LONDON (AP) — The political pitch sounded familiar: The country is in crisis. The government must slash immigration, crack down on crime, ditch green energy targets and reopen factories to “make Britain great again.”
The words of Nigel Farage to his Reform UK party’s two-day annual convention that ended Saturday echoed themes that propelled U.S. President Donald Trump back to the White House.
Farage, the veteran hard-right politician, hopes a similar strategy can make him prime minister – a once-unthinkable idea that allies and opponents alike are taking seriously.
“If an election were held now, Reform would be the largest party by far, albeit probably short of an overall majority,” John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, wrote on the BBC website. “The question hanging over the party is — can they sustain this?”
Farage aims to go from outsider to power
Farage played a major role in taking the U.K. out of the European Union in 2020, but has never held political power. He has led a succession of small, fractious parties and only became a lawmaker in 2024 after seven failed attempts to get elected to Parliament.
Reform U.K. has just four lawmakers out of 650 in the House of Commons and got about 14% of the vote in last year’s national election. But for months it has led opinion polls, ahead of the center-left governing Labour Party and the main opposition Conservatives, which Reform aims to replace as Britain’s major party on the political right.
“Our country is in a very bad place,” Farage told delegates at the convention in Birmingham, central England. “We are the last chance the country has got to get this country back on track.”
Founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party, Reform now claims to have 240,000 members. In May, it won control of a dozen local authorities in England with Trump-like promises like “a DOGE for every county,” inspired by Elon Musk’s controversial spending-slashing agency.
Farage made the most of Parliament’s summer recess, when many politicians go on vacation, by holding regular news conferences to announce headline-grabbing policies like a plan to deport everyone who arrives in Britain without authorization.
He has capitalized on — critics say stoked — concerns about migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats, which he has called an invasion. He welcomed protests outside hotels housing asylum-seekers over the summer, some of which turned violent.
Opponents say Farage has demonized migrants and fueled misinformation. Last year, he inaccurately suggested police were withholding information about a stabbing rampage at a dance class that left three children dead. False claims that the attacker was an asylum-seeker sparked days of rioting across England.
Reform faces the competence test
Reform’s success in May’s local elections has brought responsibilities that will test the party’s competence, popularity and unity.
In his closing conference speech, Farage implored members: “Can we please exercise discipline and air our disagreements between each other in private?”
Some of the positions he shares with Trump, such as opposition to net-zero climate goals, are unpopular in Britain. Past praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin could also be a disadvantage in a country where most people back Ukraine in its war against Moscow’s invasion.
Farage’s depiction of Britain as a crime-ridden dystopia “in societal breakdown” has also met with skepticism.
In Washington on Wednesday, Farage testified to the House Judiciary Committee about what he called the “awful authoritarian situation” and lack of free speech in the U.K., citing the arrest of TV comedy writer Graham Linehan for tweets attacking transgender people and the jailing of Lucy Connolly, a woman who was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a social media post urging people to burn down hotels full of asylum-seekers.
“At what point did we become North Korea?” Farage asked rhetorically. Connolly, who was imprisoned after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred, was a featured speaker at Reform’s conference.
Farage was welcomed by Republicans on the committee, but was excoriated by Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin as a “Putin-loving free speech impostor and Trump sycophant.” In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer noted Farage’s absence from the House of Commons, saying that he had “flown to America to badmouth and talk down our country.”
Other parties scramble to respond
Both Conservatives and Labour are struggling to respond to Reform’s rise. Starmer has been criticized for not confronting the party more strongly, instead seeming to agree with some of its talking points about immigration. In a May speech, Starmer said Britain risked becoming an “ island of strangers,” a phrase that some felt echoed Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 speech predicting “rivers of blood” as a result of mass immigration.
Starmer later said he regretted using the phrase.
Political scientist Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, who studied reaction to the speech, said Labour is “legitimizing the immigration debate” in a way that plays into Reform’s hands and alienates its own supporters.
“Anti-immigration voters are not convinced by the turn, whereas pro-immigration voters are, and they’re the ones who become really upset about it,” said Turnbull-Dugarte, an associate professor at the University of Southampton.
The media also comes in for criticism for amplifying Farage. The Green Party, which has the same number of lawmakers, receives a fraction of the attention. Reform is far ahead in opinion polls, however.
The government does not have to call an election until 2029, and a lot can happen in four years.
Farage said Friday that amid instability in Starmer’s government, “there is every chance now of a general election happening in 2027, and we must be ready for that moment.”
