Politics Home Article | Are New Right-Wing Parties A Problem For Nigel Farage?

Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib were both previously members of Reform UK (Alamy)

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Reform UK has led in the opinion polls for well over a year. While there have been signs of its popularity dipping in recent weeks, Farage’s party remains in a strong position. Its senior ranks expanded by several former Conservatives, Reform is expected to make significant gains at the 7 May local elections, and could even win power in Wales.

Hoping to thwart its momentum, however, are parties to its right: Restore Britain and Advance UK. 

Their leaders, Lowe and Habib, who have both fallen out with Farage, say their former party is not right-wing enough on key issues and point to the Reform leader welcoming swathes of former Tories as evidence that he is not serious about taking on the status quo.

PoliticsHome analysis of councils where full elections took place in May 2025 shows that Reform has lost more than 7 per cent of the councillors it had elected last year. Of the 50 councillors Reform has lost from its ranks due to suspensions, expulsions or defections, 17 — a third — had joined Restore Britain or Advance UK at the time of writing.

Kent County Council now has a Restore Britain group comprising seven former Reform councillors: Brian Black, Dean Burns, Isabella Kemp, Maxine Fothergill, Oliver Bradshaw, Paul Thomas and Robert Ford. All bar one (Burns) had previously been suspended or expelled from Farage’s party. There have also been defections outside of councils that held elections last year.

Restore Britain has also seen defections in Leicestershire, North Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire, while Advance UK has seen joiners in Cambridgeshire, Devon, Doncaster and Durham.

Maria Botwell, a former Reform councillor who now heads Restore Britain’s local government unit, said “every single” former Reform councillor who has contacted Lowe’s party about joining had made the first approach. 

Lowe’s party hopes to be approved by the Electoral Commission in time for the Great Yarmouth MP to stand candidates under his banner on 7 May. The deadline for nomination papers is 9 April. Currently, councillors who have moved over to Reform UK are still listed as ‘Independent’.

Speaking to PoliticsHome, Habib, who once sat alongside Farage in the European Parliament for the Brexit Party, said that people most disposed to joining Advance UK are those who “joined Reform before it became the politically expedient vehicle that Farage has made it”.

However, in the grand scheme of things, how much of an electoral threat do these parties actually pose to Farage?

Reform points to the recent by-election in Gorton and Denton, where Advance UK candidate Nick Buckley received five fewer votes than The Official Monster Raving Looney Party’s Sir Oink A-lot, as a sign that it has little to worry about. “I suppose you could say they have a long way to go,” a Reform source told PoliticsHome.

Reform’s second-place finish in the Greater Manchester constituency, where it secured 29 per cent of the vote to push Labour into third, showed that the party was on course “for another major wave of gains in May”, political scientist Rob Ford recently wrote.

Alex Wilson, a Reform London Assembly member, told PoliticsHome: “Getting beaten by the Monster Raving Loonies shows that when push comes to shove, most of our target voters can see that Reform is the only viable option to take on both the established parties and the new sectarianism of the Greens.”

According to Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University Tim Bale, Lowe and Habib’s parties are “really very small fry” as things stand: “They’re gnats, not mosquitoes.”

He explained that their impact will be determined in large part by how Farage reacts to them.

“On the one hand, it’s always helpful for Farage to be able to point to outfits on his right that he can differentiate himself from and suggest that because they’re more extreme than he is, he’s therefore not far right and actually quite mainstream,” said Bale.

Ford, speaking on a recent episode of PoliticsHome podcast The Rundown, agreed.

“We are about sovereignty, we are about controlling immigration, we are about a more assertive approach on integration, on deportation, but we are not racists. We are not thugs, we are not street fighters. This is a useful distinction [for Reform] to be able to draw.”

However, Bale said that there can be a tendency for political parties to be drawn to talking policies promoted by parties further to the fringes. He added that Farage must resist the temptation to move closer to Restore Britain and Advance UK positions, as doing so would risk damaging his party’s overall electoral appeal.

Restore Britain policies include the “mass deportation” of all illegal migrants from the UK — something Farage previously described as a “political impossibility”. Lowe’s party has also been endorsed by Elon Musk, the hard-right billionaire owner of X.

“There is a distinct possibility that once the other smaller splinter parties start raising those kinds of alternatives, that Reform will follow them,” said Bale.

“That does run a risk of [Farage] moving too far out of the kind of what is sometimes called the zone of acceptability, as far as most voters are concerned.”