As Reform UK revels in its success in last week’s local election – winning 1,450 council seats – the idea of Prime Minister Nigel Farage no longer looks like a pipe dream for the Clacton MP.
In response to Friday’s results, Farage said this is “a truly historic shift in British politics,” and that these results would not be a “one off”.
There is no doubt that the party has capitalised on public frustration over immigration, living standards and distrust in Westminster – and has gone from a fringe movement to a serious force in British politics. But, can Reform UK keep growing – or has it peaked?
Michael Crick, Jonn Elledge and Zoë Grünewald offer their perspectives.
Reform’s success has never hinged on broad appeal or personal popularity. Farage doesn’t need to be liked; he needs disillusionment, fragmentation, and a political system too brittle to absorb public anger. Right now, Britain has a surplus of all three.
First, take the mood music. Reform’s rise isn’t happening in a vacuum; it is being enabled by a government that just isn’t delivering. Keir Starmer came in with a landslide and a huge amount of political capital, yet public frustration has only deepened. Living standards are still stuck, public services still feel broken, and the national conversation is a never-ending argument about immigration.
And that narrowing hasn’t been an accident. Labour’s tougher rhetoric on migration hasn’t neutralised Reform so much as validated it, while pushing parts of its own coalition away. You could see that in this year’s local elections: progressive voters drifting to the Greens and Liberal Democrats, the vote splitting, and Reform slipping through the middle.
More broadly, the conditions that fuel populism haven’t gone anywhere. Economic pessimism is baked in, trust in institutions is broken, and there’s a widespread sense that Britain is stuck in a kind of managed decline. A decline run by a political class that prefers tinkering at the edges to actually matching the scale of the anger out there. Reform, by contrast, is willing to meet it head on. And in that gap, it’s building something that looks a lot more serious than a protest vote.
Enter Reform’s backers. If you haven’t heard of them, that’s partly the point. Behind the pub-pint populism sits a shadowy operation: a Maga-style ecosystem of think-tanks, lobbyists, billionaire donors and tech-bros, imported wholesale from the American right. Organisations tied to the US Christian conservative movement are already expanding their footprint in Britain and courting Reform, while Farage’s orbit continues pulling in money from overseas billionaires and murky crypto interests. Beneath the anti-establishment cosplay, serious infrastructure with sinister interests is being built.
At the same time, Reform is thriving inside an online ecosystem tilted firmly in its favour. Its MPs generate eye-watering levels of engagement on X, supercharged by algorithmic misinformation and amplified by Elon Musk himself, a foreign billionaire using his platform as a political megaphone. Britain has no serious regulatory framework capable of dealing with this kind of influence, and the government is sitting on its hands as the machinery of modern populism operates largely outside the reach of British law. Reform is laughing all the way to the bank.
And then there is the electoral system. For years, first past the post was seen as the establishment’s safety net, squeezing insurgents and protecting Labour and the Conservatives.
How times have changed. Britain is no longer a two party system, and FPTP is malfunctioning. In this new fragmented Britain, it doesn’t suppress challengers, but magnifies them.
The result is wildly disproportionate outcomes: parties winning frail majorities on barely a third of the vote, or making gains simply because their opponents are collapsing faster. This is why Reform doesn’t need broad support to win power, just for everyone else to lose more efficiently.
Some models suggest Reform could secure a parliamentary majority with only around 30 per cent of the vote. Farage understands this perfectly: the system he once railed against is now his very best friend since it started working in his favour.
None of this makes a Reform government inevitable, of course. But all the conditions that could deliver one – political disillusionment, weak regulation, foreign money, a broken electoral system – are all very much in place.
Ultimately, Reform doesn’t need to win the argument to win government. It just needs everyone else to keep fracturing and convincing themselves it’s not really a threat. Complacency is how Reform wins.
