Nigel Farage has proclaimed that Reform UK’s dominant performance in last week’s British elections has given his party a national footing to take down the Westminster political duopoly.
On the back of his most impactful democratic performance since the 2016 Brexit Referendum, Reform boss Nigel Farage has vowed to hit the ground running in the areas now controlled by his upstart party as it seeks to march towards taking national power at the next general election.
“Now we have to show people around the country that, when you elect Reform, you get real change,” he wrote in The Telegraph.
For example, Mr Farage said that in Lincolnshire, local Reform officials are seeking to challenge “Labour’s net zero zealots” from converting local farmland into one of Europe’s largest solar farms.
Meanwhile, he said that Reform councillors in Lancashire have declared that they do not intend to participate in the government’s migrant resettlement, which is set to disperse often young, military-aged illegal migrants from their current hotel accommodations more broadly throughout the country, in private accommodations dotted across small towns, villages, and cities.
The Reform officials noted that issues facing local residents, including homeless veterans, should take “priority over spending more millions on illegal immigrants.”
Farage said that while the national party will not micromanage how local Reform officials manage their affairs, the overarching goal will be to “cut wasteful expenditure and keep people’s council tax rises as low as possible, as Reform-run councils have done elsewhere.”
However, the Reform chief said that although the party will seek to deliver as many local wins as possible for their constituents, he noted that many of those who backed the party on Thursday did so with an “eye to the next general election”.
“There have been plenty of Westminster whispers lately suggesting that Reform UK had peaked and was proving to be a flash-in-the-pan. Well, the whisperers have evaporated. We have shattered their delusional world view once again,” Farage remarked.
He noted that Reform had won in areas that have “been run by the Conservatives for generations” as well as areas of the country that “Labour has dominated for a century.”
“We won the biggest national vote share for the second year running, gained more than 1,450 seats and took control of 14 councils. We won those seats right across the country, from Wakefield to Walsall, from Sunderland to Suffolk, and everywhere in between. And in Wales, we came from nowhere and finished a close second, winning 34 seats in the Senedd and ending 27 years of Labour rule.”
In contrast, Mr Farage said that the Conservatives have been “reduced to a rump” and essentially a regional party. Yet even in some of the areas once considered the safest constituencies for the Tories, such as Essex, Reform “routed” the traditional party of government, including from where much of the current party leadership hails.
Meanwhile, the governing Labour Party, which not only lost out to Reform in the “Red Wall” working-class areas of the north of England but also to the far-left Greens and the growing cohort of Muslim independents, is mired in questions about the party’s future direction.
For his part, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has attempted to wrap himself in the cloak of the Blair-era New Labour establishment, bringing on former PM Gordon Brown and ex-deputy party leader Harriet Harman as advisors, while arguing that tacking to the right or left is a fool’s errand. It remains to be seen whether this will convince the party’s rank and file, many of whom would have been directly affected by the election wipeout on Thursday.
Sensing blood in the water, multiple potential rivals appear to be making preparations to launch a leadership challenge against Starmer, including Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, and former deputy PM Angela Rayner.