Britain’s legacy establishment parties are “colluding” to cancel local elections across the UK this year because they fear the rise of his Reform UK party, Nigel Farage has claimed as he accused the government of “dictator”-like behaviour.
The UK government announced nine council areas covering 7.7 million residents and 5.5 million voters will have their local elections postponed this year because the Labour administration wants to radically rework local government to abolish many councils and create a new series of fewer, larger councils.
This makes voting new councillors pointless, the government argues because new council areas will be created by the end of the decade. Yet the terms of thousands of councillors are about to expire, and in many cases four year terms could become seven years without any democratic oversight from the public. The number of seats up for election this year is said to have been slashed from 2,200 to 1,600.
BREAKING: @Nigel_Farage says U.K. officials "are canceling elections in some of the counties in which we expected to do the very, very best."
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) February 5, 2025
This moves comes 1 day after a YouGov poll showing @reformparty_uk beating Labour & Tories in a general election pic.twitter.com/QDbGu87yQV
As asserted by Mr. Farage, almost all of the areas impacted leant towards the Conservative Party last time there were elections and some of the counties cancelled are those in which his party was predicted to do best this year.
Expressing his anger at democracy denied on Wednesday afternoon, Mr Farage accused the government of dictatorial behaviour for postponing elections for years during peacetime and accused the legacy parties of colluding to damage his Reform party’s rise in the polls.
Farage said: “that’s how we do things. We have elections… we judge those we voted for, whether they’ve done well or badly, and we have the ability to remove them… We think it is completely outrageous, in fact despite the fact we are a very happy, optimistic, forward-looking party we are blimmin’ angry this afternoon that five and a half million people in this country are being denied their vote on May 1st this year.”
Reform UK members are “particularly aggrieved” because of the cancelled elections in places like Essex and Norfolk, where the party is performing particularly strongly, he said, continuing: “they will be denied the opportunity to vote on May 1st this year. The elections are cancelled! Now, I thought only dictators cancel elections, but no this is the connivance of the now-terrified Labour Party”.
While Mr Farage has called the decision “sheer cowardice”, the government and top Labour minister Angela Rayner insist running elections is just too expensive and not running them is essential to do the “significant amount of work is needed to unlock devolution and deliver reorganisation”, reports The Times. Indeed, the deputy prime minister insisted they had set a high bar for postponement.
