DONCASTER, England — Reform UK topped opinion polls as a protest movement. Now it might actually get to run something.
Nigel Farage’s right-wing party is set to grip its first (small) levers of power after this Thursday’s local elections in England. A recent poll gave the upstart outfit a clear lead in two mayoral contests — Greater Lincolnshire, and Hull and East Yorkshire — while party chiefs believe they will gain hundreds of councillors, potentially even taking charge of some town or county halls.
This will make tangible the disillusionment that has put populists in power across Europe, and could in time threaten the U.K.’s century-long run of prime ministers from two parties: Labour and the Conservatives. Labour’s poll rating has tanked 10 months after its landslide; trade unions are watching reps join Reform; Farage has the slogan: “Britain is broken.”
Reform chairman Zia Yusuf told POLITICO it is part of “a journey, we believe, to winning a majority in the House of Commons with Nigel as our prime minister.”
Yet victory this week will put Reform in charge of multi-million pound budgets — and MPs and strategists from both main parties believe this will show governing isn’t so easy. They believe — or secretly hope — that Farage’s outfit will, in the words of one Labour MP, “fuck up.”
Take Brighton, where the Green Party brokered a £36 million loan for a 162-meter observation tower that later went bust; or Thanet, Kent, where UKIP (Farage’s previous party) lost control after half its councillors quit in a row over the local airport.
Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor who faced his own political firestorm over plans to regenerate a former steelworks, argued there is a “significant chance” Reform may end up a “basket case.” The Conservative politician told POLITICO: “They’re going to have two or three years to either do something which proves to people that actually they’re a genuine alternative … or they’re going to fall flat on their face.
“It’s going to be a real test.”
Meet Britain’s mini Elon Musk
As Thursday’s vote looms, the spirit of Elon Musk has come to Greater Lincolnshire.
Andrea Jenkyns is the overwhelming favorite to become the first mayor for this Brexit-supporting sprawl of rural eastern England. The Tory-to-Reform defector campaigned on a ticket of “DOGE Lincolnshire” — modelled on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — promising to cut “waste” and “bloated bureaucracy” in exchange for “lower taxes.”
Luke Campbell, the former Olympic gold medallist boxer who is the favorite to win Hull and East Yorkshire for Reform, has pledged a similar war on waste.
Yet neither of them are like Musk, who can scythe through spending backed by executive power. Combined authority mayors cannot directly cut council tax — they can choose not to raise it, by adding a “precept” to the bills charged by member councils.
Most local spending is also channeled through individual councils, although the new mayors will each hold the strings on a long-term investment fund. In Greater Lincolnshire it will be worth £24 million a year.
Jenkyns has pledged “proper flooding defences” and “better transport, roads and connectivity,” but Houchen argued: “She’s not going to be able to do all of those things and go in there and cut waste. What is she going to cut? She’s either going to cut specific types of projects or departments that are set up, or she’s going to cut staff.”
Reform declined requests for an interview with Jenkyns about how she would govern, citing her busy schedule.
However, Yusuf said it would be “irresponsible and overly cavalier to make commitments on precisely what’s going to get cut when we don’t have full information as to where the money is going.”
Reform is campaigning hard on the issue. Yusuf said the party would start with “woke projects” like launching TV stations and needless flights. The party has submitted 3,000 freedom of information requests to councils, and an official pointed to Farage’s pledge in last year’s general election to save “£5 in every £100″ spent in Whitehall. They added: “It was said we were absolutely crazy … Now Labour are trying to do exactly that.”
There is an irony to this: the mayoral authority itself is a brand new arm of governance with its own running costs. Robert Hayward, an election expert and Conservative peer, said: “You can’t say ‘I’m going to cut these things,’ because you’re actually setting up the authority and therefore spending money.”
There is an echo here in Farage himself, who was a member of the European Parliament for 21 years while he called for Britain to leave the EU. Yusuf insisted: “We’ve got to play the game as it currently is.”
A deal with the enemy
Jenkyns’ biggest hurdle may be the way mayoral authorities — “combined authorities” in local government speak — are actually run.
If she wins, Jenkyns will have power over transport, infrastructure, employment support, housing, regeneration, the environment and health and public safety.
Yet decisions are made collectively by a “board” of politicians from the individual councils; all in Greater Lincolnshire are currently Reform’s rivals. Decisions must be approved by a majority that includes the mayor — which means that, if more than half of councils object to Jenkyns’ plans, they could vote them down.
“You don’t have any real unilateral power,” said one combined authority mayor, who was granted for anonymity like others in this article to speak frankly. “You are one of a number of people on a board and you can be outvoted at any moment.”
They added: “They can tie her up in governance for months and months and months. They can say if it’s anything over £50,000 or £100,000, they want to be able to call it in and take that decision as a group … It’s just nonsense to think that as a mayor you have some kind of monarchical control over the organization in your name. It’s a partnership.”
Houchen — whose 2017 victory was a surprise deep in Labour territory — said it took him a “couple of years” to get the Tees Valley authority into the shape he wanted. He said: “I kind of walked into an office with a computer and a chair and nothing else, because my opponent, who was a leader of the council, had in effect been part of setting up the combined authority.”
Becoming visible
There will be one big advantage, though — a direct line into Downing Street.
New mayors will sit on the Council of Nations and Regions, a No. 10-convened forum of devolved leaders which is due to hold its next meeting in May, and the separate Mayoral Council convened by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner.
This will hand any Reform mayors a platform to make political points in earshot of the very Labour strategists jittery about Farage’s rise.
A wave of new councillors will also hand the party an organizing base from which to mount its general election campaign in 2029.
Yusuf said he and colleagues are setting up a “new wing” of Reform’s “Center of Excellence,” a training facility for candidates established in November. He said it “will be there to offer support, resources [and] training to new Reform councilors, many of whom will be elected officials for the first time. We will also be leveraging some people who do have experience in elected office.” It has been worked on for about a month and will “go live in the coming days,” Yusuf added.
How much Reform HQ uses its “leverage” on council groups will come under heavy scrutiny, given it — and Yusuf personally — has been accused of a controlling approach. Maria Botwell, one of a number of councillors who Reform asked to help draw up rules for council groups, quit the party last month. She said: “I can understand why, in the party’s infancy, it would choose not to make this a completely democratic process. But it also disappoints me that the chairman continues to have such a large amount of control, even at the lower levels.”
Then there’s the question of policy. Rupert Lowe, who lost the Reform whip as an MP after falling out with Farage, posted on X Monday: “For months, I pushed Reform to propose radical, but credible policies. To detail it, with substance and costings … None came. Nothing. All we get, day after day after day, is glossy pictures of Nigel Farage. No manifesto, just an empty promise that ‘Reform will fix it’. HOW?”
Yusuf insisted reports that the party’s council group leaders will be chosen or directed centrally are “total nonsense.” He blamed “deliberate disinformation from CCHQ [Conservative HQ] operatives,” said “Reform councillors will choose their own leaders” and insisted “it’ll be down to them to work together to formulate policy.”
But he added “we want to support them as much as we can,” and said Reform will have a “team” to go through council spending and waste on any authorities where the party takes overall control, including to “assist with expertise around forensic accounting.”
Welcome to Labour’s outpost
All this might get tested just up the road in Doncaster — the only Labour-controlled council up for election this Thursday. The working-class railway city will also renew its directly-elected mayor, a different model to the regional mayors.
Labour has been the largest party on Doncaster Council for 51 years, yet it’s obvious there is little love for the party when you talk to traders selling meat and pies in the city center market. Stallholders bemoan the beggars, litter, empty shops, expensive parking, the center being quieter than it once was. By no means are they all voting for Reform — Tory mayoral candidate Nick Fletcher has many traders on his side — but the common theme is obvious. Turnout for the mayoral election was 28 percent in 2021. Deli worker Linda Smith, 60, will vote Green: “I think somebody else needs to have a go. A bit of new blood.”
Keir Starmer’s party won 41 of the 55 seats on Doncaster Council even in 2021, the party’s low ebb. While Labour’s Ros Jones — seeking re-election after 12 years in power — has some name recognition and it would take a sensational night for Reform to seize the reins, Labour activists believe there is a high chance they will lose overall control of the council.
The hardest outcome would be a mayor of one party and a council run by another — and Doncaster has been there before.
Until 2013, the council was Labour-led, yet presided over by a mayor from the fringe English Democrats party: Peter Davies. Ministers swept in to oversee Doncaster in 2010 after a damning Audit Commission report said it was plagued by “dysfunctional politics” and failures to keep children safe. Davies’ reign created a “drawbridge mentality” where work between both sides broke down, Jones told me.
He may not be unique.
‘He doesn’t understand finance’
Chatting over a cash-only cup of tea from the market in the newly-refurbished Corn Exchange, loomed over by its iron pillars, Jones was scathing about her Reform rival.
Alexander Jones (no relation), a 30-year-old foreign exchange trader and male model, has promised to make Doncaster Council “faster, smarter and leaner” at the same time as investing in infrastructure, and accused the city hall of being “terribly mismanaged.” Doncaster Council had £425 million of debt on its books in September 2024, though council officials say nearly 70 percent of that is attributable to nearly 20,000 council-owned homes.
“I’m an accountant by profession,” said Jones senior, at 75 playing the elder stateswoman. “He doesn’t understand finance, I think is the kindest way to put it … Unfortunately when the young man quoted things, I had to advise him — you may have debt on one side of a balance sheet, but you’ve got the assets on the other. He doesn’t fully understand all the intricacies that go into running an authority.”
I had barely squished into the middle seat of Nick Fletcher’s electrical contractor’s van when the Tory candidate, too, gave both barrels to his “young lad” Reform rival. He claimed Farage “bullied” the candidate into standing because others decided not to, and he now “could quite easily end up winning.” Circling the quaint English Heritage ruin of Conisbrough Castle in his van, signwritten with the hashtag #makedoncastergreatagain, Fletcher said: “Labour are literally going to eat him alive.”
Fletcher, who publicly invited Farage to stand for the Tories in Doncaster in 2023, added: “Nigel Farage has not only thrown this young man under a bus, he’s thrown Doncaster under the bus … and Nigel Farage won’t care. Nigel Farage will be down in Westminster doing his GB News show.”
POLITICO was unable to reach Alexander Jones for an interview. He and Jenkyns each skipped a hustings event last week.
In fairness to Jones junior, frustration at individual mayoral candidates is nothing new.
A second Labour MP, who asked for anonymity to speak frankly, said: “I think all political parties need to stop viewing mayors as just getting a figurehead or a backbench MP in place, because they’re people that hold massive budgets. They need to be of the caliber of a minister of state. We’ve all been guilty.”
Blue sky … and on the ground
The first big decision for whoever holds the council’s reins will be Sheffield Doncaster Airport. Jones senior says reopening the former military base — which took passengers for 11 years before closing in 2022 — would support 5,000 jobs and pour £5 billion into the local economy by 2050. Councils in the region are due to meet this summer to agree funding arrangements between them and the South Yorkshire mayoral authority.
Yet there are already tensions. Labour’s Ros Jones is hoping the funding meeting will come in July, but a local official told POLITICO there were still disagreements over what to do and when. South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard has only promised it at some point in the summer. The Tories and Labour have traded barbs over who is to blame. Reform’s candidate has not made firm promises either way.
But arguably the bigger test in Doncaster — or indeed in any council where Reform has a chance of taking control — will be the overall finances.
Labour says Doncaster’s core government funding was cut by a fifth since 2010, with 70 percent (up from 56) now spent on children’s and adult services including care and health. Jones senior said: “The fear is if they took the mayoralty, what people fail to realise is the cuts promised would mean we hit our most vulnerable.”
So how will Reform distinguish efficiency savings from cuts? Yusuf picks his words carefully.
As well as “woke projects,” said the party chairman, “we also have to look at, how do we ensure that the areas where we know spending is going to have to be significant — you know, for example, in social care. We have to get our arms around where that money is going, is it being spent as effectively as it should be … We won’t have the answer to those questions until we have done the work.”
So would he contemplate cutting social care spending in the name of tackling waste? “That’s not the place we’re going to start. Where we’re going to start is the low-hanging fruit … it’s less about cutting it. It’s more about — are the recipients of that care happy with it?”
It’s all vibes
Over an oat milk coffee at Conisbrough Castle — gesturing at the fields he says will be turned into solar farms — Nick Fletcher says Doncaster has a long history of voting against “elites” who thought they knew better. “I was elected on getting Brexit done; it wasn’t Nick Fletcher,” says the short-lived Tory former MP. “Farage is doing a wonderful job at making this election about national issues. [Promising a] minister for immigration … he’s hoodwinking these people into voting for him thinking that the mayor of Doncaster can do something about illegal immigrants.”
In Doncaster’s Harewood bar, a sort of unofficial HQ for Reform, owner Rod Bloor (“call me the proprietor”) is unafraid to give Fletcher a piece of his mind. His regulars do not hold back about Labour either. “Both my sons are running as councillors” for Reform, says Bloor.
This disillusionment will be repeated far and wide. One Conservative strategist said they had been told of voters undecided between Reform and the Lib Dems — despite vast differences between the two parties. “They are basically saying Labour and the Conservatives are shite and we’re going to vote for an anti-establishment party,” the strategist said.
Labour is painfully aware of this. One minister said: “The steer from No. 10 is they don’t want strategies and reviews, they just want delivery.”
Should it win on Thursday, the task for Reform will then be to show it can deliver instead. But sometimes in politics, the vibes win the day anyway.
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