Reform take charge – so is it time to just drown our sorrows?

YOU MAY, just possibly, have gathered that the Reform UK party did very well in the recent local government elections. In fact, they swept into control of a swathe of England’s councils and propelled the grinning face of the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, onto the TV screens in our homes and onto the front pages of our ‘newspapers’, physical or virtual. And it’s a face that seems to provoke a response similar to that claimed for Marmite: love or hate, but not ambivalence.

For those who have no love for Farage, or what it is believed that he and his party to stand for, it is extremely tempting, and perhaps comforting, to assert that Reform’s success on May 1st – and success it very definitely was – was chiefly the consequence of the party and its candidates lying to the electorate via social media, pandering to underlying fears and prejudices, and making a virtue of simply ‘not being them’ (the Labour and Conservative parties) – in much the same way as Labour did at the last General Election. Oh, and being extremely tactical in focusing their campaigning effort where it delivered most seats – again, in much the same way as Labour did at the last General Election.

In my view, the ‘lying’ angle is grossly over-stated, the ‘we’re not them’ is an electoral tactic as old as the hills, and being savvy about where to campaign hardest (i.e. playing the first-past-the-post system for all it’s worth) is likewise neither new nor dodgy (even if it is becoming better-informed and more widely used).

This leaves what I feel is close to the heart of the matter: the issue of people’s underlying fears and prejudices. And no amount of demonising the leadership, candidates and tactics of a party can disguise the fact that large numbers of ordinary, sane, non-partisan voters decided it was best put their cross against Reform when visiting the polling booth. The people who returned 677 new Reform UK s across England, and who thereby caused 10 top-tier councils responsible for local transport to now be controlled by Reform, and four others to have Reform as the largest party where there is ‘No Overall Control’, cannot rationally be dismissed simply as fools, idiots or malign. They chose to vote Reform for the same kinds of reason every other voter often chooses these days to vote a different way to their parents, and social and cultural traditions.

If you don’t like that fact, it doesn’t alter the result. Had the party you favour (if there is one) done better at the polls, then Reform voters would be just as likely to dislike that outcome, as you do of the result that actually happened.

And that’s the reality: it happened. The truth is that Reform now has its hands on some significant levers of power – or, rather, those many individuals who stood under the party’s banner do: an important distinction to which I will return. That being the case, even should you disdain the party, if you want to see what you call progress made, and if you want to help make the world what you consider to be a better place, then your best interests are served by trying to influence how these new elected representatives use their power, rather than by choosing to wish the fact of their election away, or by trying to interfere with their opportunity to govern, or by just hoping the next elections will go better – from your point of view.

And it’s that personal ‘point of view’ that’s so important.

At least some of my readers will surely have themselves recently voted for a Reform UK candidate, and others would have done so if they’d had the chance. Indeed, without the postponement of quite a few ‘shire’ elections this year pending proposed local government reorganisation, and gap in the electoral cycle for most metropolitan areas, the upheaval would have arguably been even more dramatic. There will be many reasons why this is the case, and I needn’t speculate about what they might be. While I think it likely that very few people in my immediate circle are potential Reform voters, I live in a bubble, as almost all of us do. I have to accept that there are loads of people ‘out there’ who think differently, and then decide what to do about it.

I could consider myself ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’ (or, just to complicate matters, me ‘left’ and others ‘right’), but that doesn’t get me very far, unless it is to make me more indignant, self-righteous, or perhaps despairing. None of those reactions are constructive, and I want to be constructive.

For the avoidance of doubt, what I am advocating here is not that you should change your mind, or simply acquiescence with ideas you believe to be wrong, or even dangerous. What I am advocating is a carefully considered and productive response to the question, “So, what am I going to do about it?”

As a rather crude illustration of two broad paths we could go down, I have drafted a couple of optional imaginary letters from a senior officer (as we might suppose it to be for this little exercise, a Head of Transport) working in a Council now newly controlled by Reform UK. They’re written as if to the new Cabinet Member or committee chair responsible for that officer’s area of work. Don’t look at the detail (there isn’t much), but please do consider their different tone. One of them would never, of course, actually be written or sent. I’m simply trying to illustrate a difference in mindset.

Both letters could be written by someone who disagrees with Reform’s agenda and might, in particular, be appalled at what they know of the specific Councillor’s views. One projects the officer’s true feelings, while the other is written in order that the officer might make the best of things, despite that being – in the officer’s view – the best of a bad job.

Perhaps, in recognition, of most local government officers’ professionalism I should better say that these are letters the officer might like to be sending, or sentiments they are just thinking but my core point about the attitudinal paradigm would still nevertheless remain .

In this hypothetical situation, which is one I that surmise many Council officers will have come to recognise since 1st May, I would plainly advocate sending the conciliatory letter (and hope that it reflects some conciliatory thinking). And I do so for two main reasons.

The first is that, as I’ve said, my instinct is to be constructive. Have you ever come across what’s usually called the Serenity Prayer? It goes like this:

‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference’.

It represents an attitude often encouraged in members of recovery groups, and that could be exactly how some Senior Leadership Teams are now thinking of themselves! Boiled down to its essential, I see this attitude as being about focusing your efforts on what you can actually, or even potentially, change.

My second reason is that I consider it usually unwise to assume the worst. If we stay in our bubble, or echo chamber, it’s far too easy to see people who belong to groups we don’t ourselves subscribe to as stereotypes or caricatures. ‘All Reformers/Tories/Labour voters/Greens/LibDems be like…’ As a very easy counter to this huge over-simplification, I offer the fact that thousands upon thousands of the folk who voted Reform a couple of weeks ago must surely have voted for a different party last time.

And, in just the same way as there isn’t a template Reform voter, there won’t be a template reform councillor. Some of the people recently voted in as Reform councillors will have been councillors before, as representatives of another party. But most new Reform councillors are new councillors, full stop. And what each believes, what makes each tick, what made each of those people want to become councillors will vary in a way that no cartoon representation or categorisation can do the remotest justice to.

Easy labelling, despite seemingly being increasingly commonplace, is not constructive. I saw an article recently, on the Guardian website, entitled ‘From Send to cycle lanes, how Reform may try to change English councils’. Below it there’s a prominent link to another piece entitled ‘Reform UK councillors face allegations of sharing far-right and Islamophobic content’. While right-wing media and parties are often accused or fear-mongering and promoting ‘clickbait’, it’s clear they have no monopoly of these things. The ‘may’ in that Guardian headline is doing a lot of heavy lifting, with the piece itself referring to six areas where the writers fear Reform councils will take the ‘wrong’ path.

The LTT editor picked up on the same content in the last issue.

The topics referenced include Net Zero, in relation to which the Guardian article quotes Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, as having said “We will attack, we will hinder, we will delay, we will obstruct, we will put every hurdle in your way”. On the subject of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Policies, Nigel Farage is quoted as having said “If you are working in DEI or climate change then perhaps alternative employment is where you should be looking”. And on the subject of transport, new Worcestershire Reform councillor Alan Amos is quoting as claiming, in reference to cyclists, that “All the other parties have bent over backwards to please a small minority”.

In the piece, Amos is described as the ‘likely leader of Worcestershire county council’. Known for some outspoken views usually associated with right-wingers, he has been a Conservative MP and councillor, a Labour councillor, an independent councillor, and now a Reform councillor. Who he is, and what he represents is therefore not, I contend, best understood through the lens of party affiliation. What’s more, incidentally, he is unlikely to become the new leader of Worcestershire County Council, since Joanne Monk has been elected as the council’s Reform group leader.

The writers of the Guardian piece are perfectly entitled to write what they did, and it contains no untruths I’m aware of. But it is definitely written from a particular point of view, and the quotes used are from the notoriously outspoken people whose words appeal to people (including journalists) seeking to make a point (for or against). The piece is also definitely intended to appeal to, and generate concern amongst, readers of a similar point of view. In other words, it’s an article written within and for a particular echo chamber.

But there’s an important difference between worrying about what ‘may’ happen and trying to influence what will happen. And, as I have said, it’s the latter path I recommend.

Without wishing to be patronising or condescending (both of which I know I can perhaps sometimes be) many of the new crop of Reform councillors – as can be the case with new councillors of any party – will, to some extent, be blank canvasses. They may have some strong views about some things, but will be open in influence about other matters; and perhaps, even, more open than you might fear to modifying some of their strong views. Against this background the opportunity is there for us to find the suitable talking points.

A 2007 documentary by Julien Temple about Joe Strummer, leader of punk band The Clash, is entitled The Future is Unwritten. The belief is that this is a quote from Strummer himself, though there’s no evidence of the fact. However, it is a phrase that appears on the sleeve of the 1982 Clash single Know Your Rights’. And it can also be considered a handy summary of something Strummer actually did say:

“People can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks – I am one of them. But we’ve all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail… That’s my spiel”.

He might have added, “It’s allowed to change your mind, you know. It’s not always a sign of weakness. It could potentially be a sign of strength”. Which, by the way, was a statement made by one Nigel Farage, when he decided to stand, after all, in last year’s General Election. And look where that has led to.

It would be nice to think we can take him at his word. But things are rather different now in terms of open-mindedness, compared with, say, those long-lost Sixties times when the hippie message was ‘All you need is love.’

Anyone now needing to engage with a Reform-led Council or Reform councillors, still, however, has a choice. And, frankly, it’s the same choice we’ve always had, when engaging with anyone whose views we do not share. It’s a choice between trying to work out what’s best to do, as we see it, in the circumstances we’re presented with, and adopting an approach founded on obdurate opposition to the views of those whose beliefs we assume, as a given, are unacceptably different from ours.

Much, as once were, the views of the Reverend Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness, until they worked successfully together in the new Northern Ireland power-sharing executive, 30 years ago. Once the most implacable of enemies they become known, rather remarkably, as the Chuckle Brothers!

Because I know that the appreciation of complexity and nuance are often in such short supply these days, I will also add that, in fact, the choices we each have are not simply those of engaging constructively with others or not. Just because, as professionals and campaigners, we are willing to engage with a Council or councillors of an alien persuasion as constructively as possible, does not close off our option, as private individuals, also (perhaps fiercely) to oppose the policies of that Council or views of those councillors.

Another film-maker, Albert Maysles (just as radical in his own way as Julien Temple), once said that “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance”. Let us not, in how we approach difficult challenges, lose sight of these wise words or, indeed, this warning.

We can choose binary: right/wrong; them/us; hard/fast. But I do not consider this our best option, or even a good one. Instead, let’s determine to go behind the headlines, to go beyond black/white so as to find differences of tone, however subtle, that might open the way to a more productive outcome.

Sometimes strange alliances can come out of conflict

I didn’t begin this article by intending to end with what follows, but it has occurred to me that, if you’d like to engage further with this matter of rising to the challenges of engaging more constructively with councillors, or others, whose views we don’t share, you could do a lot worse than get yourself along to Landor’s Active City conference in York, and the 2nd and 3rd of July. There you will find James Gleave, Founder of Mobility Lab, talking about the findings of some research he’s recently done, based on some in depth interviews with those directly involved, under the heading ‘How to make friends and influence councillors’. And, if you’re a real sucker for punishment, you could also catch what I’ll have to say about ‘Meeting people where they are, not where we wish they were’.

How could you resist?