Farage sets sights on general election win as he hails "seismic" shift in British politics

Nigel Farage said Reform UK can win the next general election as he celebrated “historic” victories in local contests across England that he said represent a “seismic” change in British politics.

He said the next targets for his party will be the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections and told newly-elected Reform councillors at Staffordshire County Showground he did not want to hear any more about any deals with the Conservatives.

Reform won the previously safe Labour seat of Runcorn and Helsby, near Liverpool, by just six votes, secured two mayoralties and gained control of a string of English councils, with votes still being counted last night.

Mr Farage said: “I have been doing this game for about 30 years and in many ways what happened last night is without a doubt the most significant day in my political career.

“It is a seismic change in British politics. It is of a proportion nobody could even have dreamt of.

“We want our country back, we want to re-establish the right values around family, community and country.”

Reform UK's Sarah Pochin and party leader Nigel Farage after the party won the seat in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election | PA

He told his supporters the Labour government now has a “real problem”.

“They’ve got a bit of headache now haven’t they?” he said.

“In the House of Commons the other day, Keir Starmer said ‘Nigel Farage will eat the Conservatives for breakfast’.

“I think he forgot – we’re going to eat the Labour Party for lunch as well. He’s got a real problem.”

He added: “There is a sense of unfairness, bordering on resentment, that tens of thousands of young men come into our country, get put up in hotels, get given everything.

“In Staffordshire they even get given driving lessons, and it’s the people with alarm clocks that get up in the morning, go to work and pay ever more tax to fund it.

“I think with this Government, this issue could do them as much harm as it did the last Conservative government.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch apologised to Tory candidates as her party suffered a local election drubbing.

The Tory leader conceded the public was “still not yet ready to trust us” after losing hundreds of councillors in a Reform UK surge.

Speaking to supporters in Peterborough, she said: “Protest parties are doing well today, I know that, it is disappointing.

“And I have a message for all of those Conservative councillors who lost their seats, how sincerely sorry I am for your loss, because I know how hard you worked, but we are going to win those seats back.”

Peterborough represented the one bright spot for the Conservatives on Friday, as former MP Paul Bristow won the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty with a majority of more than 10,500 over Reform.

The result saw the Tories regain the post that they held from 2017 until 2021, when they lost it to Labour.

READ MORE: Reform local elections: What the results and the dominance of Nigel Farage's party means for Scotland and SNP

Anna Smith, the Labour candidate, slipped into third place, some 7,000 votes behind Reform’s Ryan Coogan.

But elsewhere in the country, the Conservatives suffered at the hands of Reform and, with votes still being counted, could also be squeezed by the Liberal Democrats in their traditional heartlands.

By 5pm on Friday, the Conservatives had lost control of 10 county councils, four of them to Reform and the other six under no overall control.

Mrs Badenoch said: “What I saw everywhere I campaigned was that people are fed up with the Labour Government.

“They were angry about winter fuel payments. They were angry about the jobs tax, but they are still not yet ready to trust us.

“We have a big job to do to rebuild trust with the public.

“That’s the job the Conservative Party has given me and I am going to make sure that we get ourselves back to the place where we are seen as the credible alternative to Labour.”

READ MORE: Reform local election results: Nigel Farage's party triumphs over Labour in by-election in 'big moment'

The Tory leader had previously warned the local elections would be tough, as the last time most of the seats up for grabs were contested was in spring 2021 when Boris Johnson’s government was boosted by the Covid vaccine rollout.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said his party has replaced the Conservatives as “the party of middle England”.

Sir Ed said: “We have overtaken the Conservatives at these local elections, putting us on track to overtake them at the next general election too.

“From Wiltshire to Oxfordshire, from Shropshire to Devon, the Liberal Democrats have replaced the Conservatives as the party of middle England.”

Thursday’s elections saw the Lib Dems take control of Shropshire from the Conservatives and take overall control of Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire, while it became the largest party in Hertfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Devon.

Sir Ed credited his party’s success to former Tory voters “appalled by the Conservatives lurching to the extremes and cosying up to Nigel Farage”.

He added: “Today voters across the country have chosen our community politics over the Conservative Party’s neglect and disdain.”

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Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer conceded Labour’s loss to Reform UK in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election was “disappointing” and insisted he was determined to go “further and faster” in delivering change.

The Prime Minister told voters his party “get it” but defended what he claimed were the Government’s “tough but right” decisions as new MP Sarah Pochin took the seat by the historically slim margin.

On a visit to Bedfordshire after the result, Sir Keir said: “What I want to say is, my response is we get it. We were elected in last year to bring about change.”

He said that his party has “started that work”, such as bringing in measures to cut NHS waiting lists, adding: “I am determined that we will go further and faster on the change that people want to see.”

Sir Keir was asked whether he would reconsider unpopular policy changes, such as means-testing the winter fuel payment, amid murmurs of backbench discontent in the wake of the results.

“The reason that we took the tough but right decisions in the budget was because we inherited a broken economy,” he told Sky News.

“Maybe other prime ministers would have walked past that, pretended it wasn’t there… I took the choice to make sure our economy was stable.”

Meanwhile, First Minister John Swinney said Scotland must be “alive” to the “threat” of Mr Farage.

The SNP leader accused Labour and the Conservatives of making a “fundamental mistake” by “cosying up” to the right-wing party.

“The results coming in from England demonstrate that Farage is a real political threat,” he said, “and the Labour and Conservative parties have made fundamental mistakes in dealing with Farage because they have cosied up to them, rather than confronting them.

“The Scottish National Party has every intention of confronting the politics of Farage because they are politics that are populist, they are deceptive, they give people false hope, and they blame others, and the SNP will confront those politics.”