The far-right Reform UK party has taken advantage of the media lull at the start of the year to launch its campaign, a few months ahead of the UK general election, which is due to be held in 2024, probably in the fall. From a hotel in London's Westminster district on Wednesday, January 3, its leader, Richard Tice, a multi-millionaire former property developer and Conservative Party defector, promised to field candidates "in every constituency in the country," claiming that only his formation could "save" the UK, which he said had been "broken" by 13 years of Conservative domination and would be "bankrupted" by Labour if it won a majority in the House of Commons, as all current polls predict.

Created two years ago, Reform UK is a reincarnation of the Brexit Party, which itself was the successor to UKIP, the euroskeptic party founded by Nigel Farage in the 1990s. Farage also helped launch the Reform Party, but this charismatic opportunist announced in the spring of 2021 that he would be putting his political career on hold in favor of a hosting position on GB News, Britain's Fox News. Deprived of this headliner, still unfamiliar to voters and wavering on its battles – Brexit having been achieved in early 2021 – Reform UK held at a few percent of voting intentions until mid-2023.

However, since the fall, the party has been steadily gaining points, taking advantage of the disastrous record of Boris Johnson's and Liz Truss' governments and the inability of their successor, Rishi Sunak, to regain popularity. At the end of 2023, Reform UK had 9% of voting intentions, enough to disrupt the predicted electoral duel between the Conservatives and Labour. The movement has also found itself a promising niche – immigration – and target voters: Drawn from the working class, they voted for Johnson in the general election at the end of 2019, but are suffering from the cost-of-living crisis and the dilapidation of public services, and have derived no benefit from Brexit.

"Exactly a year ago, Rishi Sunak promised to stop small boats [inflatable boats crossing the English Channel], but he failed and the Tories have, instead, opened the doors wide to mass migration," said Tice. Nearly 30,000 people reached Kent's shores in 2023, and Conservative governments, despite their anti-migrant rhetoric, have issued an unprecedented amount of visas since Brexit: In 2022, net immigration (mainly legal) reached an all-time high of 745,000 arrivals, compared with 184,000 in 2019. To remedy this situation, Tice proposes to "freeze" all "non-essential" immigration, without specifying how. But that's not the issue for his populist party, which feeds on voters' frustration.

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