More polling shows Nigel Farage’s Reform is leaving the disgraced Conservative Party in its wake, coming just one point behind governing Labour and Mr Farage himself emerging as the party leader most likely to be seen as ‘favourable’ by voters in the country.
Pollster YouGov has published its first research on British voting intention since the 2024 General Election that saw a small vote turnout propel the Labour Party to a historic number of seats on a record low number of votes. The country has soured on Labour since, it finds, with Labour losing of its 2024 voters and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK snapping at their heels in a margin-of-error-close second.
Per the pollster, Britons asked ‘If there were a general election held tomorrow, which party would you vote for’, replied 26 per cent to the Labour Party, 25 per cent to Reform UK, and 22 per cent to the Conservatives, with other minor parties trailing.
The figures are a major shift from the actual result of the July 2024 election when Labour achieved 33 per cent, the Conservatives 23, and Reform UK 14 per cent. Yet the poll does not appear to be an outlier: the YouGov research is the fifth national general election poll this year, three of which have put Reform in second place or tied-for-first, and generally in the mid-20s in support.
Labour has experienced some of the steepest falls in support in the country since a general election in modern history, and per YouGov are almost in a position where the majority of their voters express regret at their ballot box choice. As things stand today, just 54 per cent of Labour’s 2024 voters say they would back the party again, with their former supporters splitting off to many other parties and none. Five per cent of the party’s 2024 voters have gone to Farage’s Reform.
Labour was elected on promises of fixing the economy after the Conservatives used their 14 years in power to push taxation and mass migration both to historic highs. Months into the new government, the economic bad news just keeps coming and Labour seems determined to stuck with its plan of sending taxes ever higher.
Reform itself, meanwhile, has the most loyal voters, with a strong majority saying they would support the party again at the next election, and the party buoyed by Britons it has picked up from other parties like Labour and the Conservatives, 15 per cent of whose voters have already defected since July.
While the gender and age breakdown is not as stark in the UK as it is in some countries, it is still evident. More British men support Reform UK than any other political party, and the Conservatives have practically no supporters in the 18-24 cohort whatsoever. The youngest group of voters does still skew strongly left and is dominated by Labour and the Greens, yet Reform can command nearly a fifth of 18-24s, something the Conservatives could only dream of.
Beyond parties the pollster has also released fresh research on attitudes to the party leaders themselves, giving leaders an aggregate score achieved by subtracting the number of voters who said they have a negative impression of a leader from the number who said they felt favourably towards them. This method produces some interesting result, as the leaders who least people have heard of come out with the theoretically best score: co-leader of the Green party comes out with a net approval rating of minus-four, given seven per cent find her favourable compared to 11 per cent unfavourable. An overwhelming 81 per cent have no opinion at all, of course.
It also means Nigel Farage, who has the highest ‘favourable’ rating with 30 per cent of Britons polled saying they have a good opinion, also has one of the lowest net scores, as 62 per cent say they think unfavourably about him. The Prime Minister, meanwhile, has the lowest net favourability rating of all at -38, as despite a loyal core of 27 per cent of Britons say they see him favourably, that is massively outweighed by the 65 per cent who are unimpressed.
This latest polling comes just days after another set of results by pollster Find Out Now which put Labour and Reform on a tie at 25 points each. Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf said at the time: “Reform has all the momentum in British politics, as this latest poll shows. This is the first time we have topped a national opinion poll, but it won’t be the last.”
Read the full article here
