Farage racks up UK election gains as voters punish Starmer

NIGEL Farage’s Reform UK racked up sweeping gains in the first counts in local elections, with British voters continuing to turn away from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s governing Labour Party.

With counts completed in about a fifth of English councils, Reform had won 311 new seats, while Labour’s tally was down by 237, having lost more than half of the seats they were defending.

The governing party retained control of 10 councils — but lost the helm in seven. Reform wrested control of the council in Newcastle-Under-Lyme from the Conservatives.

The results reaffirm a splintering of British politics that’s seen the insurgent Reform and Green parties make up ground on the right and left against the Tory-Labour duopoly that’s dominated British politics for more than a century.

They also threaten to deepen rumblings within Labour about Starmer’s leadership, with potential rivals Angela Rayner, Starmer’s former deputy, and Health Secretary Wes Streeting weighing a challenge.

“It’s a really soul-destroying night,” Rebecca Long-Bailey, the left-wing Labour Member of Parliament who was runner-up to Starmer in the 2020 leadership race, told BBC radio on Friday (May 8). “We’ve lost a large number of really good Labour councilors and candidates. And it’s quite clear that we’ve been squeezed both from Reform and the Greens.”

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As of about 6.20 am local time, the count showed voters also punished the main opposition Conservative Party, which had lost more than a third of its seats, with the Greens nearly doubling their count and the Liberal Democrats also making gains.

“Our fractured politics has been fully confirmed and illustrated over the last few hours,” John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, told the BBC.

As well as voting for some 5,000 councilors, Britons on Thursday also cast ballots to elect the parliaments of Scotland and Wales. No counts have yet been completed in those elections, though nationalist parties are expected to prevail in both regions. BLOOMBERG