The left-wing Labour Party government in Britain is “haemorrhaging” voters to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK over the issue of mass migration, a “mega-poll” has found.
According to a seat-by-seat analysis conducted by the Stonehaven political strategy firm, Reform UK would surge to 120 seats if the election were held today after just sending five MPs to Westminster in the general election in July.
Meanwhile, the left-wing Labour Party would “plummet” from 411 seats to 278, and the so-called Conservatives are projected to win 157 seats, the i paper reports.
The survey found that 55 per cent of voters who backed Labour in last year’s election but who now support Reform listed immigration as their top concern, followed by healthcare at 47 per cent, cost of living at 46 per cent, and energy prices at 32 per cent.
Commenting on his party’s surging support, Reform UK Chairman Zia Yusuf said that it showed that Reform is on the precipice of “making history and will win the next general election”.
“Reform won five seats in July. Six months on this poll shows we would win 120 seats,” he said. “Imagine where we will be in a year and in four years. The century-long stranglehold the two old parties have had is finally breaking.”
Stonehaven said that their analysis demonstrated that Labour’s support is “shallow”, noting that the party swept to a large majority in the Parliament with just 34 per cent of the vote nationally, and thus, it must demonstrate to the public that it is willing and able to tackle mass migration.
The head of data science for the firm, Luke Betham, said: “Immigration is the key issue that is driving them away from Labour,” adding: “Labour should start by focusing on where these voters are, not where the party wants them to be.
“The change that was voted for at the last election cannot be realised, in their minds, unless immigration is part of the Government’s delivery narrative come the next election.”
Separately, a survey from YouGov this week found that 70 per cent of Britons believe that the levels of immigration have been too high, the highest level since the pollster began tracking such numbers in 2019.
Of those, 50 per cent say that immigration has been “much too high”, also the highest on record for a YouGov poll. Conversely, just 15 per cent said they thought immigration levels to the UK were “about right”.
Overall, the survey found that the economy remains the top concern for voters, at 52 per cent. Immigration comes in a close second, at 46 per cent, followed by healthcare at 40 per cent.
In his speech at the Reform UK conference in Leicester on Friday, party leader Nigel Farage argued that the issues facing the British economy and social services are intrinsically linked to mass migration.
“It’s my view that the population explosion of more than 10 million in the last 20 years is the biggest contributor to our diminishing quality of life. We cannot get access to health care, our children and grandchildren cannot get onto the housing ladder, the traffic is impossible, nothing works anymore,” he said.
“This has been done to us not just by Tony Blair and Labor but it’s been done to us above all by a Conservative Party who lied through their teeth at every single general election and our job now is to replace them as the opposition party in British politics and that is what we are going to do,” Farage vowed.