Beyond the media hype: Is the Reform bandwagon running out of road?

“We’ve absolutely walked it,” declared a jubilant Nigel Farage after last week’s local elections, hailing the results as a “historic shift.” Commentators rushed to agree. Reform UK is “in pole position to form the next government,” the Spectator announced.

Yet since those jubilant remarks, a by-election in Makerfield is now looming, which may become the clearest test yet of Reform’s electoral limits. Reform swept every council ward in the constituency during this month’s local elections, but the possible candidacy of Andy Burnham could derail Reform’s momentum in the Wigan borough. 

Polling expert Sir John Curtice has suggested Labour would have “less than a 5 per cent chance” of holding the seat without Burnham, highlighting both Reform’s momentum and the Greater Manchester mayor’s popularity in the North West. The contest could reveal whether Reform’s support is deep enough to overcome tactical anti-Reform voting behind a high-profile and popular Labour figure. 

Whatever the outcome in Makerfield, the race reflects a broader shift in British politics. With the change Labour promised two years ago still undelivered in the eyes of many voters, the country is fragmenting into an increasingly volatile seven-party contest, and Reform appears to be the chief beneficiary.

The far-right party won roughly a third of the council seats contested in England, surged in parts of Wales, and inflicted heavy losses on Labour in areas once considered secure. The headlines wrote themselves: Britain’s political landscape is changing.

But beneath the drama lies a more complicated reality. Reform’s national vote share is actually slipping, and whether the party’s support is enough to carry Farage to Downing Street is far less certain than the headlines suggest. Tactical voting against Reform is already emerging. The Conservatives, though battered, are not dead and Britain’s increasingly fragmented political system may ultimately prevent Reform from converting media momentum into parliamentary power.

Far from proving Reform is destined for government, these elections may instead reveal the limits of Farage’s project.

The numbers behind the hype

The most noteworthy metric deployed to understand the elections is the National Equivalent Vote (NEV), an estimate used by academics to model how Britain would vote if local elections were held nationwide.

Analysis of more than three million votes put Reform first on 27%, ahead of the Conservatives on 20%, Labour on 15%, and the Liberal Democrats and Greens on 14% each. Translated into Westminster seats, the figures point not to a Reform majority but to a hung parliament.

More importantly, Reform’s 27% represents a decline from last year’s equivalent of 32%.

That matters. The narrative surrounding Reform suggests unstoppable growth, yet the underlying data points in the opposite direction. While Reform dominated headlines and picked up council seats, its national support actually softened.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives recovered modestly from 18% to 20%, despite months of predictions of electoral extinction.

The Greens were, by this measure, the election’s real success story, doubling their equivalent vote share from 7% to 14%.

What emerges is not a simple story of Reform ascendency, but one of political fragmentation. Reform is benefiting from concentrated local gains, anti-incumbent anger, and relentless media attention more than from a sustained nationwide surge.

As pollster Peter Kellner observed, the trends on the left and right are diverging, Reform’s vote share is slipping while the Conservatives stabilise, Labour is weakening while the Greens grow stronger.

That is not the profile of a party marching inexorably towards power.

The Conservatives are wounded, not finished

Predictions of Conservative collapse also appear premature.

Despite Reform’s advances, the Conservatives remain dominant in large parts of southern England. They retained control of Hampshire and regained boroughs in London, including Westminster, which Labour captured in 2022.

This matters because Reform’s coalition remains geographically uneven. It performs strongly in post-industrial towns, coastal areas, and places suffering economic decline. But it struggles more in affluent southern constituencies where older Conservative voters remain wary of Farage-style populism.

That weakness creates an opening for tactical anti-Reform voting, something already visible in these local elections, where Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters backed Conservative candidates in some areas to block Reform victories.

Polling from More in Common in March  showed more people than ever are choosing Reform as the party they would actively vote against. The research found 38% of voters would vote against Reform, more than against any other party.

If we think back to marginal contests, like Gorton and Denton earlier this year, and Caerphilly in 2025, voters moved towards whichever candidate was best placed to defeat Reform.

There’s no hiding from the fact that the elections were bad for Labour in that where the electorate saw it as a straight Labour versus Reform, then the latter often emerged as victors. However, the evidence also shows that in those seats where other parties could be in a position to keep Reform out, that’s where voters chose to vote tactically.

The great Labour election victories of 1945, 1966 and 1997, (2024 was an odd one in that the Starmer ‘landslide’ was never built on great popular support), were all based on an alliance between traditional working-class and progressive middle-class voters. There is no sign that Farage is anywhere close to building such an equivalent reactionary alliance on the right. 
Which means that in 2029, Reform could face the same electoral squeeze that has historically punished insurgent parties under Britain’s voting system.

Once predictable first-past-the-post is becoming less predictable

For decades, Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system insulated Labour and the Conservatives from serious challengers. Smaller parties could win millions of votes and still secure very few seats.

That logic is beginning to shift.

The local elections showed how fragmented British politics has become. Reform won control of councils despite securing well below 50% of the vote in many places. Voters are increasingly willing to abandon the traditional two-party system, and the old warning that voting for smaller parties is “wasted” is no longer viable.

As pollster Sir John Curtice argues, Britain has entered a genuinely multi-party era.

“Once upon a time, Conservative and Labour politicians would cry, ‘A Liberal vote is a wasted vote’. That kind of argument has seemingly lost its force,” he said.

Yet fragmentation cuts both ways. Reform benefits from it locally, but Westminster elections are far more brutal. In 2024, Labour and the Tories still won 533 Commons seats between them, while Reform and the Greens, despite collectively receiving more than a fifth of the national vote, secured only nine seats.

This creates a paradox for Reform. Britain’s electoral system may no longer suppress smaller parties as effectively as before, but it still punishes parties whose support is broad rather than efficiently concentrated.

And tactical voting can extend that problem.

Tactical voting could become Reform’s biggest obstacle

Much of the next general election may come down to one question: can anti-Reform tactical voting be organised effectively?

Historically, centre-left voters have been more disciplined at tactical coordination than the right. In 2024, tactical voting played a decisive role in removing the Conservatives from power, as Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green supporters coalesced around whichever candidate was best placed to defeat the Conservatives locally.

A similar dynamic could emerge against Reform.

Even at roughly 30% support, which incidentally has dipped to 26% this year, seven in ten voters still prefer another party.

The local elections may therefore represent not the beginning of limitless growth, but the upper limit of Reform’s appeal.

More importantly, many voters actively dislike Nigel Farage. His pint-swilling, blokey-banter form of populism, appears to repel as many voters as it attracts. His finances are facing growing scrutiny, while his past bromances with Trump and Putin remain politically toxic with large sections of the British public.  Farage’s approval ratings stand at minus 38, having declined consistently since the middle of last year.

As journalist Sam Bright argues: “Judging by his current leadership of Reform – the dodgy donations, the racist candidates, and the punitive populism – Farage is incapable of breaking this mould. He’s instinctively divisive – preferring to build loyalty among an engaged, enraged sub-section of voters rather than unify a coalition capable of winning a majority.”

That creates fertile conditions for tactical alliances.

Electoral Calculus recently warned that Reform may face “the same tactical voting push” that gave the Tories their worse-ever general election defeat. If anti-Reform coordination intensifies, Farage’s party could find itself trapped, strong enough to frighten opponents, but not broad enough to overcome a united anti-Reform vote.

Reform could also splinter from within  

Reform faces pressure not only from opponents, but from being outflanked by even more extreme parties.

One of the most interesting stories from the local elections came from Great Yarmouth, where Rupert Lowe, former Reform MP and founder of the breakaway movement Restore Britain, claimed great local success through its offshoot party, Great Yarmouth First.

The group contested ten seats and won all of them. Norfolk County Council, once safely Conservative, was thrown into no overall control after both Reform and Lowe-backed candidates surged.

That success reflects a wider mood within sections of populist right that Reform itself is becoming too cautious, too managerial, too centred around Farage.

In a pub conversation after the elections, one man summed up the confusion and volatility of this political space perfectly.

“Everything will be okay if Restore get in,” he told me, before adding: “We need Tommy Robinson as PM,” seemingly confusing Restore Britain with Advance UK, the far-right party launched by former Reform deputy leader Ben Habib and openly backed by Robinson supporters.

The exchange was chaotic, but it showed how fluid and unstable this political constituency still is. Many voters drifting towards Reform are not driven by ideological coherence so much as anger, alienation, distrust of mainstream politics, and a desire to punish the establishment. Their loyalties are shallow and can shift quickly between competing anti-system movements.

For now, Restore Britain remains small and highly localised. But its emergence hints at a familiar problem in populist politics, fragmentation. Protest movements built around personality, grievance and anti-establishment energy often struggle to maintain unity once success arrives.

Reform’s rise depends heavily on presenting itself as the singular vehicle for right-wing anger. If competing nationalist movements begin splintering that vote, Farage’s path becomes far harder.

Reform has momentum, but momentum isn’t power

None of this means Reform UK should be dismissed, far from it. The party has terrified both Labour and the Conservatives, but the local elections do not prove Reform is on the verge of government. They show a party with undeniable momentum, but also clear structural weaknesses, including a slipping vote share, geographical limits, tactical opposition, and vulnerability to fragmentation.

British politics is entering an era of instability in which no party commands broad national loyalty. Reform is thriving in that environment, but so are the Greens and smaller insurgent movements.

And that is why the looming Makerfield by-election matters far beyond a single seat. If Andy Burnham were able to halt Reform’s advance there, it would suggest that a sufficiently popular, locally rooted candidate can still assemble a broad anti-Reform coalition under Britain’s fragmented electoral system. If not, it would strengthen the argument that Reform’s appeal is beginning to cut through even against high-profile opposition figures.

Farage may have succeeded in breaking the old two-party order. Turning that disruption into actual power, however, is a far more difficult task.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch