LONDON (AP) — The political pitch sounded familiar: The country is in crisis. The government must slash immigration, crack down on crime…
The political pitch sounded familiar: The country is in crisis. The government must slash immigration, crack down on crime, ditch green energy targets and reopen factories to “make Britain great again.”
The words of Nigel Farage to his Reform UK party’s two-day annual convention echoed themes that propelled U.S. President Donald Trump back to the White House.
Farage, the veteran hard-right politician, hopes a similar strategy can make him prime minister – a once-unthinkable idea that allies and opponents alike are taking seriously.
“If an election were held now, Reform would be the largest party by far, albeit probably short of an overall majority,” John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, wrote on the BBC website. “The question hanging over the party is – can they sustain this?”
Farage played a major role in taking the U.K. out of the European Union in 2020, but has never held political power. He has led a succession of small, fractious parties and only became a lawmaker in 2024 after seven failed attempts to get elected to Parliament.
Reform U.K. has only four lawmakers out of 650 in the House of Commons and got about 14% of the vote in last year’s national election. But for months it has led opinion polls, ahead of the center-left governing Labour Party and the main opposition Conservatives, which Reform aims to replace as Britain’s major party on the political right.
“Our country is in a very bad place,” Farage told delegates at the convention, which ends Saturday in Birmingham, central England. “We are the last chance the country has got to get this country back on track.”
Founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party, Reform now claims to have 240,000 members. In May, it won control of a dozen local authorities in England with Trump-like promises like “a DOGE for every county,” inspired by Elon Musk’s controversial spending-slashing agency.
