Internal polling conducted by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has suggested that it is set to unseat over a hundred Labour Party MPs at the next general election, including five sitting cabinet ministers.
Following last week’s historic local election results, in which Reform saw major gains in both Conservative Party heartlands and traditional Labour Party strongholds, internal polling conducted by the party based on the results has shown that it is on course to take over 110 Labour seats in the House of Commons at the next general election, The Telegraph reported.
Top members of Sir Keir Starmer’s government, including Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, and Chief Whip Jonathan Reynolds, would all lose their seats to Reform UK candidates, the polling found.
Additionally, the constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne, from which current Labour leadership hopeful Angela Rayner hails, is also likely to fall to Reform as it did in last week’s council elections.
Reform’s internal polling also predicted that Labour would lose 24 seats to the far-left Green Party of Zack Polanski and 10 seats to the Liberal Democrats. On top of that, the governing left-wing party would also see 22 seats lost to the Conservative Party, mostly in outer London, where the party performed unusually well in last week’s elections.
The projections went on to forecast that Cabinet Ministers including Justice Secretary David Lammy, Deputy Leader Lucy Powell, and Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn are all vulnerable to being lost to the Greens.
In total, the predictions put Labour’s expected losses at 168 seats, wiping out its entire majority and reducing its share in the Commons by over 40 per cent.
The predictions come after Labour lost 1,496 council seats in England, mostly to Reform UK. The party also lost control of the locally devolved Welsh Senedd parliament for the first time since it was created in 1999.
The crushing losses have sparked public debate over the prospect of a leadership challenge against Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
However, the polling indicates that Labour has much more to fear from Reform UK than from the challenge on its left flank from the Greens, potentially undermining the notion put forward by Starmer’s challengers that the party’s struggles stem from not being sufficiently left-wing.
In reality, it appears, according to Reform’s internal estimates, that Labour is far more vulnerable to the right in working-class areas on issues like immigration than it is on its left flank.
Regardless, it is more bad news for the struggling government, which is quickly losing all trust with the public. Following the election results, a survey from YouGov found that the government’s approval fell to just 14 per cent, with 70 per cent of the nation disapproving of Labour’s performance in Number 10.
In contrast, Farage’s Reform continued to see its support rise according to the pollster, which placed the party’s support at 28 per cent, compared to 17 per cent for the T0ries and 16 per cent for both the Greens and Labour.
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