Conservative Wipeout: Farage’s Reform Snaps at Heels of Governing Tories in Best-Yet Poll, Labour Soars Above

The national elections loom in the UK and the governing Conservatives continue to sink to new historic lows while the Nigel Farage-founded Reform Party creep ever upwards, heading for parity with the historic party of government.

British pollster YouGov — founded by former Conservative cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi — has published figures for Westminster General Election voting intentions, finding that while the commanding position of the left-wing Labour party itself remains basically unchanged, their lead continues to open as the governing Conservative Party proceeds with its nose-dive.

The pollster found compared to their previous polling last week, the Conservatives had dropped another point to 19 per cent, the joint-lowest result for the party ever. Last time YouGov recorded such a poor result for the party, the Tories responded by deposing their elected leader, replacing her with an appointed one instead — Rishi Sunak — believing this would save the party.

The move against the party’s own voters was characterised as a globalist coup at the time, firmly coming down on the side of treasury orthodoxy and continued mass migration.

Onwards and upwards https://t.co/g6fp4qzvzd

— Richard Tice (@TiceRichard) March 20, 2024

In the same polling period, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has risen one point to 15 per cent, the highest yet recorded by YouGov for the party, formerly known as the Brexit Party. Another recent poll by Refield & Wilton dubbed their ‘Red Wall Tracker’ — measuring sentiment in UK ‘Rust Belt’ areas that previously voted left but switched to the Conservatives in 2019 — has Reform on 16 per cent this week.

While it seems hard to believe the insurgent right-populist Reform UK Party could overtake the historic election-winning machine Conservative party in the polls, present polling trends do suggest things could be heading this way. The Conservatives, per YouGov polling, have lost six points in six months, while Reform have gained eight in that time. At that rate of convergence — although this assumed no other changes or factors in UK politics, which is generally unlikely — Reform would overtake the Conservatives in weeks.

Party leader Richard Tice said on Wednesday night of their strengthening polling position that: “It’s very significant. We’ve got a clear plan on freezing immigration… we’re now well ahead of the Lib Dems. We’re heading north, we’re catching up the Tories,,, because there’s no growth in the economy and people want change.”

The United Kingdom is expected to have a general election this year, or at the very latest in January 2025. After 14 years of Conservative rule, a period that will be remembered by many as having been characterised by massive over-promising and under-delivering on key right-wing policy areas like border control, law and order, and the economy, support for the party is in freefall and Labour appears — by present polling — likely to emerge from the vote with a hefty majority.

Yet as has been proven time and time again, and even just this month yet once more, pollsters can get elections badly wrong, and Britain’s first past the post elector system defies simple mapping of opinion polls to the number of seats won. The Brexit Party-turned-Reform UK may have been polling as the third party in British politics for months now, it has a real uphill struggle ahead of it to get as many seats as entrenched small parties like the Liberal Democrats, Greens, and Scottish Nationalists are likely to pick up. The British system is unkind to newcomers and it’s been a century since a new major national party managed to break through.