Reform UK is anticipated to increase its foothold in native authorities in England this week. Greater than 5,000 seats throughout 136 councils are being contested, making this one of many largest electoral checks in recent times. It builds on Reform’s breakthrough in 2025, when the social gathering took management of ten native authorities – its first actual expertise of energy.
For students of populism, this second could possibly be revealing. Years of analysis have centered closely on the rhetoric of populism, its voter base, and the interplay between the 2.
However far much less consideration has been paid to what populists really do as soon as in workplace. The place such analysis exists, it tends to give attention to nationwide governments, with solely a small physique analyzing native politics. Native authorities, nevertheless, is the place political guarantees get a fast actuality verify.
The hole between Reform’s “pro-workers” rhetoric and its social gathering elite’s comparatively privileged and pro-business backgrounds has been famous. However the social gathering’s first 12 months in native authorities gives a chance to see whether or not the social teams it claims to symbolize additionally have a tendency to learn from its train of energy.
Whereas systematic knowledge on the Reform-led councils is but to be collected, their monitor document up to now has revealed indicators of the place this social gathering’s pursuits would possibly lie – and of what a UK authorities led by Reform would possibly appear to be.
Power: massive donors or native pursuits?
In accordance with a current report, local weather commitments have been scaled again throughout Reform-run councils. Web-zero targets have been scrapped and local weather language faraway from coverage paperwork. These selections align with the social gathering’s broader critique of local weather coverage as economically burdensome.
It additionally aligns with the social gathering’s fossil gas donors, who account for greater than two-thirds of Reform’s monetary backing. Nevertheless, it doesn’t essentially align with the pursuits of the communities within the councils that it runs.
A great living proof is fracking. Regardless of its well-known dangers to water and air high quality, in addition to considerations over earthquakes and warming results, Reform’s management has endorsed fracking. The social gathering has pledged to legalise it if it comes into authorities.
The nation, nevertheless, isn’t as eager. In accordance with the most up-to-date polling, solely 28% of individuals in Britain help fracking, in comparison with 46% opposing it. A survey final 12 months discovered that nothing places off Reform supporters greater than the social gathering’s ties to the fossil gas trade. Farmers – 40% of whom now help Reform – have a longstanding scepticism about fracking because of its potential affect on their crops.
Actually, in two different Reform council areas – Lancashire and Scarborough, native representatives have damaged from the nationwide social gathering line on fracking. This displays a broader stress between the pursuits of its elite backers and people of its well-liked base.
Social care: when ‘populism’ meets the welfare state
These contradictions additionally develop into seen within the area of social care. In Derbyshire, the Reform-led council’s plan to close eight care properties was known as a “betrayal of native individuals”. Comparable plans in Lancashire entailed the closure of 5 public care properties in addition to 5 day centres, with residents moved to the personal sector.
What’s putting is not only the route of coverage, but additionally the political response to it. The privatisation plans in Lancashire had been ultimately deserted because of robust native opposition, which got here not solely from rival events, but additionally from Reform grassroots members.
This underlines an perception typically lacking from populism analysis: the class of “extraordinary individuals” isn’t a unified social group. It additionally signifies the unpopularity of an financial agenda that, with its emphasis on additional deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, would possibly appear to be Thatcherism’s unfinished enterprise.
Taxation: from guarantees to follow
Reform’s neoliberal outlook on the financial system is mirrored within the vary of tax cuts pledged in its 2024 manifesto. Forward of the native elections final 12 months, a number of Reform candidates reiterated these pledges, vowing both to freeze or minimize council tax.
The other has occurred, although. As reported just lately, 9 Reform councils raised Band D council tax for 2026-27 by a median of three.94%. And whereas that was decrease than the general common improve of 4.86%, it exhibits that – when confronted with budgetary constraints – Reform is prepared to comply with the identical fiscal patterns as different mainstream events. In different phrases, by rising what’s in the end a regressive tax that disproportionately impacts poorer households.
This dynamic echoes as soon as once more the discrepancy between the social gathering’s “populist” picture and its neoliberal, austerity-prone coverage agenda.
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Reform’s monitor document in these areas of policymaking factors to a broader conclusion. A lot of the present literature treats populism primarily as a discursive phenomenon – a manner of framing politics by way of “the individuals” versus “the elite”.
However Reform’s expertise in native authorities exhibits that its precise politics would possibly actually tilt in direction of the curiosity of the latter. That is exactly the place present analysis stays scant.
On the eve of a brand new spherical of native elections, Reform is prone to lengthen its presence throughout councils in England. However its first 12 months in energy already means that “the individuals” it claims to symbolize aren’t essentially the identical individuals who profit from its rise to energy.
