Reform UK

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 23rd of December 2024, Reform UK launched a public online tracker of its membership, and at noon it showed 120,549 members. Three days later the party announced that it had passed the Conservatives' most recently published total of 131,680. That made it the second-largest party in the United Kingdom by membership, behind only Labour. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, wrote on Twitter that Reform's totals were faked. In reply, Reform invited the Financial Times, Sky News, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph to inspect the website's code and the data behind it. Each outlet confirmed that the ticker was accurate. Nigel Farage called the allegation "disgraceful" and threatened legal action unless Badenoch apologised.

  Reform UK is a political party to the right of the Conservatives. It began life in 2018 as a vehicle for a single demand, and since then it has changed its name, its leaders and its message. How does a party built around one cause end up counting its members against the Conservatives'? Who owns it, who pays for it, and who votes for it? And why do political scientists, broadcasters and the party itself disagree so sharply about what to call it?

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• 2. Brexit Party Years

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  Catherine Blaiklock, a former economics spokesperson for the UK Independence Party, announced the Brexit Party on the 20th of January 2019. The company itself had been incorporated in November 2018. Blaiklock became its first leader, and the Electoral Commission registered it on the 5th of February 2019 to contest English, Scottish, Welsh and European Union elections. Nigel Farage had been an independent member of the European Parliament since leaving UKIP in early December 2018. On the day of the announcement he said the party was Blaiklock's idea, but that she had acted with his full support.

  On the 8th of February 2019, Farage said he would stand for the party in any European election held in Britain. Steven Woolfe and Nathan Gill, two more MEPs who had come from UKIP, said they would stand as well. The lead aim was to take the United Kingdom out of the EU and then to trade with the world on World Trade Organization terms.

  In April 2019 Farage drew a line between his old party and his new one. He said there was "no difference between the Brexit party and UKIP in terms of policy, but in terms of personnel, there's a vast difference". He criticised UKIP's connections to the far right. He wanted support from "across the board", including former UKIP voters and Conservative and Labour voters who had backed Brexit. The party would offer a policy platform rather than a manifesto, and only after the European elections.

  In May 2019 Farage held up Italy's Five Star Movement as a model. It had grown from a protest group into the largest party in both houses of the Italian Parliament. Farage said he saw the Brexit Party as "running a company, not a political party, hence our model of registered supporters".

  The European Parliament election of the 23rd of May 2019 was the test. Nine MEPs who had left UKIP in opposition to Gerard Batten's leadership joined in February 2019, and by mid-April there were fourteen. Only three of those sitting MEPs were chosen to stand: Farage, Gill and Jonathan Bullock. Twenty-nine of the party's candidates won seats, a group that included Richard Tice and the former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe. The party took 31.6% of the UK vote, and BBC News called it "the clear winner in the UK's European elections."

  Two of those MEPs did not last the year. Andrew England Kerr was expelled on the 29th of September 2019 over remarks about a business and a product in which he had a direct financial investment. Louis Stedman-Bryce resigned on the 19th of November 2019, objecting to the selection of a Scottish candidate who had openly posted homophobic views.

  On the 11th of November 2019, the last day for candidates to register, Farage announced that the party would not stand in the 317 seats held by a Conservative MP. Most of its candidates backed the decision, which was meant to avoid splitting the anti-EU vote. The party still fielded 273 candidates in the general election, took two percent of the vote, and won no seats. Before polling day on the 8th of December 2019, Farage announced a plan. After Brexit, the party would rename itself the "Reform Party" and campaign to change the electoral system and the structure of the House of Commons.

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• 3. Lockdowns and a New Name

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  The United Kingdom left the European Union on the 31st of January 2020, and Farage began looking for a new right-wing populist project. Later that year the COVID-19 pandemic reached the country. The Conservative government imposed a series of national lockdowns, and Farage turned to anti-lockdown campaigning, in step with similar sentiment in other countries.

  In November 2020, Farage and Richard Tice told the Electoral Commission they wanted to rename the party Reform UK. The new platform opposed further lockdowns and promised changes to British government, including the BBC and the House of Lords. The party also gave its support to the Great Barrington Declaration. The Commission approved the new name on the 4th of January 2021.

  Farage stepped down as leader in March 2021, and the party chairman, Tice, took over. David Bull, a former North West England MEP, was named deputy leader on the 11th of March 2021. The new leadership planned a full slate of candidates for the Senedd, the Scottish Parliament and the London Assembly, with Tice standing in London.

  The May 2021 elections went badly. Michelle Ballantyne, a former Conservative MSP who had sat as an independent, joined in January 2021 and led the party in Holyrood. She lost its only Scottish seat in May and resigned as Scottish leader in February 2022. Reform won nothing above local level and lost its deposit in the Hartlepool by-election.

  In the Senedd election, Reform contested every constituency and regional list. It took 1.6% of the constituency vote, placing seventh, and 1.1% of the regional vote, placing eighth. In Scotland it fielded no constituency candidates and received only 5,793 list votes across the whole country. In London the party finished tenth on the London-wide list with 25,009 votes.

  In October 2022, Reform and the Social Democratic Party announced an electoral pact. Tice declared that Reform would stand in 630 constituencies across England, Scotland and Wales with "no ifs, no buts". In December 2022 two Conservative councillors, David White in Barnsley and Richard Langridge in West Oxfordshire, defected to stand as prospective parliamentary candidates.

  The cost-of-living crisis brought renewed media attention that December, after Farage said Reform would contest every seat at the next general election. Opinion polls showed a modest rise in support. The Daily Telegraph described Reform as a "threat on the Right" to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservative government.

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• 4. The 2024 Breakthrough

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  Reform UK held its party conference in London on the 7th and the 8th of October 2023, with 1,100 attendees. On the 20th of October, Tice confirmed that the party would contest Conservative seats at the next general election. By January 2024 it was polling around 10%. Because it drew former Conservative voters, commentators cast it as a spoiler, and The Guardian speculated that its votes could cost the Conservatives more than 30 additional seats.

  Lee Anderson, elected as the Conservative MP for Ashfield in 2019, defected in March 2024 and became Reform's first MP. That month Simon Danczuk, the former Labour MP for Rochdale, joined and stood in the Rochdale by-election. He received 6.3% of the vote, and George Galloway won the seat. Also in March, Reform formed an electoral pact in Northern Ireland with the Traditional Unionist Voice.

  In May 2024, Alex Wilson became Reform's first London Assembly member, elected through the London-wide vote. On the 3rd of June 2024, Farage replaced Tice as leader. The July general election gave the party five MPs in England: Anderson, re-elected, plus Farage for Clacton, Tice for Boston and Skegness, Rupert Lowe for Great Yarmouth and James McMurdock for South Basildon and East Thurrock. Its Northern Irish partner won one seat, taken by Jim Allister. Zia Yusuf replaced Tice as chairman on the 11th of July, and Tice became deputy leader in place of Ben Habib.

  Councillors were the next target. By March 2024, two-thirds of Reform's councillors were former Conservatives. In October 2024 Farage said he was contacting more than a thousand Conservative councillors, adding that "a huge number of them genuinely agree with us and what we stand for". Reform's vote share in a Blackpool by-election in the Marton ward, held on the 3rd of October, rose from 9.5% to 38.8%.

  High-profile recruits followed in November and December 2024. They included the former MPs Andrea Jenkyns and Lucy Allan, Tim Montgomerie, who founded ConservativeHome, the actress and singer Holly Valance, and the property developer Nick Candy. On the 3rd of February 2025, Reform topped a national YouGov poll for the first time. In May 2025 Sarah Pochin won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by a majority of 6.

  The English local elections of May 2025 put Reform first, with 677 seats, ten councils and two mayoralties. Its projected national vote share was 30%, against 23% for UKIP in 2013. It was the first set of local elections since the measure began in which neither the Conservatives nor Labour had the highest share. In June 2025 Reform finished third in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election with 26.1%. Sir John Curtice and other journalists called it a breakthrough in Scotland.

  Defections carried on through the autumn. Danny Kruger, the Conservative MP for East Wiltshire, joined on the 15th of September 2025 and said "the Conservatives are over". Two days later Mason Humberstone of Stevenage Borough Council became the first Labour councillor to switch. In December 2025 Malcolm Offord became Reform's first and only peer, and he later retired from the Lords after being named Scottish leader. In January 2026, Nadhim Zahawi joined, followed by the MPs Robert Jenrick, Andrew Rosindell and Suella Braverman, bringing the Commons total to eight.

  The elections of May 2026 gave Reform more than 1,400 council seats, a figure the record puts at 1,451. In the Scottish Parliament it won 17 of 129 seats, tying Scottish Labour for second place behind the Scottish National Party. In Wales it won 34 of 96 Senedd seats, second to Plaid Cymru. Dan Thomas became leader of the opposition in Wales and formed what the record calls the Thomas shadow cabinet.

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• 5. Promises and Price Tags

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  In May 2019 the Electoral Commission published the Brexit Party's constitution after a freedom of information request. It spoke of encouraging people who aspire to improve their lot and of diminishing the role of the State. Patrick O'Flynn, a former UKIP MEP who backed the party that year, saw classical liberalism in the text and a Thatcherite core.

  The first policy beyond Brexit came on the 4th of June 2019. The party proposed turning British Steel into a partly worker-owned company, which was described as "a hybrid of Conservative and Labour policy". It also backed cutting foreign aid, scrapping HS2, free WiFi on public transport and abolishing inheritance tax. In July 2019 it signed a declaration with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Scottish National Party calling for proportional voting at Westminster.

  At the October 2021 conference, Tice attacked the Conservatives as a party of "high tax". He promised a low-tax, low-regulation platform and a higher income tax threshold, rising from £12,500 to £20,000. He also wanted energy companies owned by the government or British pension funds. In January 2023, Reform called for an end to foreign ownership of critical infrastructure such as water.

  On the 17th of June 2024, Reform launched its manifesto, Our Contract with You, which Farage presented during an interview. It promised to raise the higher-rate tax threshold from £50,271 to £70,000, abolish stamp duty below £750,000 and abolish inheritance tax on estates below £2 million. It proposed freezing non-essential immigration and raising employer National Insurance to 20% for foreign workers. It also offered an extra £17bn a year for the NHS, 40,000 more police officers in five years and defence spending of 2.5% of GDP within three years.

  The manifesto rejected net zero and put utilities and critical infrastructure under 50% public ownership, with pension funds holding the rest. It would leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Reform put the cost at £140 billion and said it would raise £150 billion a year in savings, including from cuts to working-age benefits.

  The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the sums "do not add up" and rested on "extremely optimistic assumptions". It warned that the savings would almost certainly mean substantial cuts to the quantity or quality of public services. Sky News analysis found the higher-rate change would give a tax cut of close to £6,000 to the top 10% of earners, far outweighing any gain for the lowest paid.

  In April 2025 Reform called for nationalising the Scunthorpe steel plant, along with two electric arc furnaces at Liberty Steel's Rotherham site. In September 2025 it said it would abolish indefinite leave to remain. Its benefits plan would withdraw payments from people judged fit to work if they declined two job offers or found no employment within four months. In February 2026 Jenrick said Reform would reinstate the two child benefit cap, reversing its earlier pledge to remove it.

  Climate policy has drawn the sharpest fire. A YouGov poll in November 2024 found Reform voters twice as likely as the public to believe that climate change is not caused by human activity. In October 2021 Tice called net zero "literally net stupid". In February 2025 he said there was no evidence that man-made carbon dioxide would change the climate, and scientists told Sky News he was "categorically wrong". In November 2025 he said humans had possibly affected the climate, but only by "a very modest percentage". NASA says human activity is the principal cause of unprecedentedly fast warming.

  In June 2024 the party had accepted more than £2.3 million since December 2019 from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries and climate science deniers. In April 2025 Farage called the government's net zero policy "lunacy", and the energy secretary Ed Miliband accused him of peddling "nonsense and lies". In July 2025 Andrea Jenkyns, Reform's mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, answered a question on whether climate change exists with a flat "No".

  Foreign policy shifted fast in 2026. Farage first backed Israel and the United States in the Iran war and urged Keir Starmer to open UK bases to American forces. Shortly afterwards he reversed course and said Britain should not get involved in another foreign war. Jenrick said the war needed to end quickly because it was making Britain poorer.

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• 6. Far Right or Not

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  In March 2024 the BBC described Reform UK as far-right, then retracted the description and apologised. It said the wording "fell short of our usual editorial standards". Reform rejects the label and has threatened legal action against media outlets that use it. Farage says the party occupies the "genuine centre-right", and in May 2024 he called it a "brand new Conservative movement".

  Professor Tim Bale argued that the far-right label is unhelpful because it "causes too visceral a reaction and at the same time is too broad to be meaningful". He urged a distinction between the extreme right and the populist radical right. He later called Farage the "British representative of the populist radical right in Europe", on the more moderate side of far-right parties there. By 2025 he said most political scientists would call Reform far-right, if that is accepted as the umbrella term.

  Other scholars sorted the party into different boxes. Bennie and Widfeldt, writing in Parliamentary Affairs, placed it in a European family of radical right parties that work within democratic structures. Hayton, in British Politics, wrote that it had become a "fully-fledged right-wing populist party" and a populist radical right party, beyond the single issue of Brexit. Newton, in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, called it right-wing populist and set it apart from minor far-right parties.

  Shuttleworth, Brown and Mondon took a harder line. They argued that the far-right label had been regularly left out of academic and public discussion despite the party's "clear credentials". They asked whether the BBC apology was part of the reason. Since that apology, journals including Ethnic and Racial Studies and Nations and Nationalism have used the label.

  The argument also runs the other way. Ross Clark, writing in The Spectator, claimed that Reform had become a left-wing party, citing its stances on restoring welfare benefits, nationalising steel and raising government spending. Wraight, in The Political Quarterly, described its brand as "little Englander conservatism".

  In March 2024, Matthew Goodwin analysed the vote for the Legatum Institute. He found that Reform, like UKIP and the Brexit Party, was strongest among older voters and Leave voters, and fairly even across social classes. Among likely Reform voters, 36% were in social grade AB, 22% in C1, 23% in C2 and 19% in DE.

  A Financial Times analysis in May 2025 found that Reform's projected vote share tracked poor social mobility in a constituency. Of the 30 seats with the lowest mobility, 27 voted Leave in 2016. In October 2025 a YouGov poll found that 46% of white British respondents saw the party and its policies as racist, against 36% who did not. Among ethnic minority respondents, 13% were favourable and 80% negative.

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• 7. Owning the Party

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  In its early days the Brexit Party officially had three members: Farage, Tracey Knowles and Mehrtash A'Zami. Everyone else signed up as a registered supporter. By June 2019 more than 115,000 supporters were paying, yet they had no say over policy, and Farage hand-picked candidates himself. Since 2021 the party has also offered ordinary membership.

  The original company, Reform UK Party Limited, had fifteen shares. Farage held 53%, Tice about a third, and the chief executive Paul Oakden and the treasurer A'Zami each held less than seven percent. After Oakden was removed in August 2024, Farage took his shares and reached 60%.

  In September 2024 Farage promised to give up all his shares. That would let members vote on a constitution and motions, and remove him as leader if more than half wrote to Yusuf. On the 20th of February 2025 ownership passed to Reform 2025 Limited, a nonprofit company limited by guarantee with no shareholders. Farage and Yusuf are its directors, and Companies House lists no person with significant control. Yusuf called it an important step in "professionalising the party as we prepare for government."

  The first governing board was announced on the 22nd of August 2025. Six members joined the leader and the chairman. Members elected three of them: Dan Barker, Darren Grimes and Gawain Towler.

  ITV News reported that membership rose by 50% to 45,000 in the week after Farage's return on the 3rd of June 2024. It reached 80,000 by September, 100,000 by the end of November and 200,000 on the 10th of February 2025. On the 26th of September 2025 the party announced 250,000 paid-up members, against 123,000 for the Conservatives and 309,000 for Labour. Later it cited more than 268,000 members, with 450 branches where a year earlier there were none. Standard annual membership cost £25, compared with £70.50 for Labour.

  Research by Bale and the Party Members Project, done just after the 2024 election, found the average Reform member was 61 years old. Almost half were over 65, and very few were between 18 and 24. Members were mostly middle class, with a large share in the Midlands and North. Nearly all had voted Leave, and 90% described themselves as right-wing to some degree.

  On the money, Farage said the Brexit Party raised £750,000 online in its first ten days, all in sums under £500. He said it would take nothing from Arron Banks, a key former UKIP funder. Channel 4 News then revealed undeclared travel and accommodation benefits that Banks had provided to Farage before he joined the party. The European Parliament opened an investigation on the 21st of May 2019, and the party banned Channel 4 News from its events.

  In 2019 Christopher Harborne gave the party £6.4m and Jeremy Hosking gave £200,000. Two days before the European election, Farage accused the Electoral Commission of "interfering in the electoral process" after it visited party headquarters. Asked about foreign-currency donations, he answered "Absolutely not, we only take sterling". In July 2019 the Commission said the party's internal controls had been inadequate, and the party returned a £1,000 donation whose source could not be identified.

  The Guardian reported in May 2024 that 80% of the party's funding, in loans and donations, came from Tice. He said the Conservatives spend £35 million a year, against less than £1.5 million for Reform. In June 2025, openDemocracy reported almost £5m from wealthy donors since 2023, including people linked to fossil fuels, financial services and tax havens. In December 2025 the Electoral Commission reported over £10 million in donations for the third quarter of 2025. Harborne gave £9 million of it, and Nicholas Candy gave £250,000 and £240,000.

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• 8. Turbulence Inside

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  On the 26th of September 2025, Nathan Gill pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to eight counts of bribery. Gill had briefly led Reform UK Wales in 2021 and left the party later that year. The charges covered payments from the pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Oleh Voloshyn between 2018 and 2019, when Gill was a Brexit Party MEP. In return, Gill made pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament and the media. He was sentenced on the 21st of November 2025 to ten years and six months in prison. Farage called him a "bad apple".

  In November 2024, senior figures split over supporters of the activist Tommy Robinson. Two parliamentary candidates expressed sympathy for some who joined August's anti-immigration protests, over objections from Tice and Farage. On the 5th of January 2025, Elon Musk, who had backed Farage, tweeted that Reform needed a new leader because Farage "doesn't have what it takes". The break followed Farage's disagreement with Musk's comments supporting Robinson, who had been jailed for contempt of court. Two days later Farage said he wanted to "mend fences" with a man he called a "heroic figure".

  In March 2025 Rupert Lowe was suspended. Accounts give two reasons: his criticism of Farage's leadership, and allegations of bullying office staff. Those around Lowe claimed that as many as 7,000 members resigned in protest, which Reform denied. On the 30th of June 2025, Lowe launched Restore Britain, and Ben Habib launched Advance UK on the same day. Restore Britain became a party on the 13th of February 2026, and several Reform councillors defected to it.

  Zia Yusuf resigned as chairman on the 5th of June 2025, writing on Twitter that he no longer believed working to elect a Reform government was a good use of his time. It came hours after Sarah Pochin called for a national ban on burqas, which Reform said was not party policy. Yusuf had not been told and called her move "dumb". He returned 48 hours later, saying the resignation was "a decision born of exhaustion" and a "mistake".

  That June, Farage and Yusuf set up a Department of Government Efficiency, inspired by Elon Musk's unit in the Trump administration. It focused on Kent and Lancashire County Councils. Its head, the tech entrepreneur Nathaniel Fried, resigned on the 6th of June 2025, less than a week into the role. Yusuf took over the unit the next day. On the 5th of July 2025 the MP James McMurdock suspended himself during an inquiry over property tax offences, was cleared by the parliamentary standards commissioner, and stayed on as an independent.

  Vetting caused its own trouble. In March 2025 Jack Aaron became head of vetting. In May 2025 the far-right figures David Clews and Mark Collett urged their supporters to "infiltrate" Reform and drag it further right. A spokesman said the far right would never be welcome and a "stringent vetting process" was in place. In July 2025 the party replaced that process with a looser "common-sense vetting" approach.

  Council rule brought a third round of problems. Within six weeks of the 2025 elections Reform's 677 councillors had fallen to 668, after five suspensions and four resignations by newly appointed members. In August 2025 Mick Barton, Reform's leader on Nottinghamshire County Council, banned the Nottingham Post from speaking to him or his councillors. On the 18th of October 2025, The Guardian released video of an online meeting in which Linden Kemkaran, leader of Kent County Council, swore at colleagues who criticised her. Four councillors were suspended over the leak, and the leader and deputy leader of the Cornwall Council group resigned.

  The party is already looking past those disputes. On the 7th of January 2026, Reform announced Laila Cunningham as its candidate for the 2028 London mayoral election.

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