With a thumping success in local elections this week, the hard-right Reform UK party has loosened Britain's two-party stranglehold and is already eyeing Downing Street.

Reform UK, which formed from the remnants of its firebrand leader Nigel Farage's Brexit party, swept over 670 local council seats as well as its first two mayoral posts.

In its biggest win of Thursday's poll, the anti-immigration party also narrowly took a parliamentary seat in a by-election in Runcorn, northwest England, from Prime Minister Keir Starmer's centre-left Labour.

"We can and we will win the next general election" which is expected in around four years, Farage declared on Friday to newly elected Reform councillors in Staffordshire in the west Midlands.

Although the polls took place for only a fraction of the country's local seats, the results confirm Reform UK's growing popularity, after its breakthrough in last year's general election in which it picked up five seats.

"This is the best performance by a populist radical right party we've ever seen in this country," said Tim Bale, politics professor at London's Queen Mary University.

Reform has tapped into discontent over........

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