Farage-Founded Party Doubles Support in Conservative Strongholds Since Sunak Became PM

Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage (left) and party chairman Richard Tice at a presentation
Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

The former party of Brexit champ Nigel Farage, Reform UK, has doubled its support in Conservative Party strongholds since Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was installed into Downing Street.

Reform UK, the rebranded Brexit Party, has seen its support grow to six per cent in 42 ‘Blue Wall’ seats typically held by the Tory Party in the south of England, compared to three per cent in November of last year.

The research found that when looking at voters who backed the Conservatives in the 2019 general election, just 54 per cent said that they would still back the party, with nine per cent saying that they would switch to Reform UK, 15 per cent who said they would back the left-wing Labour Party, and three per cent who would throw their support behind the Liberal Democrats, The Telegraph reported.

This matches overall trends which have placed the Richard Tice-led Reform party at around nine per cent in general election preferences over the past few months. The right-wing populist party began to surge following the unceremonious ousting of former Prime Minister Liz Truss, who attempted to implement free market reforms and to open up fracking, two major platforms of the Reform Party.

Some Conservative voters may have been irked by the party establishment’s decision to conduct a coup to replace Truss with the high-tax technocratic government of Rishi Sunak, who was expressly rejected by the party membership in last summer’s leadership race to replace Boris Johnson.

The fact that support for the insurgent party has doubled will likely come as a concern to Conservative Party HQ, given that the Tories are currently trailing the Labour Party by over twenty points in Westminster voting intention.

In the last general election in 2019, the Brexit Party, the previous incarnation of Reform, and its then leader Nigel Farage decided the stand down and not contest over 300 seats in order to allow Boris Johnson to win a strong enough majority and finally implement Brexit after years of dithering under former Prime Minister Theresa May.

While Johnson ultimately secured the UK’s partial independence from the EU — leaving Northern Ireland subject to EU trading restrictions — the Conservative government has been widely seen to have betrayed the spirit of the Brexit movement on multiple fronts, ushering in the highest tax-burden since World War II, allowing in record numbers of migrants, and imposing an EU-style green agenda on the country.

Thus, Reform UK leader Richard Tice has vowed that he will not consider any deal with the Tories to stand down in the next election to prevent the Labour Party from taking power.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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