Thursday 8 May 2025 – Reform
Last week there were local elections for some regional mayoralties and county councils in England. The Reform Party has had resounding successes against the previously two most established political parties. Reform UK won 31% of the vote share, 41% of the seats share and gained control of Durham, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Doncaster, Lincolnshire, West Northamptonshire, North Northamptonshire and Kent. From these results, Reform leader, Nigel Farage, concluded that, “We’ve dug very deep into the Labour vote and, in other parts of England, we’ve dug deep into the Conservative vote. After tonight, there’s no question, in most of the country we are now the main opposition party.”
He was talking from Runcorn and Helsby where Reform also won a byelection of what was a safe Labour seat. So, Reform now has five MPs in Parliament. And this is Farage’s takeaway; that Reform can now be considered the legitimate opposition party to the Government by gaining control from what were Conservative-run councils in Middle England. That they’re now in control of a load of councils, he is less bothered about.
Why that is, and why non-Reform-voting residents of these counties shouldn’t concern themselves too much about these results, is he knows that councillors don’t really have much influence over what happens at a council.
In a phone-in show this afternoon on LBC Radio, one Kent resident was pleased with Reform’s victory. He told the nation he was sick of there being “no schools, no dentist appointments, no doctors appointments. They’re all being blocked up by asylum seekers.” Now, that may be the case (although the presenter was at pains to say it wasn’t), but NHS services, and largely school places, have very little to do with the County Council. I know, like Farage, he saw this election victory only as a gateway to Central Government opposition and has little interest in what Kent County Council did do and what they will do now, but it is something that he and Farage might need to think about how this will now affect them.
Unlike General Elections, Reform contesting local elections is a bit like a dog chasing a bicycle: they wouldn’t know what to do with one if they caught it. They’re not going to stand in town hall chambers and make speeches about “illegal immigrants”, prioritising “native” Brits for NHS healthcare and generally promoting social, political and economic isolation from the rest of the world apart from Trump’s America because that’s not up to the local residents who attend West Northamptonshire County Council’s town hall. But, it is on these international political points they won control of the council. Now what are they going to do? They need a policy or two that has something to do with what local authorities have control over or else it’s going to be a long and uneventful four years at in the Chamber.
Farage has given this some thought since last week and declared that they are going to ban the flying of “silly flags”, including that of Ukraine, other than the Union Flag and St George’s Cross. Ok, I don’t think that’s going to affect residents that much unless you’re the type of person that that kind of thing infuriated in the first place. Maybe a socio-psychological study should be conducted into whether a majority of people (as majorities are the basis upon which our parliamentary democratic system works) can sustain a sufficient level of anger at flags that they eventually do something about it, but one would think that those people are, if not a bit socially isolated, at least on the extremes of the bell curve and addressing the issue of flags is not what the majority understood the proverbial bicycle’s use is.
He also declared that council officers shouldn’t work from home but come to the office and has aligned Reform’s policy with that of Donald Trump’s by announcing that those officers working on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) projects would do well to “seek alternative employment”. And he has pledged that councils will drop their commitments to net zero carbon emissions.
London boroughs were not included in this round of local elections but, in our team meeting today in the office, our manager declared that the Senior Leadership Team (SLT), in what I am assuming is not an unrelated reaction to the alarming local election results in other parts of the country, had upgraded their “aspiration” for council officers to work from the office at least once a week to an “expectation”. This is hardly the reform demanded by anyone who might moved enough by the issue to be the determining factor in who to vote for but, at the same time, if my employer really is going to engage in mindless populism, I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to make vacuous counter-arguments. “What is this decision based on?”, I challenged the manager in the team meeting. He didn’t know he said, and I do believe him that he has not made the link between the election results and councillors getting spooked and telling their SLT that they need to do something about voters’ “concerns” before local election time rolls round for them.
“But, the office is not a conducive place to work”, I protested. “The Council has stopped putting milk in the fridges for a cup of tea just to save money. How can we work here if we can’t stop for a tea break?”
“This is not really a big issue, though, is it?” another team member replied, sticking up for his employers and, perhaps, reason.
Is it not? I wasn’t sure. I had surprised myself with this argument, but I was determined to stick to my guns. I decided to fight right-wing populism with right-wing populism: “British workers are entitled to a tea break! Factory workers in the 1970s would go on strike if they were not allowed them. We shouldn’t let our employment rights, no matter how insignificant they may seem, be eroded!”
No protest to that ridiculous point; this was going great! I was feeling like Arthur Scargill winning the unwinnable battle. Thatcher closing his coal mines might have been an inevitability but he wasn’t going down without bloodying a few noses first. Drawing on my blog (see Office Life), I added more gripes, “And, if the point of working from the office is to promote collaboration, then why is one person allowed to camp in the small collaboration meeting space? If they want to work in isolation, they can bugger off home! I’ve never been to this office where there hasn’t been some dull-eyed person sitting in there all day. If the council wanted its workers to collaborate more in the office, they should manage their space better. And what about the security guards in reception? There are three of them guarding one door and haven’t noticed that anyone can come in through the other front door undetected!”
Wow, there was a bit of swearing in that one and I described some of my colleagues disrespectfully as “dull-eyed”. But I think both corporate infractions were warranted and I’d like to see if my team doesn’t think the same as me but, rather, thinks that, as a rule, the officers Barnet Council contrives to employ are the epitome of brilliance, a bit like working for NASA. No, they seemed quite amused by where I was taking this meeting.
The boss, smiling at my antics, said he would bring up my “valid” points with SLT… “anonymously”. I said I didn’t mind if my comments weren’t anonymised just to underline that I am happy to be a troublemaker so brace yourself if you think this is the end of the matter. But I think we all know that the reason the change recommended has been so pathetic, remaining at being in the office one day a week (that has always been the case) but upgrading this from being an “aspiration” to an “expectation”, is that we already have contracts of employment, and the employer can’t really change this now. “Expectation” may be DEFCON 2 but DEFCON 1 is “requirement” and, contractually, they can’t change what is required.
The next tin-eared item on the agenda was a working group for the council’s new EDI action plan and were there any volunteers to be a part of it? Perhaps in fear for our jobs, no hands went up.
Other than petty issues that enrage already angry people, do councillors of any persuasion really affect the services a council delivers? I have written in this blog about many things that councillors can’t affect, or prove incapable of affecting. The party in control of a local authority has little control. I talked previously about Labour’s manifesto pledge in 2014 when wresting control for Hammersmith & Fulham from the Tories to improve social housing standards. In her foreword to the housing policy adopted in 2015, the Cabinet Member wrote, “In our 2014 manifesto, The Change We Need, we made more than 40 commitments designed to fundamentally change the Council’s approach to housing.” LBHF has subsequently been given five maladministration warnings by the Housing Ombudsman. This may not have been so much because of her policy but because the housing officers were dull-eyed and commissioning managers far too cosy with their maintenance contractors to implement it (see Back to Basics). I’ve talked about adult and children’s care, statutory services not in the control of decision-making by councillors but required to be done by law, accounting for over 70% of the council’s budget, and Temporary Accommodation, also a statutory duty, increasingly taking up almost all of the rest, which, without careful management of budgets, are putting councils at risk of bankruptcy as happened to Birmingham City Council (see The Little Things). I talked about the joint venture partner of Enfield Council on the Meridian Water development, Vistry, invading the civic centre desks to spend public money on their own works without scrutiny, not just from councillors, but from the council’s finance and governance officers (see For the Betterment of the People).
What things councillors do have a say in, other than flags, could include Barnet and Hammersmith & Fulham councils’ Social Value policies. But senior officers in both have contrived to make sure this policy isn’t implemented so as not to upset their supply chains, in Barnet’s case, lying to councillors that there is a “Social Impact” from their policy (see Gaslighting). The Social Value officer informed me and my manager last Thursday that the Social Value measures for carbon emissions have been deleted because The BarNET Zero policy adopted in response to councillors’ climate emergency declaration in 2023 has been dropped as unworkable by none other than the Assistant Director for [environmental] Sustainability. She beat Farage to it. It is technocratic decisions supplanting democratic ones. And given that Facilities Management barely gets round to changing a lightbulb in the office, it’s unlikely they are going to be bothered to change what’s on the flagpoles outside the office (not that I am ever there that much to notice). Reform voters might be disappointed with the reform that will end up being made.
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