Meanwhile, much-needed local services are also being scrapped, such as care homes in Derbyshire, a council tax relief scheme in Durham and a health programme in Lincolnshire. Promises to fix potholes and increase bin collections have also not been met (in Lancashire, collections are in fact reducing from once every two weeks to every three).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From the moment last year\u2019s election was called, the extreme views of Reform candidates were\u00a0exposed<\/a>\u00a0by my colleagues at HOPE not hate, an anti-fascist campaign group. The party had selected candidates whose social media pages had shared Hitler memes, material from the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative and called for Islam to be removed from the planet with \u201cone big nuke\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since then, Reform has suffered a series of high-profile scandals involving its elected politicians. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Councillor John Allen in Northumberland was\u00a0expelled<\/a>\u00a0for posting: \u201cI\u2019d shoot Starmer myself if I had the weapon and opportunity.\u201d Two successive leaders of Staffordshire County Council resigned amid racism scandals (although one reportedly quit due to a family bereavement, rather than as a result of alleged racist activity seen on a TikTok account bearing his name), while Reform\u00a0suspended<\/a>\u00a0another senior councillor at Staffordshire who appeared to call Africans \u201cbackward\u201d on social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it is not just scandals of bigotry that have beleaguered Reform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Edward Harris, the chair of Warwickshire County Council, was\u00a0branded<\/a>\u00a0\u201ca rogue landlord\u201d by neighbouring Tamworth Borough Council after he was found to be illegally renting out two unsafe properties with no heating, water or fire alarms. A business owned by Andrew Harrison, the chair of Durham\u2019s Economy and Enterprise Overview Committee, was\u00a0fined<\/a>\u00a0\u00a340,000 for hiring an illegal worker (a finding that Harrison denies and said he will appeal). Doncaster councillors Andrew Knight and Rachel Reed allegedly\u00a0tried to profit<\/a>\u00a0from the publicly funded airport upgrade by founding a company under the same name as the \u2018arms-length\u2019 firm the council created to manage the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reform intended for its local authority governance to be a \u201cshop window\u201d for a national government. At HOPE not hate\u2019s last count, one in ten of the party\u2019s councillors elected in the May 2025 intake have now quit, many of them due to disputes and defections to other parties. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The party\u2019s dysfunctional local politics is perhaps most obvious in Kent. A\u00a0leaked video<\/a>\u00a0revealed bitter infighting, with the county council\u2019s leader, Linden Kemkaran, telling her colleagues to \u201cfucking suck it up\u201d if they disagreed with her. In a subsequent WhatsApp message that was also leaked, Kemkaran\u2019s ally, Peter Osborne, the cabinet member in charge of highways and transport, threatened to punch the leaker \u201cright in the jaw\u201d. (Kemkaran remains in post, and no disciplinary action was taken against Osborne.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n After such high-profile scandals, Reform claimed to have improved its vetting procedures. As far back as October 2025, it was reported that\u00a0the party had already vetted 4,000 candidates<\/a>\u00a0for this year\u2019s local elections. Yusuf, now Reform\u2019s home affairs spokesman, has said its vetting is \u201cthe best in the country\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These claims are belied by reality. At least three candidates selected by Reform once appeared on a leaked list of\u00a0BNP<\/a>\u00a0affiliates, according to joint investigation by HOPE not hate and the Daily Mirror. In addition,\u00a0Daniel Devaney<\/a>, Reform\u2019s candidate in Bradford, said he wanted to \u201cblast\u201d Muslims off \u201cthe face of the earth\u201d.\u00a0Andrew Mahon<\/a>\u00a0in Blackburn South East said Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, was \u201cright\u201d. And a social media account seemingly associated with\u00a0Linda McFarlane<\/a>\u00a0in Gateshead called for Keir Starmer and David Lammy to be shot.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n What steps, if any, were taken to vet these candidates remains unclear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reform\u2019s election campaign this spring is cynical in the extreme. Despite the party\u2019s failure to deliver its promise to lower or freeze council tax, its leaflets have nonetheless\u00a0claimed<\/a>: \u201cThe only way to stop more tax rises\u2026 is to unite behind Nigel Farage.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This article is republished from <\/em>opendemocracy<\/em> <\/a>under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWe get elected, we do what we say,\u201d vowed Gawain Towler, a Reform UK board member, after the party won more than 677 new councillors at last year\u2019s local elections. Other Reform leaders were similarly bullish about their capabilities. \u201cWe\u2019re pretty high-agency people,\u201d said Zia Yusuf, then the party\u2019s chair. So a year on, what\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1791,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1790","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-article"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1790"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1796,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions\/1796"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/images.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHarry Shukman<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n