Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is now the largest political party in the United Kingdom, passing the once dominant Labour Party on its way down as it haemorrhages members.
“The old two parties are decaying and dying. We are the future”, declared Reform UK leader and Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage on Friday night as a leaked membership number for the Labour Party confirmed his faction had indeed sailed past to become the largest party by paid membership in the United Kingdom, as well as the top-polling.
Reform publishes its membership figures publicly, and per Farage picked up a not inconsiderable 1,000-member boost on Friday when the news of overtaking Labour was announced. At the time of publication, Reform was just shy of 270,000 members.
As noted by The Times, Labour stopped publicly publishing its membership last year in an apparent bid to fend off embarrassment as its numbers plummeted. Astonishingly, Labour had “more than half a million” paid members at the time of the present Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, becoming party leader in 2020, but this started to fall precipitously when the Starmer faction began purging the former leadership.
When Jeremy Corbyn, who had led Labour between 2015 and 2020, was forced out he took many of his sympathisers with him, an exodus of members and a split in the UK left masked by the majority of Labour parliamentarians already being loyal to the new regime. By the time of the last update last year the Labour membership had fallen to 333,000, and according to The Times it is now reckoned to be below a quarter-million, putting Farage tens of thousands ahead.
Pure political party membership figures is no way to predict the outcomes of elections and party membership numbers in general have been in freefall since the post-Second World War era when millions of people were members of political parties. But the collapsing memberships of the legacy parties — Farage’s Reform already overtook the Conservatives at the end of last year — is being met by soaring numbers for new parties and polling that persistently puts the Farage faction in first place.
Farage called the numbers a “huge milestone” and said: “Reform is now the largest membership political party in the United Kingdom, the fastest growing in the whole of the European time zone. Massive thank you to everybody… the old two parties are decaying and dying. We are the future.”
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