Nigel Farage has urged people who voted for Restore Britain in the Makerfield byelection to back Reform UK instead. after what he accepted had been a “disappointing” night for his party.
Reform’s candidate, Robert Kenyon, came second to Andy Burnham, but was more than 9,000 votes behind after what was often a difficult campaign for the local plumber, who was dogged by questions about sexist comments. other social media posts.
Reform’s 35.5% vote share was 2.7 percentage points above what Kenyon achieved in the 2024 general election. Coming third. Restore, the far-right party set up by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, took nearly 7% of the total.
The result had been “a dramatic. emphatic win for Andy Burnham”, Farage said in a video message posted on X, after he had left the count in Wigan early with the result starting to take shape.
Reform had hoped to win at least 18,000 votes. against the 15,696 it achieved, Farage said, arguing that his party had been “slightly hoist with our own petard” in taking on a Labour challenger whose implicit message had been that a vote for him was a vote to remove Keir Starmer, which was Reform’s slogan in May’s local election.
Burnham’s personal standing in Greater Manchester, where he has been mayor since 2017, appeared to be more of a factor. Campaigners said female voters in particular had appeared put off by the controversies faced by Kenyon.
Previous social media posts by the Reform candidate had shown him openly saying he was a sexist,. endorsing lewd comments about the TV presenter Carol Vorderman.
Farage will also be concerned to have lost a number of votes to Restore, whose talk of mass deportations. at times openly racist rhetoric has seemingly nudged Reform into taking a more hard-right and nativist approach in recent weeks.
Farage addressed those who voted Restore in his message: “I would say directly to them: what do you want? We are the challenger party to the left in this country,. I would urge you to think again, I really, really would.”
Reform was. he insisted, “still the big national party on the centre right”, saying that despite the Conservative win in the Aberdeen South byelection, also held on Thursday, Kemi Badenoch’s party remained uncompetitive in large parts of the UK.
He ended his message: “A disappointing morning, but we keep going.”
The Reform MP Richard Tice said Burnham had won “a safe Labour seat”, and added: “We were always the underdogs.”
While this was true in the context of the last general election. since then Reform’s popularity has surged in constituencies such as Makerfield, with the party winning almost all the council seats around Wigan last month.
Faced with the threat from Restore Britain. a predominantly online phenomenon, where Lowe’s anti-immigrant messages have been amplified by Elon Musk, the owner of X, who supports Restore, Farage has started pushing Reform on to more hard-right turf.
In the wake of the case of Henry Nowak. the student who was handcuffed by police as he lay dying from a stab wound after his killer, a British man of Sikh heritage, told officers Nowak had assaulted him in a racist attack, Farage has argued repeatedly that white people in the UK face the most racism in what he calls a “two-tier state”.
Reform’s migration policy has also become more hardline,. now also targets EU nationals with settled status, some of whom have lived in the UK for decades.
Under planned Reform policies, EU nationals would be among people barred from living in social housing,. employing them would become notably more expensive for companies.
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