The hard-right party Reform UK led by Nigel Farage won a seat in Parliament by a handful of votes and looked set to make more gains in results Friday from local elections the party hopes will show it is a major player in British politics.
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.
Labour easily won the district in last year’s national election, but its lawmaker, Mike Amesbury, was forced to quit after he was convicted of punching a constituent in a drunken rage.
Although Reform’s victory was one of the narrowest in British history, Farage said “it’s a very, very big moment indeed” for politics.
The local elections Thursday in many areas of England were a test of feeling about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s center-left Labour government, 10 months after it was elected in a landslide. Both Labour and the main opposition Conservative Party braced for losses in the midterm poll.
The Runcorn victory gives Reform, which got about 14% of the vote in last year’s national election, five of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. 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.
Farage’s party was on course, with partial results in, to win the newly created mayoralty of the Greater Lincolnshire region of east-central England. Labour retained three other mayoralties.
Reform hopes to scoop up hundreds of municipal seats in the elections that are deciding 1,600 seats on 23 local councils, six mayoralties and one seat in Parliament. Ballots in most of those contests are being counted Friday.
A majority of the local seats being contested were held by the Conservatives, whose leader Kemi Badenoch could face revolt if the party does very badly.
Badenoch acknowledged that the results could be “very difficult” for the Tories. The party did extremely well when these areas were last contested in 2021, a time when then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government enjoyed a surge in popularity due to the Covid-19 vaccine program.
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the Conservatives and Reform are in “a fight for the soul of the right wing of UK politics.” He said Farage’s “populist radical right insurgency” also poses a threat to Labour, targeting working-class voters with pledges to curb immigration, create jobs and cut government waste.
The centrist Liberal Democrats also hope to build on their success in winning more affluent, socially liberal voters away from the Conservatives.