Prefer us on Google
February 6 2025 - 1:15pm
Never one to miss a political opportunity, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was quick to condemn Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s announcement that May’s local elections will be deferred until next year. Claiming he was “blooming angry”, Farage said there was “absolutely no justification” for delaying the democratic wishes of around 5.5 million people.
Eighteen local authority areas had applied to defer elections, citing a need to prepare for the merging of district and county councils, and for the establishment of new mayoralty positions like those established in Manchester, Birmingham and the Tees Valley. All located in South East England, the councils granted deferrals notably included Essex and Norfolk, counties where Reform won constituency seats in last year’s general election.
Rayner said it would be “an expensive and irresponsible waste of taxpayers’ money” to go ahead with elections for councils, only for them to be abolished shortly afterwards. “We’re not in the business of holding elections to bodies that won’t exist and where we don’t know what will replace them,” she told the House of Commons. On the contrary, Farage claimed the changes to local government would take up to three years to be completed and that deferring the elections would allow some councilors to ride the gravy train for three years longer than they otherwise would.
Riding high in the polls and sustained by that precious and fleeting political commodity —momentum — Farage is doing what he does best. He is massaging a fairly anodyne change to how councils are run into a narrative that suits him and his party. It’s a free story and one that, with a bit of imagination, can be given life by playfully projecting “DICTATORS CANCEL ELECTIONS” onto the Palace of Westminster as a publicity stunt, and mobilizing 245,000 motivated supporters into signing a petition.
All over a little bit of local government reform. Regardless, Farage will get his story of the night when Reform does well in the local elections, even though his sights are set well beyond local government. Love him or loathe him, the Reform leader is an ambitious “vision” politician, not a technocratic “systems thinker” with a respect for institutions and process. Is he really that worried about whether a few hundred extra councilors end up making decisions over potholes and bin collections?
Think of Reform as the polar opposite of the Liberal Democrats, who live and breathe the minutiae and intricacies of local government — using it as a springboard for higher, Westminster-bound ambitions. But for Reform, for now, it is simply enough to criticize the established order, without fleshing out the policy details of alternatives.
The proof of Farage’s clever and purposeful cynicism over this story of deferred elections in a smattering of local councils can be found in his throaty support for President Donald Trump, whose new administration is hardly showing a great reverence for constitutional norms. Indeed, when asked about the President’s plans to turn Gaza into the “Riviera” of the Middle East, Farage quipped: “I love ambition.”
There is of course a big difference between deferring local elections by one year or by three years. The former is a minor change, the latter not so. But if constitutional changes are of great importance to the Reform UK leader, why is he supporting an actual election result denier? As ever, because there’s a “blooming” good story in it and the potential to convince more voters that Reform is holding power to account. Most people know that successful opposition politics is simply about shouting loud enough to be heard.
