Reform UK is a British political party led by Nigel Farage. Its legal entity was originally known as the Brexit Party. Its chairman is Zia Yusuf, a 38-year-old former Merrill Lynch banker who made a fortune founding a luxury concierge app. Its deputy leader is Richard Tice.
Reform grew out of UKIP and the Brexit Party. Where those predecessors operated as wedges—threatening to split the Conservative vote to push the Tories towards a referendum and then a hard Brexit—Reform's objective is bigger: to replace the Conservatives as the dominant party of the British right. Mr Farage describes it bluntly as "a takeover".
The party is a far slicker operation than its predecessors. UKIP gatherings resembled church bazaars; Reform's rallies feature mechanical diggers, thundering music, dizzying lights and T-shirt guns. Where UKIP fielded candidates in just 50% of council seats in 2016, Reform contested 99.3% of possible council seats in the May 2025 local elections.
Jim Allister, the MP for Ballymena and one of Northern Ireland's most prominent politicians, leads a party with a formal link to Reform UK.
Reform was the biggest winner of the May 7th 2026 English local and devolved elections, gaining more than 1,450 councillors and control of 14 councils. It won majorities in Essex and Suffolk and became the largest party in Norfolk and East Sussex. Even so, projections suggested the party would have polled 26-27% nationally, down from 30-31% in 2025. Reform fell short in three of the four London boroughs it was targeting and was defeated in Wales, which Nigel Farage had previously called Reform's "top priority"; the Conservative share of the vote rose compared with 2025. Around 65% of voters have an unfavourable view of Mr Farage and 47% think his party is racist.
In May 2025 Reform swept to power in ten local councils and two mayoralties in Britain, giving it responsibility for some 8m residents. Dame Andrea Jenkyns serves as Reform's mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. Kent, Britain's largest council with 1.6m residents and a £2.6bn budget, is run by Linden Kemkaran, a former television anchor.
In office, Reform's radicalism has proved largely symbolic. Its councils have removed net-zero targets, flown St George's and Union flags outside buildings, and removed flags deemed to represent causes such as LGBT pride. But their budgets are strikingly similar to those of Labour and Conservative councils, according to Tony Travers of the London School of Economics. All plan to increase council tax—many by 5%—despite a national pledge to cut taxes. The party points to £70m in savings across its councils, largely from renegotiating IT contracts, but perilous finances have encouraged moderation: many councils are one wrong step away from bankruptcy. In Cornwall, Reform lost its council majority owing to infighting.
Nathan Gill, a former leader of Reform in Wales, was jailed for ten and a half years in November 2025 after admitting taking bribes to make speeches supporting a pro-Russian oligarch who faced investigations in Ukraine. Reform called his actions "treasonous and unforgivable". Keir Starmer has described the party as "pro-Putin or Putin-neutral" and has warned that pro-Russian interference in Britain's democracy "is for real".
Reform won 14% of the national vote and five of Britain's 650 parliamentary seats at the 2024 general election. Some 25% of those who had voted for Boris Johnson in 2019 switched to Reform, contributing to the Conservatives' worst defeat since 1832. In council elections on May 1st 2025, Reform's high opinion-poll standing was confirmed at the ballot box. Of the 244 seats the Tories lost, in 171 the Reform vote exceeded the margin of defeat.
The party polls at around 30% in Britain at large, in first place in national surveys. As of early 2026, Reform and the Green Party jointly poll higher than Labour and the Conservatives combined. An Economist electoral model using 10,001 simulations found that Reform's possible seat tally spans a huge range from 112 to 373—the difference between Mr Farage leading a rump opposition and becoming prime minister. In some constituencies, seats could be won on as little as 23% of the vote. It polls second in Scotland, on 25%—a striking result given that Scotland voted heavily to remain in the EU. Were the swings from a June 2025 by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse repeated in the Scottish Parliament elections in May 2026, Reform would be the biggest opposition party, according to Sir John Curtice, a psephologist. Under Britain's first-past-the-post system, small shifts in support can produce radically different outcomes: winning an extra 2% of voters at the expense of the Tories would increase Reform's notional tally of around 234 MPs by a further 63.
Reform's ranks are filling with Conservative defectors: Malcolm Offord, a former minister; Danny Kruger, once a speechwriter for David Cameron; Nadhim Zahawi, a former Tory cabinet minister who declared in January 2026 that "Britain needs Nigel Farage as prime minister"; Andrew Rosindell, the MP for Romford; and a raft of former MPs. Robert Jenrick, the serving shadow justice secretary, was expelled from the Conservatives by Kemi Badenoch when she discovered he too was planning to defect. On February 17th 2026 Mr Jenrick was announced as Reform's pick for chancellor. Mr Farage gave Tory MPs a deadline of May 7th 2026 (the day of local and devolved elections) to join his party. Its biggest donor is Christopher Harborne, a businessman and former Conservative donor, who has given the party £9m ($12m).
Robert Jenrick, Reform's shadow chancellor, outlined an economic plan in February 2026 that closely mirrors Rachel Reeves's approach: fiscal prudence, respect for the OBR and the Bank of England, and a commitment to "liberate planning". Reform's plan to save £25bn a year, mostly by cutting over 90% of foreign aid and ending welfare for foreigners, amounts to a mere 0.8% of GDP—insufficient to address the much bigger cause of rising spending, Britain's health-care bill. Like Labour, Reform supports the unaffordable triple lock on state pensions, the biggest driver of rising welfare costs. Some 73% of Reform voters want to retain it. Four-fifths of Reform voters oppose building on the green belt, limiting the party's planning ambitions just as NIMBYism has limited Labour's.
Critics argue that Reform's governing philosophy closely resembles the late-stage Conservative Party it aims to replace. The simplest policy prescriptions that would make Britain richer—making it easier to build, being open to foreign talent, making trade easier with Europe—are anathema to Reform, just as they were to the Tories. The party plans to cut civil-service headcount by 13%, a tactic tried with little success by David Cameron's government from 2010 to 2016. Its chairman, Zia Yusuf, co-founded Velocity Black, a concierge service for people who discuss airline lounges on first dates, and extols the virtues of "high-agency" appointees.
Reform's platform fuses Mr Farage's fixation on immigration with the appetite for tax cuts of Liz Truss and the industrial policy of Jeremy Corbyn. It promises "net zero" migration, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, a higher income-tax threshold, the abolition of inheritance tax, the nationalisation of the water and steel sectors, the scrapping of a two-child limit on universal credit (the country's main welfare payment), the scrapping of emissions-reduction policies, deregulation of cryptocurrencies and the creation of a "sovereign Bitcoin reserve". Its headline pledge is "Operation Restoring Justice": the deportation of an average of 120,000 people a year that it says have no right to be in Britain.
Reform UK has called Britain's Online Safety Act "borderline dystopian" and promised to repeal it. Nigel Farage compared Britain to North Korea on the subject at a special-committee session on Capitol Hill in September 2025.
In a speech in the City of London on November 3rd 2025, Nigel Farage declared that Reform's previous tax-cutting commitments were unfeasible and that his first priority in government would be retaining the confidence of Britain's lenders. He set out "relatively modest" reforms, including reversing inheritance-tax levies on farms and family businesses, costing around £500m a year.
The party's 2024 manifesto claims £140bn of annual giveaways offset by £160bn in savings. The Economist estimates actual costs at roughly £200bn and realistic savings at around £100bn—a gap that would amount to a colossal fiscal shock. The proposed lift to the income-tax personal allowance alone would cost at least £70bn. A ten-percentage-point cut to corporation tax would cost double the £18bn stated. One of its main revenue-raisers—dropping some interest payments on Bank of England reserves—would yield a fraction of the £35bn claimed. Reform also assumes its policies would add a full percentage point to growth (a near-doubling) and take 1m Britons off benefits. Delivering even the viable cuts would be difficult: many Reform voters are big-staters, and the party loudly campaigned to restore winter-fuel payments to richer pensioners that Labour had cut.
In July 2025 Nigel Farage launched a plan to halve crime within five years, including 30,000 new police officers (£2.1bn per year), five rapid-build "Nightingale prisons" on Ministry of Defence land, tougher sentences (life for three serious offences, no early release for violent or sexual offenders), and the deportation of some 10,400 foreign-national prisoners plus 10,000 more high-risk inmates to countries such as El Salvador. Labour plans to hire 13,000 more officers by 2029.
Data from the British Election Study, based on a survey of over 30,000 Britons in May 2025, found that 42% of Reform's new recruits since the general election are former Conservative voters and 33% are habitual non-voters. The party is particularly popular with older voters and those who did not attend university. Less than one in 20 supporters are non-white—the lowest share of any party—and 57% are men. Converts from Labour, who occupy an outsized place in political debate, account for only one in six of Reform's new backers. Roughly speaking, for each Labour defector who has shifted to the right bloc, at least four are liable to remain in the left bloc.
There is a "remarkable continuity" in the places that voted most heavily for UKIP in 2015, for Brexit in 2016 and for Reform in 2024, according to research by Oliver Heath of Royal Holloway, University of London. The party has entrenched its support with older, white, working-class and Eurosceptic voters. Yet many who attend Mr Farage's rallies are solidly middle-class: retired pharmacists, ex-engineers and former naval officers, many of them erstwhile Tories.
Rob Ford of the University of Manchester has argued that the Conservatives risk a collapse akin to the old Liberal Party in the 1920s, which was displaced by the emergent Labour Party.
Reform's project for government is modelled on Donald Trump's blitzkrieg on American institutions, enabled by the weak checks and balances of Britain's unwritten constitution. Mr Yusuf argues that the bull case for Britain is that a prime minister elected with a working majority in the House of Commons would have far greater control over domestic policy than an American president, because Britain has a far weaker separation of powers. A British Musk could cut at will.
Underlying the anger felt on the streets is, in Mr Yusuf's telling, a constitutional problem. Britons no longer believe in institutions, which fail to do their job and sabotage voter-mandated change. Reform's project is a restorationist vision: turning back the clock several decades to an imagined age in which checks on executive power were looser, international treaties less binding and ministers rather than arm's-length agencies made decisions. The decentralising government of Sir Tony Blair is, in this tale, the point where things went wrong.
In government, Reform would take the orthodox principle of parliamentary sovereignty and use it as a hatchet against perceived constraints. The first acts would be to denounce the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. Deportation law would be drafted with the intention of precluding judicial review. Britain's senior civil service would be cleared out in favour of apolitical appointees. The party expects a titanic clash with the House of Lords.
Since 1945 the British cabinet has been drawn mostly from elected MPs. Mr Farage says his cabinet would be formed of appointed business leaders and other outsiders, as in America. The party claims it will have stacks of legislation and lists of appointees ready for its first day. Its headline pledge is "Operation Restoring Justice": the deportation of some 600,000 illegal migrants in five years.
Mark Elliott, an expert on constitutional law at the University of Cambridge, says the idea that there was ever a "golden age" in which politicians were unconstrained by courts or international law is "considerable oversimplification".
Reform contains an incoherent coalition. On one side are "trad bros"—social traditionalists who believe the Enlightenment's emphasis on individual liberty took a wrong turn. James Orr, a Cambridge theologian and confidant of J.D. Vance, is in charge of policy. Danny Kruger, a former Tory MP and speechwriter for David Cameron, leads its preparations for government. In his 2023 book "Covenant", Mr Kruger argues for a counter-revolution to reassert a Christian social order and the "regulation of sex".
On the other side sit economic libertarians and cultural provocateurs. Bonnie Blue, a porn actress banned from OnlyFans after claiming to have slept with a thousand men, endorsed Mr Farage. She supports him because she thinks immigration is too high, inheritance tax immoral and the NHS a money pit. Mr Farage's electorate is not pious: Reform is the party of the tired seaside town—Clacton, Great Yarmouth, Skegness—and its rallies are the political wing of the end-of-the-pier show. The nostalgic era the movement evokes is not an age of piety but the early 1970s. Mr Farage likes trading, gambling, crypto and Dubai; his insight is that young men will vote for a party that wants them to be wealthy. The paradox is that Britain lacks the religious right that propelled Donald Trump to the White House: a poll suggesting an uptick in church attendance was, YouGov concedes, an error.
Reform's "Operation Restoring Justice" exists as a six-page pdf on the party's website (half pictures). The Conservatives' "BORDERS" plan is 15 pages. Both assume the barriers are mainly legal, but deporting 120,000-plus people a year is as much a logistical challenge as a legislative one.
The Home Office has paperwork on at most 300,000 of an estimated 1m illegal immigrants and cannot necessarily locate them. Both parties propose a department styled on America's ICE to replace the Home Office's Immigration Enforcement branch. In 2024 Britain recorded around 34,000 removals, 75% of them voluntary. Both parties hope doubling IE's 7,000-strong workforce will suffice; they could easily need to triple it. Britain has detention capacity for fewer than 3,000 migrants; Reform promises 24,000 within 18 months—equal to adding almost 25% to Britain's prison capacity. More than 30% of small-boat arrivals come from Afghanistan and Iran, to which Britain cannot deport people. The Conservatives' Rwanda scheme took only four migrants and cost £700m.
Reform has no clear successor to Mr Farage. The party is, in effect, a one-man band: there is Mr Farage and there are millions of voters, with little in between despite attempts to professionalise. Deputy leader Richard Tice, a businessman who bankrolled the party at times, lacks Mr Farage's appeal. Should Mr Farage leave the stage, the party would most likely wither, though the demand for something new on the right would remain.
The trouble with opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work.