Reform winning big

[Keirawr]

Reform had a good night, winning county councils, probably will win a mayoral seat and won the parliamentary by election also.

You don’t have to be a Reform voter to acknowledge that they are taking votes off Labour. Or that they are being electorally effective.

No doubt the ‘basket of deplorables’ crowd will be along in a min with their usual quips calling reform voters names, having learned absolutely 0 from Brexit. Insult the voters at your peril.

These same people also totally miss the point that winning is winning. Feeling all moral and superior about ‘oh well, what will they actually do’ changes nothing.

Perhaps those who label everyone that wants immigration limiting as ‘racist’ Will think again. But likely not.

Are Labour doing well right now in Government??!

But why can’t our own homeless be put into these hotels? They’re clearly available - why are foreigners being prioritised?

https://bylinetimes.com/2019/11/15/the-brexit-party-ltd-nigel-farages-track-record-on-limited-companies-and-unlawful-dividends/

https://bylinetimes.com/2025/03/24/reform-uk-corporate-structure/

Exactly. Why won’t Reform become a proper political party? At the moment, they are not subject to the same rules as to where their political donations are coming from.
They seem to have lots of money to spend and seem to be targeting the young. My DGS (teenager) is being bombarded by ads from Reform on social media.

I can only go by my own area, where we didn't have an election this time around. People want politicians who'll get things done, but not the things the incumbents are doing, no, not that. Complete waste of money. Reform are untried, haven't disappointed anyone yet, and can stand as a totem for whatever the individual voter wants that's 'not this shower'. They've been helped an incalculable amount by the likes of the BBC wheeling out Farage every time he farts. You don't see Independent candidate Ken from Rochester getting free publicity for his campaign.

Yep, but thats the fault of us, the UK.... we have made that choice and you can bet your last $ that if we did this, we'd have outrage as people complain of having to live next to scummy drug user homeless people and having the wedding venue cancelled.....

Also, the migrants come here, we cannot stop them and the french certainly won't now.... if they were given nothing, they would then become the "homeless"...

Significance is Labour or the Tories will just import millions of people every year and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

To be fair I've thought that about labour this time round. So many new MPs. Felt sorry for them.

Our councils are so strapped they haven't got much to play with money wise.

No it's not. Homeless people in the UK get to access equally crappy hostels. In my experience a lot prefer to sofa surf or even sleep on the street because the provision is so dire but then again I'd imagine a lot of refugees also choose to "disappear" from the system. It's not a contest over who has it worst. Provision is appalling across the board and one thing we can agree on, I imagine, is that vulnerable people shouldn't be treated like this. Reform won't do anything about it though.

Reform voters, questions for you. Why is it that your Party is funded by a handful of super-wealthy millionaires? Why do you think these people care about 'the common people' like you and me? What do you think these funders are gaining from spending millions on trying to get Nige and his mates into positions of political influence? These people brought us Brexit and the subsequent fall in living standards that Reform voters complain about. Why do you want to keep shooting yourselves in the foot by asking for more of it?

Unfortunately Farrarge is also a self serving grifter. One possible outcome that I see after a general election is a divided vote on the right with a Labour government in power. This happened in the 80s and 90s with the Thatcher regime in power for 3 terms in office.

This isn’t correct. You can’t just return people under that agreement. Have you looked at EU countries and what they can do?

So you support reform? Hmm, well as I said.

The homeless do have help available for sleeping, probably not in the same hotel as asylum seekers but it will be somewhere to sleep. The reasons why this isn't always accessed is complex why people are in the streets in the first place.

This post needs repeating.

BEXIT was and is awful for the vast majority of people in the UK

REFORM in power, will be awful for the vast majority of people in the UK.

@Keirawr which of Reform's policies, other than on immigration, do you find attractive?

From the BBC

From 2024 to 2025, Labour's vote share dropped from 53% to 38.7%.
While Reform's swung from 18% to 38.72%

So Reform may have only won by 6 votes the swing to Reform is significant. While Governments usually get something of a kicking in local elections, I don't think its usually so early in the term.

Let's see what the rest of the day brings. My concern is this will create a snowball effect because people will see that Reform isn't a wasted vote.

We've a Tory council down here... in my village they've not given pp for a single affordable house but 10s of "for open market" ones, usually nice detached builds, allowed the bilding of 34 luxury properties....

They have taken away lots of on road parking places, even putting in a loading bay..... for what? there isn't anything to off load too... its now meant people are parking further away, in more dangerous/narrow places...

Yellow lines put around the place, even put in fcking one way system.... oh and built a traffic island in the wrong place, now has to be placed elsewhere as lorries cannot turn into a road because of it.....

All a total waste of money and not needed, meanwhile the same council has no money to fix up the pot holed road in and ot of the village.

Fertile ground for Reform...

I've just heard a Labour MP saying that on the doorstep the issues were PIP and winter fuel payments - WHAT - are they having a laugh.
Obviously it will be Brexit over again. No one can say immigrants as they are branded racist - so they waffle about something else.
It will be Brexit over again as the MPs were in their London bubble and had no clue what everyone else in the country thought. Same is happening again - pure denial and pure insistence by Labour that they know what they are doing as 10,000 immigrants cross the channel - as I said they are having a laugh and deserve all they get.

As in freedom of movement, yes it did. At the time of the 2021 Census there were 3,640,000 people from the EU living in England and Wales out of a total population of 59.6 million.

For context that is three times the number of people that live in Birmingham or about 40% of the population of London.

The decisions made about immigration since Brexit have been solely made by our own Government, for better or worse. You may well not agree with the decisions they have made but at least it is our choice to replace one party in government with another if we disagree with their policies.

I agree with you that Reform lack experience but it's factually incorrect to say that Reform are only attracting votes from areas that were right leaning.

What last night did show was that Reform are gaining votes from disgruntled Labour voters as well as disgruntled Tory voters. How else do you explain the Runcorn result.

The challenge for Labour is that they are bleeding votes to Reform on topics such as immigration and bleeding votes to the Greens from their more left wing supporters. If they carry on in the mushy middle then this will continue.

I think the Labour vote was more a protest against the Tories. Now Labour have shown themselves to be little more than Tory Lite - and I say this as a Labour supporter - the protest vote is moving elsewhere.

I agree.

And this time, the far right is in the ascendancy in much of Europe and the US.

This is an informative (and alarming) piece:

I can't abide Farage but the globalists have wrecked Britain and much of Europe.

Not this kind of change.