Britain’s anti-immigrant and Trump-aligned Reform UK party has made sweeping gains in English local elections, challenging the traditional political dominance of the country’s two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives.

Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, claimed his party had overtaken the Tories as the UK’s main opposition after Reform won control of at least six county councils, one mayoralty, and narrowly defeated the governing Labour party in a parliamentary byelection in what had been considered a safe seat.

With votes still being counted on Friday from the 1 May elections, the combined vote for Labour and the Conservatives appeared to have fallen well below 50%, the first time that has happened in modern political history.

In some counties in the Midlands and the north of England, Reform won more than 60% of the vote, capitalising on disillusionment with the Labour government, and with the Tories as an opposition as well as their record running the country from 2010 to 2024. Reform campaigned principally on anti-immigrant sentiment, which Farage had long sought to cultivate. The Liberal Democrats also made more modest inroads in some councils, mostly at the expense of the Conservatives.

Across the country, Reform won a 30% share of the vote, leaving Labour second with 20%, Liberal Democrats on 17% and the Conservatives relegated to fourth with 15% of the votes.

The one parliamentary byelection being fought on Thursday was Runcorn and Helsby, near Liverpool in England’s north-west, where the sitting Labour MP had been convicted of punching a constituent. It had been a solid Labour seat that the party won with 53% of the vote at the general elections, but it lost by six votes to Reform on Thursday, in a rebuke to the prime minister, Keir Starmer.

Starmer admitted the results were “disappointing” and said he would draw lessons from the setback, adding: “We need to go faster on the change that people want to see.”

Starmer has sought to compete with Reform by announcing stricter policies to contain illegal immigration, but many in his party have complained he has steered too far to the right and alienated Labour’s traditional supporters by introducing austerity measures such as cutting winter fuel payments for elderly people.

Political analysts said Reform had performed particularly well in areas with a lot of pensioners and few university graduates.

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said the result showed that the country was “fed up” with the Labour government but “still not yet ready to trust us”.

Speaking at a rally in Durham, where Reform won 65 of the 98 council seats, Farage claimed the vote “marks the end of two-party politics as we have known it for over a century in this country”. He said it was the “beginning of the end of the Conservative party”.

Farage, who has hailed Donald Trump as his “inspiration”, said that in the county councils where Reform was now in charge, the party would try to block government efforts to house asylum-seekers in local hotels.

Asked if councils had the power to do that, he replied: “We’ll give it a go.”

(Source: The Guardian)