Farage’s Reform UK hails ‘big moment’ as it wins seat in Parl, eyes local election gains

London: 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.

“We are not a protest party, even though there is much to protest about,” Farage told reporters at the election count.

The local elections Thursday in many areas of England were a test of feeling about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s centre-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 per cent of the vote in last year’s 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 right before the next national election, due by 2029.

Reform candidate Andrea Jenkyns — a former Conservative lawmaker who defected to the party last year — was declared winner of 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.

The results give only a partial snapshot of voter sentiment. Many areas, including London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, did not hold elections on Thursday. Turnout for local elections and byelections is typically much lower than in a national election.

And Reform is not the only story. The centrist Liberal Democrats also hope to build on their success in winning more affluent, socially liberal voters away from the Conservatives.

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.

The Tories 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 programme.