Undoubtedly, the British general election was won by the Labour Party and its leader, Keir Starmer, who became prime minister of the United Kingdom. However, while Starmer was busy assembling his cabinet, another politician was eager to boast about his party’s electoral windfall.
On Friday, a group of demonstrators heckled far-right Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage as he stood to give a speech in London. Farage has a long history of polarizing British politics.
In spite of everyone’s attempts to distract him, he kept smiling and heckled back, yelling “boring!” until they were escorted from the hall.
Out of 650 seats in the House of Commons in the British Parliament, Reform UK managed to get just five seats in Thursday’s national election. However, it had five more previously.
Farage has pledged to work toward the abolition of the current voting system in the United Kingdom, stating that smaller parties have difficulties in achieving parity between their vote total and their representation in the House of Commons. Despite Farage’s debut in parliament and the five seats his party took home, the accurate measure of his accomplishment was the total number of votes cast.
With little over 4 million votes cast, the anti-immigration Reform UK received 15% of the vote—much to the chagrin of the long-ruling Conservative Party, from whom it stole a significant amount of support. The party’s leader and ideals had long been marginalized in British politics.
It meant that Reform UK had the third-highest total vote count of all the parties that ran for the seats in parliament, surpassing even the Liberal Democrats, who came out on Friday with a record-breaking 71 seats in the Commons despite receiving about half a million fewer votes.
Farage, 60, finally succeeded after seven failed tries in his home constituency of Clacton, located in southeast England. He has long worked on reducing immigration to Britain through his Reform UK party, which was created in 2018 as the Brexit Party and advocates for a complete and uncompromising separation from the European Union.
The former U.S. president, Trump, and his transatlantic ally are frequently likened to one another due to the former’s outspoken nationalist speech and abrasive political manner. The two met in Britain and attended events together in the United States.
Trump congratulated Nigel Farage on his “historic victory” on his Truth Social account.
