Failures of Establishment and Migration Driving Surging Support for Farage’s Reform Party

The failures of Britain’s two main Westminster establishment political parties and the mass migration agenda they both persued are driving the rising levels of support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a poll has found.

Decades of incompetent governance from both the left-wing Labour Party and the so-called Conservatives in London appear to be paying dividends, at least for Farage and his populist Reform Party.

The pollster YouGov noted this week that “one of the biggest shifts in public opinion since the general election has been the continued rise of Reform UK”.

While Reform secured 15 per cent of the vote in last July’s snap general election — just weeks after the return of Farage to frontline politics — six months later, the party is now consistently polling on par with both major parties, with around a quarter of the vote.

According to the survey firm, the support for Reform has been bolstered by siphoning off supporters from other parties, including 33 per cent of those who voted Conservative in the last election, nine per cent of Labour voters and eight per cent of Liberal Democrats.

YouGov found that the top reason for defections to Farage’s party was dissatisfaction with the Westminster establishment, with 19 per cent saying they are backing Reform because: “It’s not Labour or the Conservatives / Another party needs a go / Better than the rest”.

Meanwhile, a further 11 per cent said that Farage’s party represents a different and new approach to governance.

Unsurprisingly, the failures of both parties to control the nation’s borders was the second-most cited reason people gave for supporting Reform, which has vowed to freeze all non-essential migration to the UK and take a zero-tolerance approach towards illegal migration.

Although mass migration to Britain began in earnest under the left-wing Labour Party government of former Prime Minister Tony Blair in the early 2000s, the so-called Conservative Party doubled down on the agenda despite promises to the public in the 2010, 2015, and 2017 elections to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” and in the 2019 election to massively reduce migration.

Instead, the opposite happened with net migration hitting a record high of 906,000 people in 2023. This week, the Office of National Statistics said that the population is on course to surpass 72.5 million by 2032, mostly due to mass migration.

In 2017, Tory bigwig and former top advisor to neo-liberal Conservative PM David Cameron, George Osborne, admitted that the government never actually intended to reduce migration, saying that “none” of the leading figures in the party believed in the promises they were telling to the public.

Describing the flood of foreigners into the country as a “complete betrayal”, Nigel Farage said Tuesday that “both parties are guilty of this, in fact, the Conservatives lied about it in manifesto after manifesto, telling us they would reduce the numbers.”

Mr Farage said that the “population explosion” negatively impacts the way of life for all Britons, pointing to the housing shortages, the overrun National Health Service, and even the traffic on the roads. He said that migration will be the issue that sweeps his party to victory at the next election.

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