Farage Kills the Two Party System: Reform Dominates in ‘British Midterms’, Taking Seats From Both Left and Right

A “truly historic shift in British politics” has taken place where the national political question is no longer about “left or right”, Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage said as his Reform Party surged in early results in what has been called the “midterm” elections.

The first Britain-wide local election results trickled in overnight — and will continue to do so through the day and into the weekend as over 5,000 local races have their votes counted — revealing in its early stages a massive swing to Reform UK. Party leader Nigel Farage hailed the party’s gains so far, and vowed “the best is yet to come” as the vast majority of elections have yet to be counted, and with those on their way being some of the most promising for his party, he said.

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History has been made: the leader of an elected government in the United Kingdom has lost their seat at election. This has never happened before: while there have been plenty of shock losses over the years with cabinet ministers and prominent party people having their seats cut out from under them, party leaders and heads of government — such as the Prime Minister or first minister of the home nations — tend to have rock-solid seats.

Not so for Labour’s Eluned Morgan, until now the First Minister of Wales, who even under Wales’ very forgiving additional member electoral system couldn’t find a seat. Her Ceredigion Penfro constituency had six seats up for grabs, handed out proportionally: the nationalist Plaid got three on 35 per cent of the vote, Reform got two with their 25 per cent, and the Conservatives got the last one with 16 per cent. Labour, which has dominated Wales for over a century, couldn’t even make it into the top three with just seven per cent.

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That Reform can now threaten the leader of the Conservative Party in her own Parliamentary seat, and across her own county, shows how far the party has come.

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While the big story so far has been England, elections took place across the island of Britain, and now we’re starting to get results from the races for the Scottish and Welsh devolved Parliaments, so expect a lot more news about that as we go through the afternoon.

Even before the results are fully in, they are looking to be historic. Labour — which has utterly dominated Welsh politics for over a century — has already conceded defeat in the home nation, which is incredible. This is where the Labour movement, in part, was born. We expect to see the Welsh nationalist-separatist party, Plaid Cymru, to do very well, with Farage’s Reform coming in second. That said, they have gained the same number of Welsh devolved parliament seats each so far, four apiece.

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With little more than 1,200 wards declared out of over 5,000, Reform commands a strong lead with 400 seats. Because the party is new and hasn’t had a chance to challenge these elections before, apart from a handful of defections from other parties during the previous term almost all of their wins today will be gains, with 398 so far being new to Reform.

The Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats — the old centre-right, centre-left, and centrist legacy parties that between them have dominated British politics for centuries grouped very closely behind at this stage in the race, with 256, 253, and 250 seats respectively. This is already a punishing outcome for these titans of Britain’s old political order, but closer scrutiny exposes how bad it really is: while the Tories managed to win those 256, this is a loss of 174 seats compared to last time.

It’s even worse for Labour, who have lost more seats than they’ve won so far, being down 259.

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As for the reasons for this victory, Farage noted the last time there was a major change in British politics — after the end of the Great War when it settled on a two-party system representing the workers on one hand and the owners of capital on the other — and how those distinctions have long vanished and that the real political divide now is “increasingly it’s about whether you go to work or not”.

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