UK membership reform trumps Tories, party says

Reform UK’s membership has overtaken that of the Tories, Nigel Farage’s party has said.

A digital counter on the Reform website showed a membership count before lunchtime on Boxing Day, surpassing the figure of 131,680 claimed by the Conservative Party during its leadership election earlier this year.

Mr Farage said it was a “historic moment”, as he posted on X: “The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world.

“Reform Britain is now the real opposition”.

Party chairman Zia Yusuf said: “History was made today as the Conservatives’ centuries-long stranglehold on centre-right British politics was finally broken.

“Nigel Farage will be the next Prime Minister and bring Britain back to greatness.”

There were 131,680 Conservative members eligible to vote during the party’s leadership election to replace Rishi Sunak in the autumn.

The figure, revealed when Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader on November 2, was the lowest Conservative level on record and a drop from the 2022 leadership contest, when there were around 172,000 members.

The reform returned five MPs to the Commons at the general election in July, including Mr Farage from Clacton.

A Conservative Party spokesman said: “The reform has produced a Labor government which has cut winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners, put the future of family farming and food security at risk and launched a devastating raid on jobs that will leave paid workers. the price.

“A vote for reform next May is a vote for a Labor council – only the Tories can stop it.”

Unlike other political parties, Reform was set up as a limited company, and in September Mr Farage announced he would change the ownership structure so that it would be member-owned.

“I no longer need to control this party,” he said at the time.

In a video posted on X, he said: “We will change the structure of the party from one limited by shares to a company limited by guarantee and that means Reform members will own this party.”

A research briefing published by the House of Commons Library in 2022 said that comparing party membership can be “difficult”, citing that there is no uniformly recognized definition of membership or an established method for monitoring it.

Luke Tryl, director of the think tank More in Common, similarly told the PA news agency it was an “opaque” process.

“Parties are notoriously opaque about this sort of thing,” he said, also raising the point that it is not known whether the Tories have added any new members since their election to the leadership.

He later added, “It’s very opaque and murky as a metric anyway.”

On reform, Mr Tryl indicated that one of the challenges for the party will be whether the membership turns militant.

He told the PA: “There is no doubt that the reform had a very good autumn. I think they capitalized on some of Labour’s early mistakes, but also the fact that the Conservative brand is still struggling. They clearly have momentum.”

Discussing Reform’s membership, he later said: “We know that many of the most vocal supporters of reform are very much online.

“Those people who are very online and have joined … are they also going out and hitting the streets, delivering leaflets, doing canvasses, that sort of thing?

“That remains an open question.”