The Reality Trap

Reform's struggles in local government

Today’s post is the third in a series taking the prospect of a Reform government seriously. The first looked at the different ways radical right parties around the world have governed. The second at their immigration plans and how those would play out in practice. This one looks at their first six months running some of the UK’s largest councils.

Given this week’s news, subscribers may be interested in the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago on the most likely candidates to replace Keir Starmer, and also the one I wrote last month on Labour’s budget options (and why I didn’t think they’d go for an income tax rise).

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Nigel Farage on a visit to Kent County Council, pictured with council leader Linden Kemkaran. (Photo by Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images)

Before May, Reform had almost no councillors and no meaningful infrastructure to support them. Then they found themselves controlling ten councils, including some of the largest with multi-billion budgets, and two mayoralties. Most of us expected trouble and we haven’t been disappointed.

The most spectacular blow-up has been in Kent where a video was leaked showing council leader Linden Kemkaran telling her colleagues to “fucking suck it up” over challenges to her decisions. This led to seven councillors being suspended or expelled from the party who have in turn offered up plenty of juicy quotes:

“Kemkaran has neither the leadership skills nor the ability to treat other members with respect, which is borne out by the fact I am aware of at least eight formal complaints to Reform HQ over her….The reality is KCC at the moment is run by three incompetent individuals.”

Two other Reform councillors in Kent have also gone – one due to being charged with threatening to kill his wife and the other, in a somewhat retro move, defecting to UKIP. If they keep losing councillors at this rate their majority will have disappeared in five months’ time.

While Reform’s other councils haven’t fallen apart quite so dramatically there’s been plenty of upheaval. In Durham they’ve lost four councillors for a variety of reasons including being ineligible for election and being drunk at an event for armed forces veterans. Doncaster has lost four too, one for a social media post claiming Adolf Hitler would have been a “legend” had he targeted Muslims. Overall 42 of their councillors have defected, quit or been expelled since May – well over 5%.

These personnel problems are in part down to Reform’s inadequate vetting processes and its tendency to attract cranks. But it’s also a function of the frustrations of power. Anyone with a basic understanding of how local government works knew that the party was not going to be able to fulfil its pledges to avoid council tax increases or make substantial savings on budgets that have already been drastically cut. Now those who made those promises are realising they can’t keep them and are starting to panic. As Kemkaran said in that leaked zoom meeting:

“We are going to live or die on [our next] budget. If we don’t balance the books you can forget Reform winning the next election. It’s that crucial. If we can avoid putting up council tax by the full 5% that is going to be the best thing that we can do to show that Reform can actually run something as big as Kent council, because let’s not forget we are the shop window in KCC. People are looking at us, they are judging us every single day, every single minute of every single day. Nigel knows that. He is super aware that we are the flagship council.”

This is an overreaction – despite its struggles Reform is still likely to pick up a swathe more councils next May, and will lead national polls for the foreseeable future. But we can learn a lot from what the party’s elected officials are doing, both about the difficulties Reform would experience in national government and why local government is so fundamentally broken.