminster byelection by a wafer-thin margin of just six votes to take the constituency of Runcorn and Helsby in Cheshire. It used to be one of the safest Labour seats in the country and had been held by that party since 1983.
Reform’s Sarah Pochin, a former magistrate, defeated local Labour cllr Karen Shore with a campaign focused on her party’s core national anti-immigration theme. Ms Pochin becomes Reform’s first female MP and its fifth overall, restoring its numbers after Rupert Lowe, who was elected for Reform in July last year, was kicked out of the party after a grudge row with Mr Farage.
In the votes held on Thursday, Reform also captured control of several local authorities among the 23 whose seats were up for grabs. This included the councils for Durham, Lincolnshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire, which have evolved into strongholds for Reform in England’s midlands and north.
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With counting ongoing in many areas heading into Friday evening, Mr Farage’s party had won far and away the most council seats compared to the other parties. Of the roughly 1,600 council seats being contested, Reform seemed on course to win as many as 700.
Before Thursday’s vote, the Conservative party under the leadership of Kemi Badenoch had control of about 14 of the councils and held close to 900 of the seats. It was on course to lose well over half of those and control of all of its councils.
It was also a dire performance from prime minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, after disillusioned working-class voters turned on it barely 10 months after it won the general election.
It wasn’t just Reform celebrating the local election results, however. While Mr Farage’s party brushed aside competition from Labour to gobble up Tory council seats in the east midlands and north, the Liberal Democrats won seats from the Tories in the shires of England’s south and also in the west.
Ms Badenoch said she had always expected a difficult result for the Tories as she pleaded that her renewal of the party following its historic general election defeat last year “had only just begun”. In response to Labour’s dire performance, Mr Starmer promised to deliver the change sought by voters “even more quickly. We must go even further”.
Reform had yet more cause for celebration when it also captured its first mayoralty – there were six directly elected mayor seats up for election, all relatively powerful positions created for England’s regions under the UK government’s devolution drive. Andrea Jenkyns, a former Tory MP who defected to Reform, won easily for Mr Farage’s party to be elected mayor of Greater Lincolnshire.
Former Olympic boxer Luke Campbell was also elected for Reform as the mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire. Reform came a close second to Labour in three of the other mayoral races, while the Conservatives narrowly won one, in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
In the run-up to Thursday’s elections, Mr Farage had promised to remake the landscape of British politics and fulfil Reform’s promise as laid out in opinion polls. It seems he met or perhaps exceeded even his hype. The challenge for his party now will be to show it can govern effectively, albeit at a local level, before it turns its attention to parliamentary votes next year in Scotland and Wales.
