Reform UK has gained a new Member of Parliament by just six votes, won its first mayor, and picked up more councillors than all other parties combined in early results in a historic night.
Nigel Farage celebrated a “huge night for Reform” where his party showed all signs of having “cut deep” into the votes of both the governing Labour Party and official opposition the Conservatives, who he said Reform was now supplanting. Crucially, the party won major contests against both UK legacy political parties, underlining Farage’s claim that Reform is not merely a force on the right but something above the old dividing lines drawing support from both the old sides.
The most visible result nationally will be Reform having won a new Member of Parliament, with Sarah Pochin taking the Runcorn and Helbsy race in a byelection (special election) that was called after its incumbent, Labour politician Mike Amesbury, was filmed repeatedly punching a constituent after drinking six pints of beer. The race was astonishingly close, with Labour demanding a recount in hope of overturning the first result, but eventually losing out by just six votes.
This victory for Farage’s Pochin is remarkable not just for how tight a race it was — the BBC says it is the closest byelection result in modern British history — but also for what an enormous Labour majority was destroyed by Reform to get the win. It is one of the safest seats ever overturned in a byelection, with Labour’s result collapsing from a commanding 53 per cent in the last national elections, allowing Reform to swing form 18 to 38 per cent, grabbing it by a whisker.
Conservative party-allied newspaper The Daily Telegraph notes that if the Runcorn swing was replicated nationwide in a general election, Nigel Farage would be Prime Minister with one of the largest majorities in the history of British politics, even greater than the heights of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair. Of course, Runcorn and Helsby is not Britain and by-election swings are not generally mappable onto national elections, but it is still an amusing and illuminating way to illustrate the severity of the kicking Labour got here overnight.
Another stunning victory for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK overnight was winning the Greater Lincolnshire mayoralty, the first time this post has been selected by direct election. The victory was by a “huge margin”, regional newspaper the Linconshire Echo states, with Reform taking a towering lead at 42 per cent compared to 26 per cent for the legacy Conservatives — who are very much on their home ground here — and a paltry 12 per cent for the party of national government, Labour.
Farage’s new Lincolnshire mayor, Dame Andrea Jenkyns — a defector to the Reform cause from the Conservatives, where she was an acolyte of Boris Johnson — was strident in her election victory address, praising Mr Farage and promising change. She said: “the fightback to save the heart and soul of our great country has now begun. Now that Reform is in a place of power, we can help start rebuilding Britain. Inch by inch, Reform will reset Britain to its glorious past. We will tackle illegal migration”.
One day, she said, Nigel Farage will “make a magnificent Prime Minister”.
Farage, for his own part, spoke of the damage these results were causing to the two-party system that has dominated British politics since the end of the First World War. “I think we’ve supplanted the Conservative Party now as the main opposition party in government”, he told the BBC, noting Reform has “bitten quite hard” into Labour, taking their voters.
He acknowledged there had been “one or two near misses in the mayoral contests” but nevertheless told The Telegraph: “it’s been a big night for us, we’ve dug very deep into the Labour vote and in other parts of England, we’ve dug deep into the Conservative vote. And we are now — after tonight there is no question — in most of the country we’re the main opposition party to this government”.
Indeed, while Reform did lose three other mayoral contests — with one still to declare at the time of publication — they were all close-runs with Reform coming out of nowhere to lose each to Labour by just a few hundred votes. As if that wasn’t bad enough for the Labour leadership in London — knowing the trend line in polling for months has shown Reform moving steadily upward and Labour down — even their own candidates didn’t have a kind word to say.
Mayor Ros Jones, who has been the mayor of Doncaster for years and held on against Reform by just 698 votes this time had no praise for the Prime Minister when she said the close result there showed it was time for the government to start listening to the people. She told Laura Kuenssberg: “I think the results here tonight will demonstrate that they need to be listening to the man, woman and businesses on the street and actually deliver for the people with the people.”
Nevertheless, it is still early days in these counts and the vast majority of the over 1,600 council seats contested yesterday won’t be declared until late into this afternoon and evening. Even so at the time of going to press Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has won more council seats than all other parties put together and has handily outperformed even the most flattering polling taken in the lead-up to election day.
On average, at this time, Reform’s vote in council seats is trending towards 40 per cent.
Sir John Curtice, the psephologist and perhaps the closest thing the United Kingdom has to an academic who is a household name — being a staple of election-time news coverage as he is — said “Reform’s performance is quite remarkable” and that Farage had proved that polling hadn’t been an illusion. He said: “The big question we were asking ourselves was: are Reform posing a major challenge to the traditional dominance of British politics by Conservatives and Labour? Is that challenge really there? And I think we now know that the answer to that question is yes.”
While the Conservatives have had a brutal night so far, their position very much under threat by Farage, they have been able to at least take consolation in the British public having delivered a shattering verdict on the Labour party, and its leader-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. The party has said Labour MPs will now be considering his leadership in the light of this “damning verdict… which has led to Labour losing a safe seat”.
The United Kingdom has several layers of government. Local authorities and councils are led by councillors which are elected on a rolling basis, so unlike the national parliament there is always a body of experienced delegates to keep things working. Of the 18,725 councillors across the whole country, 1,641 were up for election on Thursday. In theory, councillors set local taxation rates and spending priorities for local services, which include bin collection, schools, and fixing roads.
In reality, over time central government has introduced so many mandatory services that councils are required to provide — and centralised what they can do in terms of council tax — the actual power of councils is very limited. This is becoming a major problem in many areas as the mandatory requirements for what councils must provide has soared while the money they have to spend has not, even falling per capita in many areas, leaving some councils bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/05/02/the-fightback-has-begun-farage-sweeps-england-elections
