Brexit boss Nigel Farage has captured his “beachhead” in the UK Parliament as his Reform UK party is projected to become the third largest party by vote share in the country in Thursday’s general election.
UPDATE 0400 — Reform UK’s Richard Tice wins seat in Parliament
Nigel Farage’s deputy leader Reform party chairman, Richard Tice won his seat in Boston and Skegness, becoming the fourth successful candidate so far, following Mr Farage in Clacton, former Tory MP Lee Anderson in Ashfield, and Rupert Lowe in Great Yarmouth.
Original story continues as follows…
Just over a month after returning from political retirement to reclaim his position at the helm of the Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party) Nigel Farage has once again upended the British political landscape and will finally be heading to the House of Commons as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton with a large majority, beating out his Conservative challenger Giles Watling by a margin of 21,225 votes to 12,820.
Although Mr Farage has been arguably the most significant political figure in Britain since the Second World War — having spearheaded the Brexit movement to remove the UK from the shackles of the globalist EU project — a seat in Parliament has long eluded him, having previously fallen short on seven different occasions to become an MP.
However, with his victory in Clacton — a working-class constituency in the southeast of England that was one of the strongest backers of Brexit — the Reform UK leader has secured a “beachhead” in parliament from which he intends to launch a five-year campaign to win the 2029 general election.
“I will do my absolute best to put Clacton on the map,” Mr Farage said in a victory speech, adding: “It’s four weeks and three days since I decided to come out of retirement and throw my hat in the ring. I think what Reform UK has achieved in those few short weeks is truly extraordinary.”
“Something very fundamental is happening. It’s not just disappointment with the Conservative Party, there is a gap on the centre-right of British politics and my job is to fill it, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“My plan is to build a mass national movement over the course of the next few years and hopefully be big enough to challenge at the general election in 2029. There is no enthusiasm for Labour, there is no enthusiasm for Starmer, in fact half the vote is simply an anti-Conservative vote. This Labour government will be in trouble very, very quickly and we will now be targeting Labour votes, we are coming for Labour, be in no doubt about that.”
“This is just the first step of something that is going to stun all of you,” Farage concluded.
Reform will have a strong base from which to build a national movement to compete for control of Downing Street in the next election, projected to have secured 17.6 per cent of the vote, so far the third most of any party, only trailing the Conservatives by three per cent, according to the initial exit poll, a stunning result for the upstart party. The initial snapshot — which is still subject to change — also put Reform on pace to win 13 seats in the Parliament while the party has also secured numerous second-place finishes across the country.
The strategy going forward for the populist party will not only be to win over more voters from the Conservatives — as they descend into an expected political civil war for the future of the Tory party — but also to convince disaffected Labour voters that the increasingly London-centric elitist left-wing party does not serve their interests, particularly on issues such as immigration.
One of the key issues of potential reform the party will also advocate for will be a change in the voting system to proportional representation, in which parties are allocated seats based on their total number of votes, rather than the current first-past-the-post winner-take-all system.
While the Farage-led Party is on pace to have won million votes, perhaps the third or even second most nationally, it is only projected to have secured 13 seats in the parliament, behind the Liberal Democrats at 61, despite having won more significantly votes than the anti-Brexit Ed Davey-led party.
Although the Labour Party has traditionally supported changing the electoral system to one of proportional representation, it is unclear if it would be willing to risk a change that might increase Reform’s ability to challenge Labour in the next general election, even though its own base favours the idea.
Mr Farage has also signalled that his party will pursue a much more nationalist approach to economics rather than the laissez-faire Thatcherite model preferred by former Reform boss Richard Tice. Much like his ally across the pond, Donald Trump, Mr Farage could seek to undermine Labour’s support in working-class areas by challenging globalist trade policies with countries like Communist China in favour of boosting domestic industry.
Speaking to Breitbart London ahead of the election, Mr Farage said that Thatcherite thinking is “irrelevant” to the modern realities facing Britain.
“Over the last few decades… the power of the big corporate companies has got bigger and bigger. Capitalism is dead, it doesn’t exist, we’re living in corporatism. An unholy alliance of big business, big banks, and big government… I genuinely think we won’t get economic growth if the country is dominated by six giant multinationals, none of whom pay tax on-shore.”
A key opening on this front to challenge Labour will be on the green agenda. Mr Farage told this publication that the green agenda is a “con”, arguing that though the government can claim to have reduced carbon emissions by shutting down industries in the UK, such as the steel industry and heavy shipbuilding, the emissions have, in reality, just been sent to other countries.
“We’ve lost a whole lot of jobs for no environmental gain whatsoever,” Farage said.