Reform can win election, Farage tells conference full of hard-right rhetoric

Nigel Farage has predicted he can win the next general election at a packed Reform UK conference that announced a new structure for the party but also leaned heavily into hard-right tropes and occasional conspiracy theories.

- Peter Walker Ben Quinn

"We can win the next general election just with the numbers of people that agree with our principles," Farage told cheering supporters in Birmingham.

"What we have to do is to be credible. What we have to do is be on the ground everywhere. What we have to do is to show that we can bring success after success after success. If we do those things, we genuinely can."

At the gathering - which included repeated attacks on immigration, diversity and green policies, and calls to "put British people first" Farage promised to professionalise the party and end its status as a company majority-owned by him.

Instead, he said, it would become a mass-owned nonprofit organisation with "significant" control by members - although he did not set out what this would entail.

The first proper conference for the successor to the Brexit party, which won the third-biggest vote share in July's general election, attracted about 4,000 people to the National Exhibition Centre (NEC).