Fewer people than ever are prepared to vote Tory or Labour as Reform look set to claim hundreds of seats at this week’s local elections, polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice has said.
Speaking exclusively to The Independent, Prof Curtice said less than half of voters are telling pollsters they will vote for one of the two main parties, in a historic shift in voting patterns.
He said: “Fewer than half of the people who tell pollsters how they are going to vote say they are going to vote either Conservative or Labour. It has never been quite that low before.”
The big winner from the shift in voter intentions is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which Prof Curtice described as having “already won” next week’s elections before a single seat is declared.
The professor said that while Reform, along with its predecessor parties Ukip and the Brexit Party, has previously eaten into the Tory vote, it is now taking thousands of Labour votes as well.
He also predicted that the Liberal Democrats will do well in places including Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire, due to Reform having “murdered the Tories”, enabling Sir Ed Davey’s party to slip through.
The leading pollster said the Lib Dems have eclipsed Mr Farage’s former challenger party Ukip in standing candidates in more than 99 per cent of the seats up for grabs on 1 May, contesting more wards than Labour or the Conservatives. At its peak, Ukip managed to fight in 75 per cent of available seats in the 2013 local elections.
Stressing the “highly uncertain” nature of next week’s vote, and cautioning against drawing conclusions from how many seats each party wins or loses, Prof Curtice told The Independent: “Reform, in a sense, have already won these local elections. One of the targets they set for themselves is to create local party organisations.
“Evidently, in the limited number of places we have elections, they have managed to create enough of an organisation to find 1,600 candidates, and they are fighting for more seats than any other party. Ukip never got to fighting more than 75 per cent of the wards in 2013, so they have already won an organisational battle.”
Prof Curtice said Reform will end up winning “probably a few hundred” seats across the country, a significant step towards Mr Farage convincing voters that his party is the real opposition to Labour.
In a dire assessment of the Tories’ prospects, echoing a warning from their leader Kemi Badenoch herself, Prof Curtice said the baseline for the party is May 2021.
“It is the day Boris Johnson won the Hartlepool by-election. It is a high Tory baseline in predominantly Tory areas. Even if the Tories were to achieve something of a recovery from last year, they would still lose heavily in these elections.”
And despite Sir Keir Starmer’s party having collapsed in the polls since the general election, Prof Curtice gave a less bleak view of Labour’s prospects next week.
“It may well be that Labour end up making net gains,” he said. This is because, while Labour are still polling well below their own May 2021 benchmark, Reform will take more seats from the Conservatives and allow Sir Keir’s candidates to hold on.
But, in a warning to the prime minister, Prof Curtice added: “The problem for Labour now is that whereas Reform, at 15 per cent, was great news for Keir Starmer, because it murdered the Tories and enabled a Labour Party with just 35 per cent of the vote to [win the general election], Reform at 25 per cent – at the same level as Labour – are in a position to take loads of Labour seats.
“We are in very uncertain territory … partly because Reform are intervening virtually everywhere. There is no baseline against which to measure them.”
