Nigel Farage has been handed a local elections breakthrough just three days ahead of May 1 as fewer people than ever are planning to vote Labour or Conservative.
Record numbers of English voters are turning away from the two biggest parties, polling guru Sir John Curtice has said – and as a result, Sir Keir Starmer has been warned that Reform UK “has already won”.
He said: “Fewer than half of the people who tell pollsters how they are going to vote say they are going to vote either Conservative or Labour. It has never been quite that low before.”
Curtice added that while Reform, along with its predecessors Ukip and the Brexit Party, has previously eaten into the Tory vote, it is now taking thousands of Labour votes too.
Record numbers of English voters are turning away from the two biggest parties
PA
“Reform, in a sense, have already won these local elections. One of the targets they set for themselves is to create local party organisations,” he told the Independent.
“Evidently, in the limited number of places we have elections, they have managed to create enough of an organisation to find 1,600 candidates, and they are fighting for more seats than any other party.”
“Ukip never got to fighting more than 75 per cent of the wards in 2013, so they have already won an organisational battle.”
The leading pollster said that Reform polling at around 15 per cent was “great news” for Labour as it “murdered” the Tories – which came to a head at the General Election.
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But now, he warned, Nigel Farage’s party – polling at 25 per cent – had surged into a position to stake claim to “loads” of Labour seats.
“We are in very uncertain territory… partly because Reform are intervening virtually everywhere. There is no baseline against which to measure them.”
And with Reform taking chunks out of the Tory vote, Curtice has also projected that the Liberal Democrats will romp through traditional Conservative heartlands – as highlighted by GB News back in March.
In a bleak analysis of the Conservatives’ outlook – mirroring concerns raised by their leader Kemi Badenoch – Curtice pointed to May 2021 as the party’s benchmark.
With Reform taking chunks out of the Tory vote, Curtice has also projected that the Liberal Democrats will romp through traditional Conservative heartlands
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“It is the day Boris Johnson won the Hartlepool by-election. It is a high Tory baseline in predominantly Tory areas. Even if the Tories were to achieve something of a recovery from last year, they would still lose heavily in these elections,” he said.
At the same time, the professor stressed the “highly uncertain” nature of next week’s vote, and warned against drawing conclusions from how many seats each party wins or loses.
In his warning to Starmer, Professor Curtice said: “The problem for Labour now is that whereas Reform, at 15 per cent, was great news for Keir Starmer, because it murdered the Tories and enabled a Labour Party with just 35 per cent of the vote to [win the general election], Reform at 25 per cent – at the same level as Labour – are in a position to take loads of Labour seats.
“We are in very uncertain territory … partly because Reform are intervening virtually everywhere. There is no baseline against which to measure them.”
