2026 Bradford District local elections poll results
Reform boom, Tory blues, Labour flatlines, a Green revolution ...
We carried out a poll between 5–6 May on Twitter/X. The audience selected was City–Bradford, England, GB, Leeds, Yorkshire and the Humber. We were limited to four options.
This wasn’t ideal but working within the parameters of the platform, we decided to leave out the Lib Dems. This was based on them being the smallest party on Bradford Council (they have five councillors).
We also left out the independents who collectively total 14 councillors, a significant number. Our reason here was that we wanted to gauge voter sentiment for the two biggest parties, Labour and the Conservatives, the Green Party, who have been showing an upward trend in the district, and Reform, based on the 2025 local election results.
For our poll, we asked voters which party would get their backing in 2026’s local elections. A total of 645 responses were made. The results were as follows:
🟣 Reform: 47%
🔴 Labour: 29%
🟢Greens: 21%
🔵 Tories 3%
Reform UK’s successes in the local elections were historic. Unprecedented, as its leader, Nigel Farage, described it. 677 councillors. 10 councils. 2 mayors. 1 MP. It confirmed that the 2024 general election results – five seats, 14.3% of the popular vote – were a sign of changing times … at least for now. As history has shown, no one has any real idea how the future will unfold. Donald Trump as president in 2016 seemed ridiculous. He was elected. Trump as president in 2024 seemed equally absurd. He was elected.
And let’s not forget, closer to home, how the Lib Dems, near enough wiped out in the 2015 general election when they were left with only eight MPs out of a previous total of 57, have since bounced back with tremendous zeal. Last year they saw a record 72 MPs elected to parliament on a vote share of 12.2%, while last week they picked up 163 new councillors and ended up in control of more councils than the Conservatives. It’s a hell of a turnaround. Anything can happen.
Reform feels new, but it isn’t. It’s an extension of Farage, a conduit for the political firebrand who has been a household name since as far back as 1999 when he was first elected as an MEP to the European Parliament. As Emily Maitlis, co-host of The News Agents, recently put it:
“They are UKIP into Brexit into Leave into Reform with the same leader, the same clothes, the same rhetoric … If people are saying it’s a ‘scream of pain’, they’re going to provide the answers and they’re the ones that are now responding to the fact that we now hate the main party politics, Britain is broken …
“Well, who broke it? It was Farage's Brexit ideas and his Leave campaign that shrank the economy by 5%, we’ve got higher legal immigration now than when we were in the EU, we’ve got a 15% slump in trade, we’ve got a £40 billion loss in annual tax revenue … It is the same party that has done so much damage to this country under a different name.”
It would be amiss to see the results last Thursday as outright support for Reform, though there is, evidently, a strong, right-wing, anti-immigration, nativist, jingoistic and non-progressive sentiment among voters. They agree with Andrea Jenkyns, formerly of the Conservatives and now mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, when she says “no to putting people up in hotels … tents are good enough for France, they should be good enough here in Britain”. They agree with Farage when he says that the former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to Indian parents, “doesn’t care about our history, frankly our culture”. They want a return to a made-up past in an impossible future.
The results also reflect widespread political apathy and dismay for politics as usual – Labour-run councils and governments, Tory-run councils and governments. It’s also a criticism of the duopoly and the arrogance both parties share about the (divine) right to rule (the Conservatives have long described themselves as “the natural party of government”). And it’s an indictment of democracy, neoliberalism and a failure of ideas that would provide, as the professor of history and sociology Perry Anderson described it in a recent essay for the London Review of Books, a “coherent alternative vision of the way an advanced capitalist economy should be run”.
All of this should serve as a warning to the Labour-run Bradford Council. Do better. Explain how the district is better today than it was yesterday. Make material, meaningful differences to the day-to-day experiences. Listen. Because as cosy as you might feel, comfortable enough to introduce one of the highest council tax increases in England – in a non-election year, no less – as the 2025 local election results have shown, without a positive story to tell, without demonstrable change being felt by residents, no one is safe from a political earthquake.