The Liberal Democrats and Reform UK look forward to May’s local elections in their new year messages.<\/p>\n
Both parties are hoping to make gains in the polls, which cover the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Senedd as well as thousands of council seats in England and a handful of directly elected mayoralties.<\/p>\n
Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said his party could “win again in 2026” after “our record-breaking success” in the last local elections.<\/p>\n
He vowed to “stop Trump’s America becoming Farage’s Britain” and “change our country for the better”.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, whose party has been consistently leading in national opinion polls since the spring, said his party was offering “hope” and “change”, as he predicted May would be “the single most important set of elections between now and the next general election”.<\/p>\n
He said the country was getting “gloomier” and “poorer”, with higher unemployment and debt “running completely out of control”.<\/p>\n
Farage criticised both Labour and the Conservatives for not understanding the “new world” of cryptocurrencies, AI and digital assets, which he described as “the technologies of growth”.<\/p>\n
In his new year message, SNP leader John Swinney said the last year had been “difficult” for some, with “conflict and upheaval” across the world. <\/p>\n
The first minister said he would be “toasting Scotland’s famous win against Denmark” to qualify for the World Cup, as well as looking forward to the competition over the summer and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Liberal Democrats and Reform UK look forward to May’s local elections in their new year messages. Both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-345520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}