Labour membership plummets since general election

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The Labour party has lost about 100,000 members since last year’s general election, underscoring the dramatic fall in Sir Keir Starmer’s popularity and the surge in support for smaller parties.

The governing party’s membership now stands at 250,000, down from around 333,000 at the time of the election in July last year.

The figures, first reported by The Times and not disputed by Labour, mean that Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK has now overtaken Labour to become the largest political party in the UK, with 268,631 members according to its “live counter” online.

The news is the latest boost for Farage, who in September received the biggest donation from a living person in British history. 

The £9mn gift from billionaire crypto investor Christopher Harborne will help Reform spend heavily in the run-up to pivotal elections across Scotland, Wales and English local councils in May.

In spite of recent revelations about racist comments allegedly made by Farage while he was a student at Dulwich College, Reform is still nearly 10 percentage points above both Labour and the Tories in opinion polls, commanding about 27 per cent of public support. 

Farage said that “as we have suspected for some time, Reform has overtaken Labour to become the largest political party in British politics — a huge milestone on our journey to win the next election. The age of two-party politics is dead.”

Labour membership is still higher than before Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015. During his leadership, the number of members tripled to more than 600,000 on a surge of enthusiasm for the uncompromising veteran leftwinger. 

But many of those members have drifted away as Starmer has shifted the party to the centre ground and taken a hard line on immigration.

Unlike Reform, most parties do not keep a running public tally of their membership figures.

The Conservatives had about 120,000 members in July, according to reporting at the time.

The Green party’s membership has risen from 126,000 to 180,000 since October.

Membership figures released in August showed that the Liberal Democrats had 83,174 members, a small decrease compared with the previous year.

The Labour party said: “Our membership figures are published in our annual report. We do not give a running commentary on them throughout the year.”