Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Reform UK has become the latest alternative party to top Britain’s political opinion polls, after a YouGov survey placed it ahead of the Conservatives and Labour, which have a century-old duopoly on power.
Nigel Farage is hoping to be the political leader who can finally break the Labour and Tory hold on Westminster. But the next general election is not expected until 2029, and the record for third parties is not promising.
A number of recent surveys have put Reform top, including this week’s YouGov poll, with the party averaging 24.3 per cent in a host of voting intention opinion polls conducted so far this year.
That puts them above the opposition Conservative party on 23.1 per cent and almost level with the governing Labour party on 25.5 per cent.
In most previous election cycles, support for third parties has fallen away as election day approached and the main two parties consolidated their base.
The question for Farage’s Reform party is whether it can avoid this fate.
The Brexit party, Reform’s predecessor, reached a similar peak of support immediately after European parliament elections in 2019 — the last before the UK formally left the EU — polling around 23 per cent.
But after the accession of Boris Johnson as Tory leader and UK prime minister, the Brexit party’s strength quickly dissipated — partly owing to an electoral pact where the party withdrew some candidates from seats where pro-Brexit Tories were running.
The Conservatives won a landslide general election victory in December 2019. The Brexit party won zero seats.
Previous efforts to overturn the two-party stranglehold on British politics have withered away without much lasting impact because of the UK’s first past the post system — parties may poll well, but if they fail to win a majority of votes in each constituency, they will come away with no seats.
In the early 1980s, the Social Democratic Party briefly polled well above both Labour and the Tories, but faded into third place at the 1983 election.
The run-up to the 2010 election saw a similar surge by the Liberal Democrats, who frequently polled level with the Tories and Labour.
On election day, the Lib Dems won just 23 per cent of the vote and picked up 57 seats, but did manage to form a coalition government with the Conservatives.
The last time one of the UK’s two main parties was dislodged was 1922, when Labour replaced the Liberal party as the official opposition, a shift precipitated by the extension of the franchise to millions of working class voters. The Tories and Labour have remained the two largest parties ever since.
But there are some signs their position is eroding. At the 2024 general election, though Labour won a huge majority in terms of seats, the combined vote share for Labour and the Conservatives fell to just 59 per cent, its lowest in a century.
The Liberal Democrats, Reform, the Greens and independent candidates also won a record numbers of seats.
The next electoral test will come with England’s local elections in May.
Unlike the major parties, which can count on long-established networks of local volunteers and constituency associations to knock on doors, Reform is starting almost from scratch, even if its membership has swelled in recent months.
Farage is hoping dissatisfaction with the UK’s two main parties will translate into scores of elected Reform councillors.
