Nigel Farage has claimed pollsters were suppressing support for his surging Reform UK party, but says they’ve now agreed to change their approach after a complaint.
Reform UK, the spiritual successor to the Brexit Party and UKIP before it has already achieved a historic polling success by surpassing the governing Conservative Party in a general election poll, but more yet yet come as Farage hails a reset in pollster methodology.
Last week the veteran campaigner had complained many British pollsters hid Reform in their surveys, only making voting options for the major legacy parties immediately obvious. Reform was not prompted for, he said, and had to be accessed by recipients clicking through ‘other’, which he said was suppressing his results.
Now the Reform leader says he’s had a victory against those pollsters after he wrote to their governing body to demand a correction. Speaking on Friday in London, Mr Farage said the energy he’d been experiencing campaigning on the ground was now being felt in the polls, and now the technique correction was due to be felt, more was yet to come.
He said: “…there’s always a lag time between understanding what’s happening on the ground, and seeing it playing out in the polls. I also told you some of the polling industry were acting entirely dishonestly and I’m pleased to say as a result of my letter to the chair of the British Polling Council, they have been told now they really ought to be prompting for Reform. So they’re all playing catch-up.”
Referring to Thursday night’s political paradigm-shattering news that his party was now outpolling the 400-year-old Tories nationally, and by an even wider margin in several regions, Farage hailed the “inflection point” and said: “The momentum that Richard and I are seeing in the seats, at the doors, is filtering through”.
Farage made clear in his remarks he had no real expectations for how far this movement would go, and how many Members of Parliament he would find himself with, having started with effectively zero, bar a defection, and a party with immature infrastructure and almost no money. He made clear the legacy parties — Labour and the Conservatives, who between them have dominated British politics for a century — would likely outspend Reform by a factor of ten.
But it wasn’t just polling companies suppressing his support, Farage said, pointing a finger at broadcasters and the television regulator too for using what he decried as not-fit-for purpose rules on election time broadcasts to cut him out of the national picture. He said the amount of television time was dictated by the performance of parties in the last two general elections, but: “We haven’t stood in the last two general elections! it’s as if everything about our politics is designed to stop the new boys and girls from coming in, and to keep everything the same.”
Given the latest polling gives Reform and Farage a plausible claim to represent the opposition to the first-place left wing Labour Party, Farage also challenged the Labour leader Keir Starmer to a televised duel. Angered Reform wasn’t invited to next week’s four-way leader debate, he said: “I think we can demand right now that the BBC put us into that debate. I would also very much like to do a debate head-to-head with Keir Starmer… to ask him why, if you’re going out looking for the working people of Britain to vote for you, why have you not put [the migrant crisis] in your top six priorities.”
