The hard-right party Reform UK led by Nigel Farage won a seat in Parliament by a handful of votes and looked set to make more gains in results Friday from local elections the party hopes will show it is a major player in British politics. <\/p>\n
Reform\u2019s Sarah Pochin was declared winner of the seat of Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by six votes after a recount, defeating Labour candidate Karen Shore. <\/p>\n
Labour easily won the district in last year\u2019s national election, but its lawmaker, Mike Amesbury, was forced to quit after he was convicted of punching a constituent in a drunken rage. <\/p>\n
Although Reform\u2019s victory was one of the narrowest in British history, Farage said \u201cit\u2019s a very, very big moment indeed\u201d for politics. <\/p>\n
The local elections Thursday in many areas of England were a test of feeling about Prime Minister Keir Starmer\u2019s center-left Labour government, 10 months after it was elected in a landslide. Both Labour and the main opposition Conservative Party braced for losses in the midterm poll. <\/p>\n
The Runcorn victory gives Reform, which got about 14% of the vote in last year\u2019s national election, five of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. National polls now suggest its support equals or surpasses that of Labour and the Conservatives, and it hopes to displace the Conservatives as the country\u2019s main party on the right before the next national election, due by 2029. <\/p>\n
Farage\u2019s party was on course, with partial results in, to win the newly created mayoralty of the Greater Lincolnshire region of east-central England. Labour retained three other mayoralties. <\/p>\n
Reform hopes to scoop up hundreds of municipal seats in the elections that are deciding 1,600 seats on 23 local councils, six mayoralties and one seat in Parliament. Ballots in most of those contests are being counted Friday. <\/p>\n
A majority of the local seats being contested were held by the Conservatives, whose leader Kemi Badenoch could face revolt if the party does very badly. <\/p>\n
Badenoch acknowledged that the results could be \u201cvery difficult\u201d for the Tories. The party did extremely well when these areas were last contested in 2021, a time when then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson\u2019s Conservative government enjoyed a surge in popularity due to the Covid-19 vaccine program. <\/p>\n
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the Conservatives and Reform are in \u201ca fight for the soul of the right wing of UK politics.\u201d He said Farage\u2019s \u201cpopulist radical right insurgency\u201d also poses a threat to Labour, targeting working-class voters with pledges to curb immigration, create jobs and cut government waste. <\/p>\n
The centrist Liberal Democrats also hope to build on their success in winning more affluent, socially liberal voters away from the Conservatives. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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