Labour and the Conservatives have had a stranglehold on political power for decades — but as Reform UK's victory in last week's election shows, this now appears to changing.
Britons awoke last Friday to images of a giddy Nigel Farage.The leader of Reform UK, an anti-immigration, populist right-wing party which has surged in the polls in recent months, was celebrating his candidate’s narrow victory in a by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, a constituency in northwest England. Below his beaming smile, Farage showed just how tight the race was by holding up six fingers to represent the six deciding votes. “It may be a small margin but it’s a huge win,” he said, congratulating his colleague Sarah Pochin, who had become Reform’s fifth MP and the first woman to represent the party in Westminster.Overturning Labour’s almost 15,000-vote majority in Runcorn and Helsby was indeed an enormous win, but Reform’s performance in last Thursday’s local elections sent an even starker political message to its opponents.Reform gained control of 10 of the 23 councils up for grabs, and won 677 of the 1,600 council seats being contested. It also finished first in two mayoral elections — one in Greater Lincolnshire, the other in Hull & East Yorkshire. Conversely, support for the Conservatives and Labour, the historically dominant forces in British politics, crumbled: the parties lost 674 and 187 local seats respectively, and neither won control of a single council. As the scale of his success began to emerge, Farage said the country was now experiencing a “whole different politics”. “We are now the opposition party in the UK to Labour, and the Tories [the Conservatives] are a waste of space,” he declared. Beyond two-party politics Over the past week, many political commentators have suggested that Britain’s decades-long political duopoly could be over. “The results confirm that we're in an era of four or even five-party politics," said Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. "The fragmentation of the party system has been going on really since the mid-1970s, but it's accelerated considerably over the last few years.”“And as a result, we've seen the domination of Labour and the Conservatives possibly come to an end for good.”While Reform came first by some distance in the local elections, the Liberal Democrats also did well, making inroads in plenty of former Tory strongholds. Reform’s rise is partly the result of the traditional parties’ failure to tangibly improve people’s lives and public services, and their tendency to overpromise and underdeliver, according to Bale — who also points to a growing impatience at the speed of political change.A problem for Labour, a crisis for the ConservativesPolitical analysts told Euronews that Farage’s win last Thursday posed a problem for Labour, but a much greater threat to the Conservatives. As the next general election doesn’t have to be held until 2029, Labour, the ruling party, still has up to four years to set the agenda and attempt to bring about the change they have promised, the experts said. Government success could dent Reform’s popularity.“They have to hope that the things that parties used to be able to provide — economic growth, improvements in living standards, relatively good quality public services — will in the end be more attractive to voters than the emotive performance politics that they get from leaders like Nigel Farage,” said Bale. However, the Conservatives, who did disastrously in July’s general election after 14 years in power, do not have as strong a hand to play. While cautioning that local elections are not always indicative of voting behaviour at general elections, Robert Ford, a political scientist at the University of Manchester, said the Tories could face “an existential crisis” at the national level. “The most successful election-winning machine in British history — and one of the most successful in world democratic history — has been absolutely knocked to the canvas here,” he said, referring to this year’s local elections, a far cry from their performance four years earlier. “They went from being the party of everywhere in 2021 to being the party of nowhere in 2025. They got completely wiped out, lost every single council and 70% of their council seats.” Ford noted that it will be difficult for the Tories to rebuild their brand in opposition, as unlike Labour, they have fewer opportunities at their disposal. According to the latest YouGov polling, if a general election were held tomorrow, 9% of 2024 Labour voters would choose Reform, as would 26% of Conservative voters.Still, it may be too early to declare the Tories dead, said YouGov Director of Political Analytics Patrick English. “The two most-established parties of British politics have survived everything thrown at them for the past 120 years, so we probably shouldn't write either of them off,” English noted. “What the last few months of polling, and the general election, have been telling us is that Labour and the Conservatives face serious, structural challenges to their voter coalition and supporter base which they do not, currently, seem properly equipped to deal with,” he added.The trap of Farageism Both Labour and the Conservatives need to focus on themselves, said Ford, rather than being tempted to ape Farage’s politics. He cited the example of immigration and the Conservative former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s pledge to “stop the boats” bringing migrants over from Europe. “They have been trying to offer people a poundshop, knock-off Farage. But no one wants that. Why would you accept the knock-off when you can have the original?” he said. Labour should also be wary too, he warned. “They need to have this fight on their terrain, not on Farage's terrain. It needs to be a home fixture, not an away fixture.” Both traditional parties will hope that Reform struggles under the scrutiny that comes with controlling local councils, or that it starts to suffer from the fragmentation to which radical-right parties are prone. Asked whether Farage could become prime minister in the coming years, Ford said it was “still not the likeliest outcome”, but that “it's a substantially more plausible outcome than it was a week ago”. “These are the kind of results in terms of depth and breadth and strength of support that Farage needs if he's to be a credible aspirant for power,” he said. English, the YouGov political analyst, said only time would tell. “There is nothing in the data we can currently see to suggest that Farage and Reform UK will fade away any time soon.” “In fact, there is plenty to suggest the opposite — that their support will continue to grow and solidify. But we are years away from the next general election, and so much can happen in between now and then.”The death of ‘first past the post’? One thing that the local election results have made clearer is the potential need to change the UK’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, which historically has given the bigger parties, Labour and the Conservatives, an advantage. For example, with just 33.7% of the vote in last year’s general election, Labour won 412 of the country’s 650 seats. But with Reform’s growing popularity, it is not just the main two parties who can now benefit disproportionately from the current system. Farage’s party proved as much in the local elections, where it won around 31% of the vote but gained a much higher percentage of councillors. The UK’s changed political landscape may start to change minds among those who have always backed FPTP. ”If you are a Conservative or Labour politician or activist or voter who views a Nigel Farage majority government as the worst of all possible outcomes, there is only one electoral system that will ever deliver that outcome. And that is FPTP,” said Ford. “Electoral reform is not just about what it enables, it is about what it prevents.”
