Farage’s reform would come top in UK election, YouGov finds

By Alex Morales

Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK would be the biggest party in parliament if the country held a general election today, according to a nationwide projection, underlining the political danger to Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Reform would win 271 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, with Starmer’s governing Labour party second on 178, polling firm YouGov said on Thursday. That would leave a hung parliament in which no party could govern alone. 

The Tories, who already posted their worst ever general election result last year when they won 121 seats, would plumb new depths on just 46, while the Liberal Democrats would leapfrog them, winning 81 seats. Following Labour’s landslide victory last year, another general election is not expected until 2029.

The poll highlights major changes in the UK’s electoral landscape, as the country appears poised to move beyond the Tory-Labour duopoly that’s dominated politics for a century. Amid disaffection over the state of the country’s public services, Farage’s right-wing outfit — which won just five seats last year — has been riding high in the polls. The Reform leader has warned he’s coming for Labour after his party made huge gains in a set of local elections earlier this year.

Reform has emulated America’s Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — and pledged to slash waste in UK local councils. Former chairman Zia Yusuf told Bloomberg’s In The City podcast this week that Britain is being held back by Labour’s economic policies.

Fragmentation

The YouGov survey also suggested Labour cabinet ministers including Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, Defense Secretary John Healey and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson would lose their seats if a general election was held now. Former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, of the Conservatives, would lose his seat to Reform, YouGov said.

Labour and the Tories combined would win just 41% of votes, according to YouGov. That’s half the level of their joint share as recently as 2017.

“That a clear majority would now vote for someone other than the two established main parties of British politics is a striking marker of just how far the fragmentation of the voting public has gone over the past decade,” YouGov said.

YouGov’s poll also sees the Scottish National Party, the Greens and Plaid Cymru advance. The pollster used so-called Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification modeling, which aims to give a more detailed electoral prediction than standard polling — its first such survey since last year’s July 4 vote.