Right-wing Reform UK is arguably on a hot streak of popularity over the past months. The anti-immigration party, led by Brexit architect Nigel Farage, won its first electoral mandate in Scotland and became the largest party by membership in the UK over just one weekend.
On Thursday, 11 December, David McLennan took the West Lothian Council seat with 1,177 first-preference votes, ahead of the Scottish National Party (SNP) on 1,028 and Scottish Labour on 627, securing the seat at stage eight under the single transferable vote system.
Farage hailed the Whitburn and Blackburn result as an emphatic breakthrough for his party, declaring that voters had delivered a ‘huge message to the Scottish political establishment’. He stressed that Reform UK had not been expected to win the seat, yet local residents had demonstrated a clear appetite for political change.
Farage framed the victory as further proof of Reform’s growing strength in Scotland and said the party now looked toward the 2026 Holyrood election with confidence and ‘continuing anticipation’.
‘Voters had delivered a “huge message to the Scottish political establishment”’
Although Reform UK already has 19 councillors in Scotland, all were gained through defections, making this the party’s first win on an official Reform ticket. Former Conservative peer Malcolm Offord, now a Reform candidate, hailed the result as a ‘dam breaking’ moment.
Meanwhile, Reform UK has also become the largest political party in the United Kingdom, as Labour hemorrhaged more than 100,000 members since the last General Election in 2024. Reform UK’s membership tracker shows more than 268,000 paid-up members and is steadily growing, while the Labour Party—boasting more than 500,000 members at the time Prime Minister Keir Starmer took over the party leadership in 2020—has fallen below 250,000.
Nigel Farage, reacting to the development, decleared that ‘the age of two-party politics is dead’, adding that it is a huge milestone for his party to surpass Labour. Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left socialist Your Party and the Green Party have profited from the exodus of Labour members, with the latter witnessing an increase of 54,000 in the past three months.
As Hungarian Conservative reported, the UK’s two-party political system is rapidly crumbing, as all credible polls show Reform ahead of the two establishment forces, the Conservative Party and Labour. An October poll showed an unprecedented majority for Farage’s party, with 445 mandates in the House of Commons—a number not seen in modern British political history.
Nigel Farage is a close ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, praising Hungarian migration policies and holding views very similar to Orbán’s on most global issues. Political director of the Hungarian prime minister Balázs Orbán was recently hosted by Farage on GB News for a discussion on migration.
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