Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, won a seat in the British parliament for the first time on Friday in the seaside English town of Clacton-on-Sea, as voters deserted Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party.
Farage, whose career of anti-immigration, pro-Brexit campaigning has made him one of Britain's most recognisable and divisive political figures, comfortably beat the Conservative candidate Giles Watling who had previously held the seat.
His surprise entry into the election a month ago, having initially ruled out standing, boosted support for Reform UK across the country. That helped scupper Sunak's hopes of closing the gap on the centre-left Labour Party, which is on course for a huge national victory.
"There is a massive gap on the centre right of British politics and my job is to fill it and that's exactly what I'm gonna do," Farage said after the result was announced.
"My plan is to build a mass national movement over the course of the next few years and hopefully be big enough to challenge the general election properly in 2029."
After seven unsuccessful attempts to win a seat in parliament, Friday's victory finally puts Farage, 60, inside a political institution he has spent decades railing against and will test his ability to deliver on promises to voters.
A vocal Donald Trump advocate nicknamed “Mr Brexit” by the former US president, Farage is a divisive figure, loved and loathed in equal measure by supporters and detractors.
Opponents have long accused Farage of fanning racist attitudes toward migrants and condemned what they call his scapegoat rhetoric. They argue that chronic underfunding of schools, hospitals and housing under successive governments on both left and right — particularly in poorer areas like Clacton — is the real problem, not migrants.
“We’re getting poorer. Our productivity is going down. Our public services are failing. Britain is broken and the population explosion is the main reason why,” Farage told The Associated Press in an interview at his campaign office in Clacton on Friday.
He had dubbed this “the immigration election.”
The latest official figures show that net migration — the number of people moving to the U.K. minus the number of those moving abroad — was 685,000 in 2023, slightly down from a record set in 2022. That’s compared to levels of around 200,000 to 300,000 a year pre-pandemic.
The figures have been on an upward trend since the 1990s and climbed sharply in recent years, with a large influx of international workers, students and their dependents making up most of the numbers.
(With Inputs From Reuters And AP)
