REAL conservatives have won a majority of seats in Norfolk County Council, a major UK regional council. Nigel Farage’s Reform candidates gained 38 seats in addition to the two they already had and Restore Britain candidates running as Great Yarmouth First, gained nine seats.
Restore Britain is threatening to keep Farage’s Reform Party honest, by splitting the ballooning nationalist, Britain-first vote.
Reform UK has now taken control of 14 councils in England, coming second in the Welsh Parliament and tied for second in the Scottish Parliament.
The Green Party has also seen some victories, gaining five councils, two mayors and hundreds of councillors largely from inner city voters.
Labour suffered repeated losses across the UK after Thursday’s elections, with a historic defeat in the Welsh Parliament and losing both councils and councillors across many areas of England. Welsh Labour’s historic defeat was the first for 100 years. In Scotland the SNP remain the largest party at Holyrood (the Scottish Parliament) but fall short of a majority.
Across the UK 5066 councillors were up for election across 2969 wards and divisions in 136 English local authorities, which included all 32 London borough councils, 32 metropolitan boroughs, 18 unitary authorities, six county councils, 48 district councils and six directly elected mayors in England.
In an election result with parallels to the weekend’s historic Farrer by-election in Australia, the mainstream Conservatives were decimated in Norfolk, losing a massive 44 seats (retaining eight) while Labour lost eight seats, retaining just one.
As noted by the BBC, Reform needed to reach a total of 43 seats to take a majority of the council, which is now made up of 40 Reform councillors, 13 Liberal Democrats, 12 Greens, nine Great Yarmouth Firsts, eight Conservatives, one Labour and one Independent.
MP Rupert Lowe’s Great Yarmouth First won all nine seats it contested, giving ideologically-aligned “Britain first” conservatives control over the council – assuming they work together.
A Reform UK Norfolk spokesman told the BBC: “We are grateful that residents have returned Reform UK as the largest party in Norfolk, and we intend to govern purely in the interests of people across this great county.”
For the county council elections, 325,335 votes were cast, leading to a voter turnout of 45.44%. At the 2021 county council elections, turnout was about 237,000 people.
Rupert Lowe trumpeted the result as a major win for his new party, sounding a warning shot not only to Conservatives and Labour, but to Reform as well.
Lowe has been an MP for Great Yarmouth since 2024 and was originally elected for Reform UK. He sat as an independent from March 2025 to March 2026 following the suspension of the party whip.
Lowe founded Restore Britain on June 30, 2025, and registered it as an official political party on 20 March 2026, becoming the party’s sole MP on the same day. He was a member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the West Midlands from 2019 to 2020.
Lowe entered the House of Commons at the 2024 UK general election and was appointed Reform UK’s Business and Agriculture Spokesman. In March 2025, he had the whip suspended due to legal accusations, days after criticising Farage.
Lowe insisted that Reform UK’s aim following Thursday’s historic victory was to win the next general election.
“And I have never been more confident we are going to do exactly that. What’s happening in Great Yarmouth was seismic,” he posted on X.
“Turnout soared. We brought thousands of people to the polling station who have never voted before. We got more votes in this local election than I received in the general election.
“The implications of it all must not be underestimated. Despite everything Reform threw at us, we decimated them in every single seat.
“Farage said we wouldn’t win one percent. He was right. We won almost fifty. The nine wards across Great Yarmouth are so varied. From Winterton in the rural north, to the urban centre of Great Yarmouth itself.
“We won the nine seats, and the borough council by election, but within those wider seats we won every single ward by a mile. If we can win in every one of those areas, we can win anywhere.”
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