What Reform’s by-election success means for troubled Tories
If one party has been keeping the Conservatives awake at night over the past few months, it is Reform.
Pipping the Lib Dems to third place in the polls at roughly 12 per cent, they appear to be a major thorn in the Government’s side as the general election looms.
In the Blackpool South by-election on Thursday, the insurgent party originally founded by Nigel Farage as the Brexit Party, posted its best ever by-election result.
Reform took 16.8 per cent of the vote and came just 117 votes behind the second-placed Tory candidate.
Richard Tice, Reform’s leader, said the results showed his Right-wing party was “rapidly becoming the real opposition to Labour”.
However, despite this apparent momentum, the news on Friday morning with roughly one third of the 107 councils declaring results, showed not a single Reform candidate had been carried across the line to win a council seat.
But this may have more to do with the electoral system favouring the mainstream parties than anything else: In some wards, the Reform pick garnered roughly a third of all votes cast.
Much of their current poor national showing also comes down to the relatively small number of seats the party actually contested at the local level.
Last year, Mr Tice pledged to stand a Reform candidate against every Tory in a general election.
At these local elections on May 2, however, the party fielded just 316 council candidates when more than 2,600 seats were up for grabs.
The party will have been hoping to capitalise on the migrant crisis’s place at the top of the political agenda, with comparisons to the mid-2010s and Ukip at its heyday coming thick and fast.
In the 2016 English local elections – where a broadly similar total number of seats were on offer – Nigel Farage’s outfit mobilised 1,400 council candidates.
Different playing fields
Clearly the two iterations of Mr Farage’s party are on different playing fields in this regard.
A better metric of comparison would be the success rate of the candidates who actually appeared on ballots.
Results on Friday show a total of 129 Reform candidates across 21 of the declared seats stood in local elections, without a single one winning.
Reform’s only sitting candidate, in Sunderland, lost their seat.
Across the local elections in 2014 and 2015, Ukip took 4 per cent of all seats available.
Even Reform’s Blackpool South by-election result is dimmed somewhat by Ukip’s, with the earlier party luring a greater share of the constituency’s votes at the 2015 general election (17.3 per cent).
Despite the relative fragility these results suggest, digging down into ward-level data, where the party concentrated their efforts, shows their support to be much stronger than headline statistics suggest.
Reform put forward 25 candidates in Sunderland, more than for any other council in England. Mr Tice described the early results there as “outstanding”, adding: “We expect to beat Tories in the majority of 25 seats in Sunderland.”
The Reform candidate actually came second in 9 of the 25 wards, and claimed more votes than the Tories in 16 of them.
The party took an average of 14.9 per cent of the vote across all wards.
The fact that they failed to win a seat came down to the First Past The Post system used to elect local councillors, mimicking parliamentary elections.
The party’s high-water mark came in the Redhill ward, to the north west of the city centre, with the candidate there taking 32.3 per cent of all votes.
Bolton is where Reform went after its second-most seats, with 21 candidates across the town’s 22 wards. On average, they convinced 9.5 per cent of voters, going as far as 28.5 per cent and coming in second place in Tonge with the Haulgh.