The list of ever-mounting issues for the governing globalist Tory Party of Rishi Sunak as it faces a potentially historic electoral wipeout next year now includes being outflanked to the right by the surging populist Reform UK party as it has begun to consistently poll in the double digits.
Amid mounting rage at the Conservative in-name-only Party’s failure to deliver on its promises to the public, notably on mass migration, the Nigel Farage-founded Reform UK has risen to third place in national polls with double-digit support.
According to a YouGov poll conducted for The Times of London, Reform UK, previously known as the Brexit Party, has surpassed the Europhile Liberal Democrats, with ten per cent support compared to 22 per cent for the Tories, 45 per cent for Labour and nine per cent for the Lib Dems.
Another survey conducted by BMG polling put Reform UK’s support at 11 per cent, the highest ever level of public backing for the upstart party ever recorded by the polling agency.
The surge in popularity for the Richard Tice-led Reform party comes amid years of failures by the Conservative Party to fulfil its pledge to the public to reduce mass migration. While voters were told by the Tories that Brexit would see the UK “take back control” of its borders and reduce the influx of foreigners, the opposite has happened. Last month, it was revealed that net migration hit a record high in the year leading up to June, climbing to 672,000 as a total of 1.2 million migrants came to the country.
With the party haemorrhaging support over its open borders policies, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government announced plans to restrict chain migration and the raising of the salary threshold for so-called ‘skilled labour’ migrants from £26,200 to £38,700. Home Secretary James Cleverly claimed that the plans would hopefully bring net migration down by around 300,000 per year.
However, even still, the reduction would be a far cry from the now-abandoned Tory pledge to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands.
Tory insiders have begun to openly express concern that migration failures could be the downfall of the party and see more turn to Reform UK, with one backbench MP telling the i newspaper this week: “None of this comes as a surprise, sadly. Immigration is quickly becoming the dominant issue for the majority of Conservative voters.
“If these voters believe that the Government – and more specifically the Prime Minister – is incapable of addressing their concerns it’s hardly surprising they’re looking elsewhere.”
The ‘first past the post’ voting system in which seats in the parliament are not divided up based on the total number of votes won in the country — as is typical in many other European nations — but rather based on which candidate secures the most votes in a given district, will likely prevent Reform UK from gaining any meaningful representation in the House of Commons. However, the surge in support for the populist party will likely see the Tories lose more seats in the next election than they would have without a challenger party on the right.
Meanwhile, there are mounting rumours that Brexit boss Nigel Farage, who stepped aside from frontline politics after successfully leading the country out of the European Union, may use the expected electoral disaster for the Tories as a springboard to launch a campaign to take over the Conservative Party as its next leader and finally fulfil the true promises of the pro-sovereignty movement he waged for decades.
Farage, who is currently attempting to win over the hearts and minds of the general public as a contestant on the popular I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here jungle challenge reality television programme, said in October that he would be “very surprised” if he was not the leader of the Conservative Party by 2026, although he later claimed that the comments were made “in jest”.