Will the rise of Reform UK ever end?

By Lewis Young

Dominating the news cycles, and now dominating results. The Reform party won 677 council seats and 10 councils in the 2025 local elections. Image: Sean Smith

The recent local elections painted a clear picture of each party’s popularity at this, albeit early, stage of the new Labour Government’s cycle. The major parties found themselves forced to face up to many widely perceived failures, largely due to distrust in both the current Labour Government and the previous Conservative Governments of the past fourteen years. Because of this, traditionally ‘minor’ parties including the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and Reform UK all gained greatly from the local elections. The success of these parties, notably Reform, throws into question whether we will still see a two-party system as of the 2029 election cycle. Will Reform be able to topple the Labour and Conservative parties?

To start out I will focus on the Labour party. The party retained only 99 council seats, losing 187, while also losing key county councils in Durham and Doncaster. This major loss of almost two thirds of Labour’s council seats demonstrates the major disapproval felt by many towards the state of the party. As for the Tories, the party achieved a historically poor result losing 674 council seats, and all fifteen councils they controlled. These lost councils included Staffordshire, Kent and Lincolnshire, all of which were lost to reform. This loss proved, what has if anything been a very poorly kept secret, that ‘right leaning’ voters are now more often than not backing the Farage-led Reform Party, while heading further from Badenoch’s Tories. The Conservatives will have to prove themselves as a party capable of leadership across the economic front, on ‘fixing’ the immigration ‘issue’ and in its ability to repair the broken NHS system, if they have any hope of returning to the peak of British politics. If this is not proven and the Labour

Party fail to fix the latter two issues, it is likely Reform will continue to be the more

dominant of the right-wing parties.

For the Liberal Democrats, this local election cycle was very successful. With a net gain of 163 council seats and majorities gained in Cambridgeshire, Shropshire and Oxfordshire, the Liberal democrats hold more seats that the governing Labour Party. With 17% of the vote share, disapproval for the major parties can be seen once again, with many turning instead to the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, according to the BBCs estimation, if a General Election had happened on the day of the local elections, the Conservatives would have slumped to only 15% of the national vote, its worst-ever share of such a projection, narrowly behind the Liberal Democrats. The Green Party were also successful in gaining over 40 council seats - one of these seats

being your very own local councillor Mark Stevens if you live in Heronbank,

Sherbourne, Lakeside or Cryfield. Admittedly, however, the Greens were unfortunate

in their Mayoral campaign in the West of England, coming third to Labour and

narrowly losing to Reform.

The Green Party growth demonstrates more than just disapproval with the main two

parties, but also disappointment with the efforts of the Government in working

towards solutions for environmental issues. An example could be the inclusion of a

significant section of the planning bill earlier this year, which environmental groups

including the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts labelled a “license to kill nature”, which will, if passed, allowed developers to avoid environmental laws at a site by paying into a national nature recovery fund to pay for environmental work in other places. Additionally, the growth of the Green Party amidst the Labour decline shows a shift

away from Labour by many on the left. Many view this Starmer-led Labour

Government as not truthful to the roots of what the party once was, and unrepresentative of the ‘working people’.

Finally, the main story from these results has to be Nigel Farage’s newest project, Reform UK. There is no better description of Reform’s performance in the recent local elections other than an absolute demonstration of the party’s ability to perform on the level of Labour and the Tories, potentially as a right-wing replacement for the latter. The party won 677 council seats and ten councils overall. These councils included Staffordshire, Kent and Lincolnshire from the Tories, along with Durham and Doncaster from Labour. Furthermore, Reform won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election on the same day, gaining the party their fifth MP overall. Reform won 30% of the vote share, larger than the vote share won by the Tories and by Labour. To me, without a doubt this places Reform in conversation as contenders for the next General Election campaign. As much as I will admit this is an early statement that could easily backfire, if the Labour Party fail to answer the major issues in its face in which the electorate is demanding answers it may well lose further support to Reform.

As mentioned prior, this must include the answer to the immigration problem, a fix to

NHS waiting times and also the state of the economy into which young people are

entering. Yes, as much as we assume Reform voters to be only older people, issues

including the difficulty of first home ownership and messages of toxic masculinity and

anti-‘wokeness’ growing in social media has led to a groundswell of young people with far-right beliefs, many of whom identify closely with Farage’s party. Overall, it is very important to acknowledge the very real possibility of a Reform Government taking us into the 2030s if this trend continues. The Tories simply are not a party which the electorate trust economically or in their ability to lead, being merely a laughing stock in the current political sphere. The Labour Government are also failing. They must fix the immigration issue, repair our NHS, housing crisis and the economy if they are to prove themselves worthy in the eyes of the electorate. 

Image: Sean Smith/The Guardian