Reform UK, the force led by populist Nigel Farage, has overtaken Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party for the first time in the latest YouGov poll for The Times. With less than three weeks to go until the July 4 election, 19% of voters show their preference for Reform UK compared to 18% of the Tories, with the Labor Party consummating its almost twenty point lead in 37%.
“We have become the opposition party to Labor”Farage boasted to the ITV cameras in his second television debate against Labor number two Angela Rayner and former Tory leader candidate Penny Mordaunt. “In fact, we are ahead of the Conservatives in every part of the country except Scotland.”
Buoyed by the success of the far-right in the European elections, in the midst of the debacle of the conservative campaign, Farage assured that “the turning point” has occurred and urged the British to “join the rebellion” against the imminent Labor majority. “I will stand up against open borders, I will call for the deportation of those who cross the English Channel illegally, I will fight for the millions of Britons running their small businesses,” the Reform UK leader proclaimed.
Farage changed the dynamic of the campaign when he announced his candidacy for the Clacton constituency two weeks ago, despite his seven failed attempts to get Westminster on his feet. At 60 years old, the former MEP and founder of Ukip, baptized by his friend Donald Tump as ‘Mr. Brexit’, decided to break the deck and supplant his ally Richard Tice as leader of Reform UK.
The latest polls have triggered alarms among the Tories due to the loss of votes to the right and have activated fear of a Labor “supermajority”, even greater than that achieved in 1997 by Tony Blair. The line of attack in the last week has been to ask Britons not to sign “a blank cheque” to Keir Starmer and to prevent the country from becoming “a one-party socialist state”.
The launch of the conservative manifesto this week has apparently not served to stop the fall of the ‘premier’ Rishi Sunak, weighed down by the fiascos of his campaign and especially by his absence at the final D-Day celebration in Normandy. “We are still in the middle of the campaign and I am fighting for every vote,” declared Rishi Subak from Puglia, where he is participating in the G7 summit. “The only vote that counts is the 4th of July vote, but if that poll is replicated it would be like handing a blank check to Keir Starmer to raise all taxes.”
The specter hanging over the Tories is a disaster comparable to that which occurred in Canada in 1993, when the Conservative Party called elections after a recession and was humiliatingly defeated by the Liberal Party. The Conservatives were then forced to merge with the populist Reform Party of Canada, and it took them 13 years to return to power.
Farage has predicted during the campaign that in the United Kingdom “a merger like that of Canada, but in reverse” will occur, with the Conservative Party forced to join Reform UK. The nationalist leader, determined to turn the July 4 event into “the immigration elections”, assures at this point that “a conservative vote is a lost vote” in the face of the hypothetical victory of the Labor Party.