Nigel Farage claims Reform is now UK’s biggest party as Labour membership plummets
Nigel Farage has claimed that Reform UK is now Britain’s largest political party, following an internal leak that suggested Labor had lost 100,000 members.
Accordingly TimesLabor’s number of paid members has fallen below 250,000, meaning the party has lost one person every seven minutes since winning the election 18 months ago.
Reform officially has 268,631 paid members, making Mr Farage’s party the largest party in the UK, in another blow to Sir Keir Starmer.
Mr Farage said: “As we have suspected for some time, Reformation is now the largest political party in British politics; a huge milestone for us. The age of two-party politics is dead.”
It comes as Britain’s leading polling guru, Sir John Curtice, suggested that support for Reformation may have plateaued after a significant rise throughout this year, but that it represented the biggest attack on the two-party system since the Second World War.
Sir John said Independent: “The reform drive is ahead of the polls in terms of duration and is longer than the liberal SDP Alliance’s push in late 1981-82, which is the last important point.”
But he added: “I think my view for a long time has been that, except in exceptional circumstances for Reform, 30 per cent or a little bit higher looks like a plateau, because they’re going after a very, very niche market.
“The proportion of people who voted for Brexit is around 50 percent, but nowadays approximately more than 40 percent of the population is not in favor of Brexit.
“You’re never going to get this entire market. And they’ve barely moved since the beginning of May. It’s very, very stable.”
He noted that support for reform was “heavily dependent on Farage” but efforts to “dig the dirt on him” were influencing reform at the polls.
In particular, he warned that allegations that Mr Farage made racist remarks as a schoolboy had little impact on the Reform vote, even if it was on those on the left who disliked him.
But the issue of racism saw a crack in the Reformation.
In an issue for Mr Farage, the man expected to be leader of Reformation in Scotland has distanced himself from his comments about English being spoken in Glasgow.
During a recent visit to Scotland’s largest city, Mr Farage described the fact that 29 per cent of children speak English as a second language as “the cultural collapse of Glasgow”.
Scottish SNP First Minister John Swinney described the comment as “racist”.
Lord Offord, who recently handed over Reform to the Conservative Party and is expected to become leader of the party in Scotland, said he “will not use that kind of language” in his speech on BBC Question Time.
A Labor spokesman said: “Our membership figures are published in our annual report. We do not comment on them on an ongoing basis throughout the year.”
