london —
While Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Britain Party made strides in local elections, the ruling Labor Party slumped, deepening doubts about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s ability to govern and further fracturing Britain’s traditional two-party system.
Results released early Friday showed Mr Farage’s Reform Party, the Brexiteer and ally of US President Donald Trump, won more than 600 seats, while Labor lost more than 450 seats. The Conservative Party, the other half of the duopoly that has dominated British politics for more than a century, lost nearly 300 seats.
“Labour is being wiped out by reform in many of its most traditional areas and what we will see later today is the Tories being wiped out in their heartlands,” Mr Farage told reporters on Friday morning as some parliaments were still counting votes.
He insisted his fledgling party, which rose in the opinion polls after winning just five seats in the last British general election nearly two years ago, was no longer a “fluke or protest vote” but a “true people’s party” that was “here to stay”.
Meanwhile, a beleaguered Mr Starmer told his Labor faithful it was important not to let the early results “surface”. He said voters were clearly not satisfied with the “pace of change” under his government, which secured a landslide victory in July 2024. Still, he emphasized that he would not resign, saying, “I have no intention of withdrawing and plunging the country into chaos. We were elected to meet these challenges and that is what we will do.”
While Starmer considered losses in the historic Labor heartland in northern England, an ecstatic Farage traveled to Havering, a borough on the outskirts of London where reformers took control of the British capital’s first parliament.
“What has happened is a truly historic change in British politics,” Mr Farage said. He added that the widespread victories for Reformers across England showed his populist party could challenge the traditional dominance of Labor and the Conservative Party. “This is a huge day, not just for our party, but for the complete reshaping of every aspect of British politics,” he said.
The early results confirm that British politics, once a binary opposition between the powerful Labor and Conservative parties, has splintered into a multiparty system, with once-dominant parties losing votes to the Reformers, the progressive Liberal Democrats and the Greens. Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties are also undermining the long-standing Labor-Tory duopoly.
“British electoral politics is highly fragmented,” British pollster John Curtis told the BBC on Friday. He pointed out that if all 5,000 contested seats in England were declared, Labor could face a net loss of more than 1,200 seats.
These losses will be evidence of Starmer’s unpopularity, his government’s policy failures, and Labor’s failure to assuage the dark mood of the British public. In Starmer’s first year in office, his team tried to stem the tide of reform by appealing to right-wing voters with tough rhetoric and policies on immigration. This strategy backfired. Opinion polls continued to show support for Reform, but Labor was losing progressive voters.
Many disaffected Labor voters flocked to the new Green Party, led by Zak Polanski, a former hypnotherapist who took over as leader in September. Under Polanski’s leadership, the Green Party has sought to expand its appeal beyond its traditional environmental support base. It has criticized Starmer’s government for its perceived lack of support for Palestinian rights and proposed a series of populist economic policies, including a wealth tax.
Much of the support for the Green Party is concentrated in cities. The Green Party won its first mayoral election in the London borough of Hackney on Friday, when Zoe Garbett ousted the incumbent Labor MP. In his victory speech, Mr Garbett said the national results showed voters were “desperate for an alternative to this failed Labor government”.
Although the Greens have so far held fewer than 100 seats in England, Mr Curtis said their support was still splitting the left-wing vote and causing Labor to lose “a lot of seats” to the reformers.
“Labour’s vote tends to suffer more when the Greens have a strong vote than the Reformers,” he said. “This suggests that the flow of votes from Labor to the Greens has at times allowed Reformers to win Labor seats, despite Labor’s tactical appeals to voters to vote to keep Reformers out.”
Many Labor voters switched to the Green Party, while many traditional Conservatives, known as the Conservative Party, switched to Reform. Mr Farage’s party won control of Essex County Council, which has been dominated by the Conservatives for 25 years.
Mr Farage heralded the inroads of reformists into the Conservative Party’s heartland, saying these achievements signaled a new kind of politics. “Politics is no longer the old debate of right or left,” he said. “It’s a story about people who hold patriotic ideas, who believe in this country and who want things to get better.”
Labour’s criticism is likely to renew questions about Starmer’s suitability to lead the party. Left-wing Labor MP John McDonnell said the Prime Minister now needed to decide whether staying in office risked “opening the door to Mr Farage”.
But Mr Starmer’s position may be further strengthened by the lack of an obvious candidate. Many of Mr Starmer’s potential opponents within the Labor Party are scandal-tainted or untested, including former deputy prime minister Angela Ryder, who resigned last year for failing to pay the proper amount of property tax. Mr Starmer’s other rival, Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, currently has no seat in parliament and cannot run against him.
Government ministers insist now is not the time for a change at the top. “We will not change pilots mid-flight,” Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said Thursday night.
On Friday, Mr Starmer told reporters: “These difficult days do not weaken my resolve to deliver the change I promised at the general election. They strengthen my resolve to do so.”
