MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Farage does it again: Reform UK trashes Labour and Tories, becomes main opposition

Reform UK advanced both in Labour and Tory areas, with candidate Sarah Pochin beating Labour in the Runcorn and Helsby House of Commons by-election

Populist Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party surged into the lead in local elections across England and grabbed one of Labour’s safest parliamentary seats, trashing Conservatives and becoming head of Britain´s opposition, underline UK media.

Reform UK advanced both in Labour and Tory areas, with candidate Sarah Pochin beating Labour in the Runcorn and Helsby House of Commons by-election. The result has been a strong warning call for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s and Labor, less than a year after it was elected. 

By 5.45 p.m. local time, Reform had won 577 council seats across England, having previously held none of the 1,600 being contested in Thursday’s elections. 

The Conservatives lost 566 of their councilors, while Labour were down 161. The results saw Reform take control of a string of local government authorities in England and win two contests for regional mayor. The centrist Liberal Democrats also had a good night, adding 130 council seats to their tally.

“We are now the opposition party in the U.K. to Labour, and the Tories are a waste of space,” Farage declared.

The results also provoked deep soul-searching for the main Conservative opposition, which showed no sign of recovering under new leader Kemi Badenoch after the party was brutally ousted from power last year. 

It was the victory in Runcorn that set the tone. Winning by just six votes after a recount of ballots, Reform’s Pochin overturned a 14,696 Labour majority secured at the general election last July and granted a fresh boost to Farage’s right-wing populists.

After the early-morning recount at the DCBL stadium, Farage was jubilant, hailing a “huge night for Reform.” Reform won by 12,645 votes to Labour’s 12,639.

Labour swept to national power in a landslide in July but is now trailing Reform in some polls. Starmer told reporters on Friday that he “gets” the message from voters in Runcorn.

“We were elected in last year to bring about change,” he said, adding: “I am determined that we will go further and faster on the change that people want to see.”

Labour Party chairman Ellie Reeves was meanwhile in a fighting mood. “There’s been a lot of noise from Reform, a lot of hype from Reform, but actually people will now, I think, take a closer look at some of their policies,” she told Sky News.

The closely-watched Greater Lincolnshire mayoral election saw Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns — a former Tory MP — comfortably see off her Conservative and Labour opponents.

Jenkyns won the newly-created position with 104,133 votes, with the Conservatives trailing on 64,585 votes and Labour a distant third. In a highly-charged victory speech, she took aim at the “negativity and soul-destroying” campaigning tactics of her opponents — and blasted asylum policies in what she called Labor’s “soft touch Britain.”

“I say ‘No’ to putting people in hotels,” Jenkyns said. “Tents are good enough for France; they should be good enough for here in Britain.”

The Conservatives, in national government just last year before suffering a kicking in the general election, were most vulnerable in this set of local elections. They have already lost hundreds of councillors across the country, with counting continuing Friday evening.

In Kent, the Tories have shed the majority of their county council seats to Reform in what the ousted Conservative leader of the authority called an “apocalyptic” night.