Nigel Farage’s Reform Ahead of Labour and Conservatives in Major Poll For First Time

Reform UK is narrowly ahead of all other political parties in Britain according to the findings of a major pollster for the first time, adding evidence to suggest a general trend in favour of Nigel Farage’s nascent faction.

If there were a general election to be held tomorrow in the United Kingdom, pollster YouGov states that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK would emerge with the greatest number of votes. Nigel Farage’s party, which only got elected Members of Parliament for the first time last year, was polled to take 25 per cent of the national vote.

The result means that the populist party has pulled ahead — but “within the margin of error”, YouGov reminds us — of Britain’s legacy parties of government. While Reform has picked up two points since the last poll in late January, Labour has lost a more statistically significant three points, falling to 24 per cent. The Conservatives lost another point since the last round, continuing their record-low run of polling at 21 per cent.

The Liberals, once a formidable party of government before it was replaced by Labour a century ago, trail well behind on 14 points, while the Green Party takes just nine.

This result is perhaps not the most pronounced lead for Reform in recent polling, but it does stand out as important in its own right. Among the British polling industry — which has suffered some serious blows to its credibility in the last decade — YouGov is reckoned to be one of the more accurate pollsters.

Indeed, the UK Election Data Vault has previously stated that YouGov was among the most accurate in predicting the 2024 UK General Election.

The demographic breakdown of the YouGov figures published Monday evening also appeared to buttress trends already identified elsewhere, namely that Reform’s onward march in the polls is due to a combination of retaining an impressive level of loyalty among its own voters while also recruiting a good number of defectors from elsewhere.

A solid nine in ten Britons who voted for Reform in the 2024 general election said they would do so again next time. Yet 24 per cent of 2024 Conservative voters said they would now back Reform, equivalent to 1.6 million Tories defecting to Reform out of an active electorate of 29 million.

Despite that Reform are doggedly portrayed as right-wing extremists in much of the UK press, an impressive eight per cent of 2024 Labour voters now say they would back Farage’s faction, something like three-quarters of a million Labour defectors to the Reform camp. This may vindicate Farage’s plan to go after Labour’s historic working-class voter base, who may have backed the party tribally in the past but are poorly represented by its modern metropolitan-liberal leadership.

Perhaps most incredible, given the apparently irreconcilable differences between their political positions, is YouGov’s claim that four per cent of former Liberal Democrats would now back Reform UK.

The other parties from whom Farage is poaching voters have apparently taken notice. The Conservatives had, The Sun’s Harry Cole reports, a crisis meeting on Monday to try and figure out their plummeting polling and evaporating donations. Claims in the day alleged the party was no longer able to afford to pay special advisors for ministers and may even be about to surrender the lease on its central London party headquarters.

Labour, on the other hand, are said to have established an ‘anti-Reform unit’ to better coordinate their attacks against Nigel Farage. A senior Labour figure identified by GB News is reported to believe attacking Mr Farage on the National Health Service (NHS) is Labour’s silver bullet.