Farage’s first real test: can Reform govern?
After storming to success in the local elections, Reform now holds real positions of power – so what does it intend to do with it? Asks Emma Revell
Many column inches will be spent poring over what the local elections mean for our supposedly two-party system, whether Labour or the Conservatives have most to lose from Reform on the march, and whether this is the end of Kemi Badenoch’s leadership (spoiler alert – no). But a more basic question has had much less attention. Now Reform has power, what do they intend to do with it?
Starting at the top, with Nigel Farage. He sits, it goes without saying, on the right of British politics. He supports lower taxes, welfare cuts, a smaller state and has, at times, supported an insurance-based healthcare system. Not long after her death, he proclaimed himself to be the only politician “keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive” and he has enough selfies with Donald Trump to wallpaper his parliamentary office.
Farage has also long attracted libertarians and free marketeers into his orbit – people who may disagree with him on some cultural or social issues, but who think that when it comes to economics, he’s on the money.
But the idea of Farage as just a tax-cutting state-slasher has always been somewhat misguided – he is also capable of proposing incredibly left-wing solutions to policy challenges. Despite previously arguing against nationalising British industry, Reform made significant hay out of Labour’s recent bailout of British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant, claiming they’d been calling for such a move all along and criticising the government for not acting sooner. He’s also suggested British businesses need protection from foreign competition and wants to restrict foreign ownership of British companies – not very Thatcherite.
Of course, a party is more than just its leader – although if ever there were an exception to that rule, it’s Reform
We know Reform are anti-net zero: Farage’s deputy Richard Tice set social media ablaze in February with new anti-renewable announcements, including widely mocked taxes on subsidies. We also know where they stand in the culture wars. Dame Andrea Jenkyns – the newly minted Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire – has argued that migrants should be sleeping in tents, not hotels, and announced that Reform-controlled Lincolnshire County Council will be getting rid of its diversity officers (which they don’t actually have) in a bid to cut waste and as a “war on woke”.
We also know that they’re not great on the detail. Tice’s announcements were widely mocked – not least for promising to save people loads of money on their energy bills while also spending billions to bury pylons. Looking back to the general election, the party’s manifesto proposed tax cuts it estimated would cost nearly £90bn per year, and spending increases of £50bn per year.
Reform’s sums don’t add up
Yet according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the cost-saving measures wouldn’t save as much as Reform claimed and the spending pledges “would not be nearly enough” to meet the goals attached to them. In short, the IFS said, “the sums in this manifesto do not add up”.
Nigel Farage has always had the benefit of shouting from the sidelines. Until very recently the idea that he and whichever party he was in or leading at the time would be in a position to put those ideas into practice was for the birds.
But now there are Reform MPs. Reform Mayors. Reform-run councils in places as disparate as Kent and County Durham. Whether it was because they liked Reform’s contradictory, off-the-cuff, and arguably fanciful policy offering, or simply felt left down by the more established parties, the public have decided they’re comfortable to see what happens when Reform have their hands on the levers of power.
So what’s going to happen? On the one hand, it could be a disaster. At the local level, the biggest areas of responsibility – and cost – are adult and child social care and support for those with special educational needs. The challenges are complex, the funding short, and the cost of failure enormous – and both the policies and the spending obligations are dictated by statutory duties set in Whitehall, not town halls. Indeed, the way Farage speaks about local government, including promises of a DOGE in every town hall, suggests he doesn’t understand these dynamics at all.
A chance to actually govern and govern competently would give Reform credibility ahead of more elections in Scotland, Wales, and London next year
On the other hand, this could be the making of Reform. A chance to actually govern and govern competently would give them credibility ahead of more elections in Scotland, Wales, and London next year. And nothing irons out kinks in the policy formation process like a brush with reality.
But then again, there’s a third path – one we’ve already had hints of. Reform might not be able to set policy. But they can certainly wreck it. Tice has suggested that Reform will fight tooth and nail against attempts to build renewables in the areas it now controls, expand the electricity grid – and presumably any attempts to house illegal migrants.
Britain’s lopsided political settlement doesn’t give much power to local councils. But we could be about to find out whether they have control of the wrecking ball.
Emma Revell is external affairs director at the Centre for Policy Studies