Tuesday briefing: What would a Reform-led country look like?

Original article by Aamna Mohdin

Good morning. Reform is coming. Or so the polls have insisted all year.

The hard-right party, which entered the British political scene in 2021 after rebranding from the Brexit party, has reshaped the landscape with breathtaking speed. In just four years, it has gained four MPs, hundreds of councillors, two mayors, and a small cascade of defections from the imploding Conservative party. It has now comfortably positioned itself as the dominant force on the right.

If an election were held tomorrow, Reform would be on course for an outright majority, with Nigel Farage walking into No 10.

The party is adept at generating headlines with sweeping promises about what it would do in power. But what would a Reform-led national government actually look like?

The answer may come from its track record in local government. To understand what it has been like under a Reform-controlled council, I spoke to Sam Jones, a Green councillor in Warwickshire, part of the insurgent opposition on the ground. That’s after the headlines.

In depth: ‘They’re trying desperately to figure out how this actually works’

Reform’s performance in the local elections was one of the biggest political stories of the year. The party won 677 council seats, about 41% of those contested, and went on to take control of 10 English councils in May.

The triumph, however, quickly gave way to reports of chaos, infighting, and scandal. In Cornwall, Reform emerged with 28 seats, more than any other party, but within six months its local operation had unravelled amid resignations, suspensions, and internal disputes. The party no longer holds the largest bloc on the council, and its inability to form an administration has allowed the Liberal Democrats and independents to create a governing coalition.

In Kent, which Nigel Farage billed as Reform’s “flagship council”, the party has already lost nine of the 57 councillors elected in May. The latest upheaval follows the Guardian’s publication of a recording from a fiery internal meeting in which the Reform council leader told her dissenting party colleagues they had to “fucking suck it up” if they did not like her decisions.

This First Edition turns to Warwickshire, where Reform is now the largest party, led by 19-year-old George Finch (pictured above), who took charge after the previous leader resigned five weeks after the May elections. Has it been smooth sailing there? Not exactly.

“They’ve run into resistance in the form of the truth. They promised their voters that there were all sorts of inefficiencies that they would be able to find and resolve, but they’ve run into the cruel reality that the council is actually underfunded,” Sam Jones told me. “They’re trying desperately to figure out how this actually works.”

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A powerful story

Jones was elected as a Green councillor for Warwickshire, representing Warwick and Leamington Spa last May. The Greens now hold seven seats on the Warwickshire county council, compared with Reform’s 23. While Reform is the largest group, it still falls short of the 29 needed for a governing majority.

Jones (pictured above) is not a neutral observer of what’s happening in the council chamber. In fact, he’s a forceful opposition voice who has built a sizable following on TikTok (14.4k) and Instagram (27k) by challenging Reform’s decisions. But his perspective offers a lively window into how their critics see the council’s direction.

“Warwickshire’s a very divided county. If you were to look at a map of how Reform took their seats, it was a pretty clean sweep of one side,” Jones says. The county includes more affluent areas anchored by major employers such as Jaguar Land Rover, and others that were once coal-mining powerhouses but are now slowly declining.

Reform tapped into the anger and frustration created by that decline, Jones says, offering a compelling narrative, laying the blame on bloated, inefficient council budgets, and claiming that immigrants are prioritised over Britons.

“I see the voters that rally around Reform. A lot of them are good people, well-intentioned people who just want to throw sticks and stones at the status quo,” Jones says.

But to his surprise, one of Reform’s first moves was to restore the roles of political advisers at a cost of £150,000 a year. These roles support the three largest groups with research and administrative work, but were cut by most councils across the UK during the austerity drive of the 2010s.

So much for eliminating waste then.

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Finding waste to cut

Where cuts were announced, backlash followed quickly. Reform’s George Finch wrote to Bridget Phillipson seeking permission to revise rules governing pupils’ eligibility for free home-to-school transport. The letter triggered a storm of anger over plans that could see children as young as eight walking up to five miles to school.

Phillipson responded by accusing Reform of trying to send “children back to the Victorian era”. Finch later denied he had plans to increase the statutory distance to five miles.

“You don’t get to be the party of protecting women and children and then say we want to make as many children ineligible for safe transport provided by the county to school,” Jones says. “You don’t get to be the party that supports the working class and says that if you want your kid to have a bus pass, you’re going to have to foot the bill for that.”

Jones took to TikTok to raise the alarm, and his video has 340,000 views.

It is also worth noting that Reform now appears far less bullish about cuts, both locally and nationally. After the backlash over school transport, Finch condemned the constant underfunding of local councils. Meanwhile, Reform UK’s deputy leader has admitted the party cannot deliver the £90bn in tax cuts promised in its manifesto.

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A glimpse into the future

When asked what has taken up a lot of time in council chambers, Jones’s answer was swift: “flag gate”.

A row over flags erupted at the council during the summer after the council’s chief executive blocked Reform’s attempts to remove a Pride flag from Shire Hall. Reform eventually prevailed, stripping the chief executive of the power to decide which flags could fly outside the building. The party argued that only the union flag, the St George’s cross, or the county flag of Warwickshire should be displayed outside the council hall.

“Symbolically, that’s an important thing,” Jones says. “But does that matter? Is it substantial change? No, it’s symbolic. And they’ve not covered themselves in glory at times trying to get that.”

(For those curious about the current state of flags, Finch has asked for some British and English flags to be taken down to safely install Christmas lights.)

The past six months in local government show the difficulties Reform will have with what they describe as bureaucracy, but Jones aptly insists is the daily reality on the ground.

But local councils are often tasked with implementing decisions made in Westminster, and if Reform does manage to gain power, they will have much stronger levers to pull. Will we see the same level of disorganisation and chaos? Jones isn’t sure.

“The top of Reform is a very well-oiled machine,” Jones says. “It’s very efficient, very direct, very intentional in what it does. When you get to the lower levels, these are councillors who, at the end of the day, are Farage fans. They’re not in the inner sanctum of Reform, dealing with billionaire oil giants or whatever.”

He added that the left cannot simply wait and hope for Reform to implode before the next election. “Right now, we’re in a battle of ideas. And while we have time, we can fight forward with different ideas: better ideas, ideas that more closely align with the reality of the world around us. The legacy parties aren’t doing that. So, there is an alternative – a positive alternative. Hope is here. It’s all of us.”

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