Farage and Badenoch clash over Reform UK membership figures
USEPAConservative leader Kemi Badenoch has accused Nigel Farage of “falsifying” UK Reform Party membership numbers after the party said it had more registered members than the Conservatives .
Digital tracking on the Reform Party’s website shows its membership has surpassed the 131,680 announced by the Conservatives earlier this year.
Badenock said Reform’s counters were “coded to automatically go up.”
Farage said he would be “happy to invite” a firm to audit the party’s membership numbers, as long as the Conservatives did the same.
When the figure was announced on Boxing Day, Farage said it was a “historic moment”.
React to the growing count on X, he said: “British politics’ youngest party has just overtaken the world’s oldest party.”
Party chairman Zia Yusuf said the reforms broke “the Conservative Party’s centuries-long stranglehold on the center right of British politics”.
Late Thursday, Badenock said in a post on
“Farage doesn’t understand the digital age,” Badenock added. “Such fraud is quickly discovered, although many people are fooled.”
In a later tweet reply to Badenoch, Farage said he had 5.4 million social media followers to her 320,000.
Farage claimed Badenock was “distressed, upset and angry” about membership numbers.
“As long as you do the same, we would be happy to invite one of the Big Four to audit our membership numbers,” Farage said.
Earlier this year, the Conservative Party said 131,680 party members were eligible to vote in its leadership race to replace Rishi Sunak.
This is the party’s lowest membership number on record and a sharp drop from the 2022 leadership race, when the party had about 172,000 members.
A Tory spokesman said the reforms “spawned a Labor government that brutally cut winter fuel subsidies for 10 million pensioners, put the future of family farming and food security at risk and launched a campaign against jobs.” A devastating blow that will leave working-class people having to pay their pensions.” price”.
“A vote for reform this May is a vote for Labor Councils – only the Conservatives can stop this,” he added.
A Labor spokesman said that while the Conservatives and Reform Party had chosen to “fight”, the government was “continuing to deliver the changes the British people voted for”.
All major parties saw membership declines last year This is despite preparations for this summer’s general election.
Although Labor still has the largest membership of any UK party, its numbers fell below 400,000 for the first time since 2015.
Comparing party membership numbers can be “difficult” because membership is not uniformly defined or monitored, according to a research brief released by the House of Commons Library.
Luke Tryl, director of the More in Common think tank, told the PA news agency that the indicator was “opaque and vague”.
He said there was “momentum” for Reform UK but said there was no guarantee its membership would translate into activists.
