Nigel Farage declared that Britain is at the dawning of a “new political age” following his Reform UK party’s blowout victory in Thursday’s local elections in England, from which the so-called Conservatives “will never recover.”
Massively outperforming expectations, Farage’s Reform party took a hammer to the Westminster establishment, picking up 677 council seats, taking control of 10 councils, the mayoralty of Greater Lincolnshire, and adding the Runcorn and Helsby seat in Parliament.
While the governing Labour Party suffered significant losses to Reform, in addition to losing support to the Liberal Democrats, Greens, and pro-Gaza “independent” candidates, Thursday evening’s big loser was the neo-liberal Conservative Party of Kemi Badenoch, which lost a staggering 674 seats and control of the 16 councils it was defending.
Mr Farage argued that the scale of the Tories’ defeat would have been far greater if it were not for the Labour government’s move, in conjunction with the Conservatives, to delay many council elections next year, which Reform claimed was a cynical tactic to stymie their growth as a party.
Nevertheless, Reform’s widespread success, as a result of building out a national infrastructure with over 400 local branches, and the electoral bloodbath for the Conservatives, demonstrate that Reform UK is now the true opposition party to the Labour government, Farage wrote in The Telegraph on Saturday.
“Nothing will ever be the same again. Two-party politics at both local and national level is over. The system that dominated in this country for a century died on Thursday. It will never return,” he declared.
“The party that I lead is expanding. As we march on, the Conservatives are in retreat. In my opinion, they will never recover,” Farage continued. “There is now a widespread acceptance that Reform UK has supplanted the Conservatives as the real opposition to Labour in England, Scotland and Wales. We no longer have to rely only on opinion polls to indicate this; Thursday’s results prove it.”
The Brexit leader said his party’s only disappointments were the two narrow defeats to Labour in mayoral races in the north of England, which he claimed were only due to people continuing to support the failing Conservatives.
Turing their past rhetoric against them, Farage wrote: “The lesson for future elections is simple: if you vote Conservative, you will get Labour. By supporting the Conservatives, you split the Reform UK vote.
“Many will find my words hard to accept. They probably feel the Conservative Party has been part of their family or their identity. But those days are gone. We now live in a new political age.”
The Reform leader argued that the Conservatives lost the public’s faith after Boris Johnson’s 2019 landslide victory. This itself was bolstered by Mr Farage standing down his then-Brexit Party to allow the Tories to gain a large enough majority to “get Brexit done.”
However, rather than delivering on the promises of Brexit and the opportunities afforded to Britain with its newly found independence from the globalist European Union, the Tories ushered in the highest level of taxation since the Second World War and record levels of immigration, now dubbed the “Boris-wave”.
Mr Farage said that as a result, “very few people under 40 [are] now interested in what they offer” and thus a “state of disillusionment has set into the once-proud party of Churchill and Thatcher.”
Despite her party’s massive defeat, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch attempted to defend her position, claiming that a change in leadership would only further diminish the party, pointing to the rotating circus that saw four different leaders of the party within the space of two years.
“Reform had a good night. We had a bad night. And what this shows for a lot of people who hoped that just changing leader again would fix everything is that that’s not going to be enough. We tried that previously. And that brought us to a historic defeat,” she told the BBC.
“This is not about winning elections; this is about fixing our country. Yes, of course, you need to win elections to do that, but you also need a credible plan,” she added. “My job is to make sure that he [Farage] does not become prime minister because he does not have the answers to the problems the country is facing.”
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