Reform Isn’t Anti-Establishment. It’s Anti-Responsibility.
On politics as evading responsibility.
There is a comforting version of the Reform UK story, popular among people who already dislike Reform UK, which says the party is simply incompetent.
On one level, this is not an unreasonable conclusion. A party that repeatedly sends candidates into public life only to discover, days later, that some of them have apparently spent years treating social media like a pub toilet wall is not a party that has fully mastered candidate vetting. A party that promises an assault on waste, bureaucracy and taxes, then finds itself raising council tax, cutting ordinary services or arguing about infrastructure finance, is not exactly staging a seminar in administrative seriousness. A party that takes control of local authorities and then starts losing councillors to resignations, suspensions, expulsions and internal warfare has, at the very least, a personnel problem.
But I think the incompetence explanation is incomplete.
The problem with Reform is not merely that it is bad at responsibility. The problem is that its politics depend on evading responsibility.
That distinction matters because it explains both Reform’s appeal and its vulnerability. Reform is very good at politics when politics means naming grievances, directing anger, finding enemies and promising the simple moral pleasure of finally saying what supposedly cannot be said. It is much worse at politics when politics means budgets, trade-offs, legal duties, procurement, adult social care, children’s services, scrutiny committees, risk registers and the melancholy discovery that a council cannot, in fact, pay for much-needed road repairs with the proceeds of cancelling a diversity training session.
This is not an argument that the grievances are invented. They are not. The country is full of places where people - rightly - feel that public services have deteriorated, that politics has become unresponsive, that immigration has changed communities faster than institutions have adapted, and that the old parties have offered managerial disappointment in slightly different colours. It is not hard to see why Reform’s story appeals. It tells people that the problem is not complexity, scarcity or institutional decay, but betrayal. Someone did this to you.
The trouble is that grievance is not a programme for government.
Reform’s national politics works because it converts dissatisfaction into momentum. Every failure can be folded back into the same story. If public services are struggling, it is because the old parties wasted the money. If councils are broke, it is because of bureaucrats, consultants, net zero, equality officers, asylum hotels, work-from-home culture, or whatever target happens to be nearest to hand. If a promise proves impossible, it was because the establishment hid the true scale of the problem. If a candidate collapses under scrutiny, the media are out to get them. The emotional structure is wonderfully convenient: success proves the people are rising; failure proves the establishment is afraid.
Local government ruins this game because it supplies receipts.
Reform’s breakthrough in the 2025 local elections was enormous. The party gained hundreds of council seats, won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election (albeit by six votes), took mayoralties, and won pluralities or majorities of councillors in Durham, Kent, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, North Northamptonshire, Doncaster and West Northamptonshire. In 2026, the pressure continued in Labour’s northern heartlands, with Labour losing control of Barnsley for the first time in the council’s 52-year history.
For a national insurgent party, these are trophies. But for a party supposedly preparing for government, they are tests.
That is the difficulty. Reform has spent its entire existence making the claim that other people are useless. Then voters, reasonably enough, began giving them the opportunity to be useful. The party’s old posture was anti-establishment. Its new problem is responsibility.
Take council tax. This is where an anti-waste party should, in theory, have its easiest win. Reform’s pitch depends heavily on the idea that the state is bloated, captured and frivolous; therefore, a determined outsider should be able to find savings where the old parties found excuses. Yet Reform’s record is awkward for the easy version of this claim. The party made pledges at various levels to cut or freeze council tax, on this basis, with local election leaflets saying the party would “reduce waste and cut your taxes”.
Reform have not managed to do this anywhere. In many places, they’ve fallen into the kind of political doublespeak they rightly criticise the ‘uniparty’ for - my favourite example, from Kent, is the line “cutting taxes could mean not putting them up as much”. Kent then increased council tax by 3.99%. Elsewhere, the pattern has been even starker. In January 2026, the Guardian reported that Derbyshire, North Northamptonshire, West Northamptonshire and Leicestershire had proposed 5% rises, the maximum normally permitted. In Worcestershire, they received special dispensation to go above the usual cap on rises and upped it by nearly 9%.
Now, to be fair (a terrible habit, but sometimes necessary), this is not only a Reform problem. Local government is under extraordinary pressure. Councils with social care responsibilities face a 5% referendum threshold, including 2% for adult social care and 3% for general spending. The Local Government Association has warned that the finance settlement puts pressure on councils to raise council tax up to referendum thresholds to fund demand-led services such as adult social care. The Institute for Government has shown the deeper structural shift: between 2009/10 and 2024/25, per-person spending on adult and children’s social care rose in real terms, while spending on other services fell by more than a third; social care rose from just over half of local authority spending to more than two-thirds.
This is the boring-but-true answer, and it matters. Councils are not sitting on vast secret vaults of spare money waiting to be unlocked by someone sufficiently annoyed with HR departments. Everything that can be cut, has already been slashed during the years of Conservative austerity. And much of what is left is simply not optional. Adult social care, children’s services, homelessness, SEND transport and safeguarding obligations do not disappear because a councillor has found a pleasingly punchy phrase about waste.
But that’s precisely the point. Reform’s promise is not just that it would be a slightly better manager of scarcity. Its promise is that the old constraints are fake: that the system is rotten, the waste is obvious, the priorities are mad, and only cowardice or corruption prevents someone from sorting it out. Then it gets into office and starts sounding, very quickly, like every other council leadership that has ever had to produce a legal budget.
Worcestershire is the clearest example because it compresses the whole problem into one local authority. Reform took minority control of a council Farage later described as virtually bankrupt, adding that he wished the party “hadn’t bothered”. That is an extraordinary confession, not because Worcestershire’s finances were easy, but because the complaint amounts to this: governing would have been more convenient if the inherited problems had been less real. Reform’s tenure was then marked by emergency funding, a council tax rise of 8.98%, internal battles, the replacement and suspension of its former leader, and ultimately the loss of minority control after Conservatives, Greens, Liberal Democrats and independents formed a short-lived alliance.
What is revealing about that story is not simply chaos. It is the implied expectation that opposition politics could continue after power had been taken. But councils do not exist to supply press release material for Westminster. They exist to fix roads, fund care packages, maintain libraries, run children’s services, process planning applications, manage SEND transport, collect bins and keep the whole civic machine moving even when nobody is paying attention. Local government is unglamorous because it is real. It is where politics stops being a pose and becomes a spreadsheet.
The same thing appears in Doncaster, where Reform’s position on reopening the Doncaster-Sheffield Airport has moved through a strange cycle of support and opposition, confrontation and retreat. Reform councillors have certainly argued that they wanted scrutiny and better terms. That is not inherently unreasonable. A £57 million loan is not pocket change, and major regeneration schemes should be interrogated. But the politics around it has been deeply revealing. Reform councillors submitted a motion criticising the Labour mayor’s airport pledge and stressing their own democratic responsibility, after that mayor’s narrow victory in 2025, which was attributed in no small part to Labour being the only party with a plan to reopen the airport. Later, Reform members sought to revisit or rescind the previously approved loan, before an amended position allowed the loan to continue after negotiations.
Again, the point is not that every concern they raised was automatically illegitimate. The point is that attacking the symbol of another party’s campaign is easier than carrying responsibility for the mechanism that might deliver a major investment. Reopening an airport is an excellent local political goal because it condenses jobs, pride, regional neglect and economic hope into one image - and thus making sure it fails would show the public that their opposition can’t deliver. But the actual ‘getting stuff done’ work of leases, loans, commercial operators, regulatory hurdles, passenger forecasts, public risk and timelines is also extremely popular, and trying to shut it down showed Reform the limits of their own strategy; they caved and backed it once they realised they were hurting their own position.
Then there is candidate vetting. Here, Reform’s defenders sometimes say that rapid growth brings growing pains, and that every party has had bad candidates. This is true as far as it goes. The Greens, Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have all had candidates suspended, exposed or embarrassed. No party with hundreds or thousands of local candidates can guarantee moral perfection.
But Reform’s problem is not an isolated embarrassing Facebook post. It is a recurring inability to filter out candidates whose public records appear to contain racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic or otherwise extremist material. Mark Pack notes 73 Reform UK resignations or kickings-out between May 2025 and May 2026, with a further 17 (and counting) since May 2026. Add that to their two lost MPs since the General Election, and criticism of both Farage and Tice over their financial dealings.
That is not just a reputational issue. A political party asking to govern cannot treat candidate selection as a content acquisition strategy. Councillors are not disposable avatars for national messaging. They are their own people. They sit on planning committees. They handle casework. They make decisions affecting schools, safeguarding, highways, care, housing and community cohesion. In a political system already suffering from immense distrust, a party that floods public office with unfit or poorly-vetted candidates is not challenging the establishment. It is lowering the minimum acceptable standard for entering it.
The deeper problem is that Reform’s politics rewards irresponsibility long before it reaches office. It rewards the person who says the difficult thing is easy, the complex thing is a conspiracy, the constrained choice is a betrayal, and the boring institutional answer is cowardice. This is powerful because it feels like clarity, but clarity is not the same as truth. Sometimes the simple answer is simple because it has left out the parts of the problem that make the problem hard.
That is also why local government is so dangerous for them. It deprives them of the luxury of purity. It asks them not what they oppose, but what they would fund. It asks not what they would abolish, but what they would put in its place. It asks not whether they dislike waste, but whether the promised waste actually exists in sufficient quantity to pay for their promises. It asks not whether they can identify public anger, but whether they can turn that anger into functioning administration.
And when they cannot, they increasingly risk portraying themselves as what they most despise: another party promising change and delivering excuses.
There is a political lesson here for Reform’s opponents too. Simply calling Reform chaotic will not be enough, because some voters already believe the whole system is chaotic. Being ‘adults in the room’ counts for very little when a plurality of most voters in any given constituency want to burn the house down. Simply listing offensive candidates will not be enough, because some voters have become grimly accustomed to scandal as political weather. Simply saying their sums do not add up will not be enough, because many people already think expert arithmetic has been used for years to justify decline.
The stronger argument is about responsibility.
Reform should be judged not only by whether it reflects grievance, but by whether it can carry the burdens that come with power. Can it select candidates fit for public office? Can it make lawful budgets without pretending every rise is someone else’s fault? Can it scrutinise major projects without turning them into performative hostage situations? Can it govern places it wins, even when those places are financially strained, demographically complicated and institutionally fragile? Can it tell voters the truth before an election, rather than discovering the truth immediately afterwards?
If the answer is no, then Reform is not the antidote to broken politics. It is broken politics with a harder edge and a louder microphone.
The party’s great asset has always been its ability to stand outside responsibility and profit from everything that goes wrong inside it. Local government changes that. A pothole does not care whether your rhetoric is insurgent. A care package cannot be funded by vibes. A council tax bill is not impressed by the phrase ‘more of the same’. The moment Reform wins power, its central trick becomes harder to sustain, because every grievance it harvests becomes, in some measure, a problem it now owns.
That is why the title matters. Reform is not simply anti-establishment. Plenty of establishments deserve criticism, and many institutions have earned the public’s suspicion. The more precise charge is that Reform is anti-responsibility: fluent in anger, evasive in power, and increasingly exposed wherever voters have made the understandable mistake of asking it to govern.