Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK party has seen its support among British voters surge higher after it thrashed both Westminster establishment parties in last week’s local elections.
The latest Westminster voting intention survey from YouGov, conducted on Sunday and Monday in the wake of last week’s results for the English council elections, the Scottish Holyrood parliament, and the Welsh Senedd, has shown a noticeable bump for Farage’s Reform UK.
The populist party, which dominated the council elections, picked up over 1,450 council seats, including in traditional Labour and Conservative heartlands such as the ‘Red Wall’ seats in the north and Tory strongholds in Essex. Demonstrating nationwide appeal, Reform also saw strong second-place finishes in both Scotland and Wales, a feat that has long eluded the Conservatives.
The historic results for the upstart party have apparently convinced some voters that Reform is a future worth backing, with the YouGov survey finding that 28 per cent of voters now back the Farage party, an increase of three points over just last week. Meanwhile, the Tories remained static at 17 per cent, the Greens gained one point to reach 16 per cent, Labour declined by two points to fall to 16 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats shrank by one point to 13 per cent.
Rounding out the rest, the leftist-separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) remained steady at three points after maintaining control of the locally devolved parliament in Edinburgh, former Reform MP Rupert Lowe’s breakaway Restore Britain fell by one point to three per cent, the Welsh leftist-nationalist Plaid Cymru party surged by one point to two per cent, and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s “Your Party” remained steady at zero per cent.
Meanwhile, approval of the left-wing Labour Party government has also continued to decline, with a paltry 14 per cent approving of the government’s performance, down two points from last week. In comparison, its disapproval rate shot up by 6 points to 70 per cent, giving it a net approval rating of negative 56 per cent.
The pollster also found that the economy remained the top issue for voters at 56 per cent, followed by immigration at 48 per cent, health at 30 per cent, defence at 26 per cent, crime at 18 per cent, housing at 17 per cent, welfare at 16 per cent, the environment at 15 per cent, tax at 15 per cent, and European affairs at 15 per cent.
Commenting on the surging results for his party, Reform boss Farage said on Tuesday: “For several months now, pollsters and commentators have been talking down Reform’s prospects; the party’s peaked, it’s going down, it’s all over, the Tories are surging, and that has been the narrative.
“Well, in the wake of our dramatic victories last week, YouGov, of all the polling companies, cause they are the ones that have been marking us down the most aggressively, have just put this opinion poll out this morning. It shows us back up at 28 per cent, but significantly, with an 11-point lead over our nearest rival, that’s the biggest margin we have had at any point in time with YouGov.”
As Mr Farage alluded to, Reform has long been at odds with the pollster, which consistently showed a lower level of support for the party than other major survey firms in Britain. YouGov claimed this was a result of a methodology that accounted for the possibility of tactical voting against Reform at the local level; however, its latest results appear more in line with other firms, which have consistently placed the Farage party between 28 and 31 points ahead over the past year.
Under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, a party does not need to win a majority of the votes to control parliament; seats are awarded to the party with the most votes in each constituency rather than being apportioned according to national vote share. Indeed, the governing Labour Party of Sir Keir Starmer swept to power in 2024 on just over 33 per cent of the total vote.
It is believed that for Reform to win a governing majority in the House of Commons, it will need to win at least 31 per cent of the vote at the next general election, meaning the party will still likely need to peel away some supporters from Labour or the Tories.
The co-founder of the influential ConservativeHome website, Tim Montgomerie, who himself has jumped ship from the Conservatives to back Reform, said in response to the YouGov survey: “Reform’s hope has been that they would receive a boost from their local election wins – especially from Conservatives who would recognise that Farage is now the obvious, ascendant force to prevent another Labour govt. Time will tell if Tory voters have rejected the ridiculous spin their current party has been spouting.”
For his part, Mr Farage expressed confidence in such an outcome, saying: “Politics in Britain is fracturing, it is changing very rapidly, but Reform are on top and I believe over the course of the next weeks and months, we can go higher still.”
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