Reform’s embarrassing council mess shows the posh-boy hatemongers have nothing to offer

New Reform UK councillors in Kent promised efficiency, but have taken just a few months to go back on their pledges. And the embarrassing mess is yet another sign that the posh-boy hatemongers have nothing positive to offer ordinary people.

It was only a matter of time before Reform councils messed up

Reform took numerous councils in England earlier this year, amid the ongoing decline of the Tories and corporate hollowing-out of Labour. But Nigel Farage’s super-rich Thatcherite tribute band has wasted no time in disappointing. Because while it promised to save money by cutting out waste, in the reckless and disastrous chainsaw-style of Elon Musk, its takeover of Kent County Council (KCC) hasn’t gone well.

A story this week suggested that KCC could actually have to raise council tax by 5%, despite Reform candidates previously pledging to slash taxes. Reform leader Linden Kemkaran has said the council won’t make that decision until at least next month, but did admit that the council is struggling economically. Cuts to services like the “homes-to-school transport budget”, she said, had been going well. But as one senior Reform member on the council admitted:

Everyone thought we’d come in and there were going to be these huge costs we could cut away but there just aren’t.

Tory-led austerity after 2010 cut English councils’ core funding to the bone, hitting poorer areas the hardest. Some councils came close to bankruptcy, leaving community infrastructure and public services on their knees. And under the current austerity-lite regime under Labour, councils are still far from recovery. So more cuts from a different group of austerity-loving extremists was never the answer. As economist Richard Murphy stressed:

what [Reform’s] councils are showing is that there is no further room for cuts, and everything that Reform has been saying is total nonsense.

No more corporate shills in charge

Thanks to political domination of neoliberalism since the 1980s, the rich and powerful have gained more and more power in Britain. The politicians serving their interests – from the Tories to New Labour, and now Reform – have focused on cutting public spending, privatising public resources, freeing companies from regulations, and turning citizens into competitors rather than communities. Mainstream economists have condemned neoliberalism as a failed model that deepens inequality, undermines democracy, slashes living standards (especially for the poorest people and younger generations) while only serving the super-rich.

Millionaire Nigel Farage and his Reform party don’t serve ordinary people. They’ve attracted millions of pounds from super-rich individuals close to fossil fuels and finance. So it’s hardly surprising that they want to force dangerous things like fracking onto the ordinary communities voting for them. Reform’s private-school-educated climate-denier-in-chief Richard Tice is positively frothing at the mouth about the prospect. He lies about immigrants to distract people from the fact that he’s another posh boy born with a silver spoon in his mouth trying to squeeze money out of ordinary people and put it in the pockets of unscrupulous CEOs.

People like Farage and Tice are awful people, but great salesmen. In Kent, their party launched cuts that hit essential services for vulnerable children and families, throwing in some anti-environment cuts for good measure. And now, it seems they want local people to pay more tax for the privilege.

That’s the nature of Reform, just as it’s the nature of the Tories and Labour today. They’ll distract you with words they think you want to hear. But then, they’ll do everything they can to fill the bulging pockets of their super-rich donors at your expense.

Featured image via the Canary