LONDON: Membership of Britain’s upstart anti-immigration Reform UK party has overtaken that of the centre right Conservative Party for the first time, the party said on Thursday.

Party leader and Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage hailed the figure an “historic moment”. Immigration was a major issue at the ballot box at the UK’s July general election which saw the Conservatives ousted after 14 years in power.

The digital counter on the Reform website showed a membership tally ticking past the 131,680 figure declared by the main opposition Conservatives during its leadership election earlier this year.

“The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world,” wrote Farage on X, formerly Twitter.

“Reform UK are now the real opposition.” Party chairman Zia Yusuf said the milestone showed the long “stranglehold on the centre-right of British politics by the Tories has finally been broken”.

The last declared Conservative Party tally was the lowest on record and a drop on 2022 when there were around 172,000 members. Reform won five seats in the 650-seat UK parliament in July, although it received roughly 14 percent of total votes cast.

Reform maximised the damage to the Conserva­tives by splitting the right-wing vote and picking up former Tory supporters in key constituencies.

The Labour Party won by a landslide although Prime Minister Keir Starmer has had a bumpy first five months in power.

An Ipsos opinion poll earlier this month found that 53 percent of Britons said they were “disappointed” in what the Labour government had achieved so far. British politics has been dominated by the two main political parties — Labour and the Conservatives — for decades but commentators have warned that major political parties have seen irreversible downturns in their popularity in the past.

In the years after World War I, a divided Liberal Party found itself supplanted by the Labour Party as the main opposition.

Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2024