Reform UK obliterated both the Labour and Conservative parties at the English county council and mayoral local elections last week, and gained a new MP with a six-vote victory in the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby.
Reform gained 677 councillors and control of 10 councils, becoming the largest party at a local level across England. They also won the new mayoralties of Greater Lincolnshire, with former Conservative MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns, and Hull & East Yorkshire with Olympic gold medallist Luke Campbell.
The Conservatives suffered 44 percent of the total losses, performing worse than their historic defeat at the last general election. Queue the anonymous Tory sources calling for Kemi Badenoch to be replaced as Leader of the Opposition, less than a year into her term.
As reported by David Maddox of The Independent:
Two senior backbenchers have confirmed to The Independent that they are calling meetings with fellow parliamentarians to discuss ousting the Conservative Party leader.
“We cannot continue as we are and she [Ms Badenoch] is just not up to the task,” one of the MPs said.
One Conservative MP said: “These results were actually worse than last year’s general election. We have somehow gone backwards.”
One senior backbencher said: “I feel like I have been banging my head against a brick wall trying to find out what the strategy is to take on Farage and Reform. There has been nothing.”
Pollster Luke Tryl from More in Common suggested that the Tories have 12 months to turn things around.
But one MP said: “If we give Kemi another year it could be curtains for us. There are no policies, no ideas, no strategy and she has no charisma.”
There are also complaints about her choice of senior staff, especially ex-MPs like Rachel MacLean and Therese Coffey.
“They just don’t seem to understand the trouble we are in,” another MP said.
Another MP said:
“I think the leader needs to go, I think she’s lost the plot. She’s not good enough and I think the people around her aren’t good enough either,” one said.
“There’s no vision at the moment and there’s no leadership. We’ve allowed a void to open up and Nigel Farage has been able to move into it.”
Another MP said that they and colleagues had been shocked by the scale of the party’s losses on Thursday, which even took CCHQ by surprise.
They said: “There’s a very high expectation that on digesting this there will be a set of actions to deal with it. You’d expect her to do a pretty quick reshuffle.
“She’s got to show she means business and is actually serious about turning this around pretty much straight away, because the plan isn’t working.”
A Tory source said Reform “keeps stealing our voters“ and the leadership must act quickly “to stem the bleed because we’re just bleeding out”.
On Wednesday, the 7th of May, a “Senior Source” in the Conservative party wrote pseudonymously in the Critic that:
Three months ago, I took to this magazine to call for Badenoch to go.
Since, two other colleagues have added their throats to the chorus, calling for her to be replaced with Robert Jenrick. Rumours are also swirling that James Cleverly is starting up on manoeuvres, too. If I’m being honest, my panic has become so existential that I don’t really care who comes next — only that they arrive soon.
Because if Kemi Badenoch is not replaced as leader within a year, it doesn’t matter who is next; there will be nothing to inherit. The Conservative Party will cease to exist, cease to function and cease to matter.
If we move now, we are responding to the local elections. And what a set of elections to respond to! Fourth in national share projections, 10 per cent worse than the previous Conservative vote share ever in a local election. Every Conservative-controlled council lost, along with nearly 700 councillors. Were this a Parliamentary election, we would have been reduced to 12 seats.
Kemi has been out to say our problems are “not going to be fixed after six months”. This is factually correct. But given that there was an election less than a year ago in which we won ten times that number of seats, it is also factually correct to say things have grown worse under her leadership.
Not only were these people right about the need to shift us rightwards, but they were also among the most vocal and critical voices pushing back against the party’s drift towards the centre. In groups I’m in, in reaction to this result, I have seen the most horrific examples of electorate-hostile centrist liberal elitism I’ve seen since Brexit;
Comparisons to 1933
The electorate have learned nothing about voting for change’s sake after electing Labour
Reform now have to run things but won’t be able to
Now is the time to keep quiet and remain pragmatic
We can’t out-Reform Reform, and shouldn’t try
Reform pulling away our right flank means increasingly few voices are pushing back against this. We will drift further and further away from the voters, a process that will not just be political but geographic; there are elections across 149 councils next year. If this year’s results are repeated and we are wiped out on council after council, we will lose our foothold in the very places that once defined us. Towns we used to win without thinking now have no Conservative councillors at all. Whole counties will turn teal, constituency associations will fold, local activists will give up or defect.
But, with the Tories never ones for listening to the electorate and learning their lesson, a Conservative strategist told the Telegraph:
“This week we’ve seen some of the global right’s biggest long-term hopes in Canada’s Pierre Poilievre and Australia’s Peter Dutton not just lose, but even lose their seats in the process.
“This shows the danger of chasing populist parties like Reform to the right. Kemi wants to ensure the Conservatives don’t suffer the same fate by taking her time and basing the offer on principles, not what looks superficially popular.”
If you interpret Reform’s victory at the local elections as the British public being more bothered about what Donald Trump says than the decades-long sabotage of the peace and prosperity of this country, then you should check yourself into an asylum and chew on the padded walls of your cell.
The Liberal Democrats, now the second-largest party at the local level, have the middle-class Luxury Belief vote locked down. Both Reform and the Lib Dems code as English parties: with Reform for the working and middle-classes who have been confronted by the economic and cultural costs of unwanted mass migration; and the Liberal Democrats the party for the middle and upper-classes in leafy Oxfordshire and the Shires, which have yet to be scoured by the benefits of Diversity, and for whom “politics is something that happens to someone else somewhere else.” This is why Ed Davey ran as a Brewster’s Millions candidate, and continues to win large swathes of the wealthy countryside with his strategy of irreverent TikTok dances and prat-falling off paddleboards.
The Liberal Democrats are the party for those, like in Australia and Canada, who are five years behind the rest of the country. To bet on those remaining the majority, when even the Lib Dems are making fines for the (conspicuously new) practice of playing music and taking phone-calls aloud on public transport a key campaign issue, is to consign the Conservatives to the electoral dustbin.
And yet, that is exactly what former leader and Conservative senior, Sir William Hague has done in that last holdout of wet liberal Toryism, The Times. On the Monday before the election, he wrote an article titled, “Don’t panic! Here’s how to see off Reform”, in which he advised:
when the results of this week’s elections roll in on Friday with serious gains for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, both main parties might wonder whether the time has come to panic.
By then, British party leaders might be looking enviously at Canada, where voters are going to the polls as I write. If Mark Carney is confirmed as prime minister, he will have turned around the fortunes of his Liberal Party in a matter of weeks with a rallying cry against the bullying of his country by President Trump. Even if he loses, the electoral power of standing up to Trump will have been demonstrated in the transformation of Canadian politics.
the signs are that many British voters are still some distance from seeing Farage as Donald Trump with a pint. Reform is likely to gain hundreds of council seats, win more votes than any other party and run Labour close in a by-election in one of its safest seats. By this weekend we will be looking at Farage being carried aloft by triumphant supporters while doom-laden commentaries look ahead to the fall of the Labour government and the extinction of the Tories.
And, in a piece following the disastrous local election results, titled “Kemi Badenoch, here’s my 10-step plan to save the Tories”:
avoid the elephant trap of copying Trump. Sister parties of the Tories in Canada and Australia have just crashed down into it. So far, the Trump administration has strengthened China, emboldened Russia, divided the West and severely disrupted free trade. We should not be hostile in any way to the US, but our parties do not need to adopt the same policies. One of the things Nigel Farage will most regret is showing so much admiration for the US president.
Reminder: on the eve of the American election, Hague wrote “Trump is no Ronald Reagan — we all need him to lose”, and in December that “Fall of Assad gives West a chance to curb Iran”. I wouldn’t take his advice on whether or not the Sun will rise tomorrow at this rate.
However, as the mouthpiece for the Conservatives’ ruling One Nation faction, Hague does provide some telling insight into how the Tories are feeling the pressure to make concessions to the electorate, and the “Very Online Right”, as we are perjoratively called, who voice their concerns.
Couching it in the acceptable framing of a European left-wing party doing it, therefore it must be okay for the ostensibly right-wing party to do it too, Hague says,
I suggest there are three parts to that. The first is to learn from Denmark’s centre-left leaders about the control of migration. Their tough approach to asylum and integration has often met international criticism but has been effective in greatly reducing illegal and uncontrolled migration, producing a cross-party consensus between conservatives and social democrats. British ministers would say they are trying hard on this, but trying will no longer be enough. Success is a non-negotiable requirement of political survival.
And that Badenoch should
adopt an approach to immigration that is consistent with those objectives for growth and excellence. Explain that this country should welcome brilliant people, from home and abroad, but will bring an end to illegal migration and abuse of the asylum system. Learn from Italy and Denmark. Argue for changed laws, restrictions on benefits, digital identity and reform of the ECHR, but keep working with other countries. No party will be elected in future that can’t deal with this, but no future government can deliver on it if it thinks it can do it all alone.
Of course, he limits any action to illegal migration only, and suggests the pet projects of his former supposed rival, Sir Tony Blair, as the solutions:
This is not about preventing youth mobility schemes, or students or scientists coming here. The public are entirely capable of differentiating such migration from the country being unable to control its borders. Even a Labour government, and even one led by a notable lawyer, will have to accept that it must reinterpret the European Convention on Human Rights or agree reform of it with other countries. It will need “return hubs” in other countries. It ought to bring in digital ID to make it harder for illegal migrants to work and access public services. Some long-cherished assumptions will need to go.
And that:
do not fall into a new trap now opening, of opposing anything the Labour government does to improve co-operation with the EU. Do not see every step to co-operate on defence and innovation as a plot to reverse Brexit. Recognise that if we can rely less on the US, we will need to work with our neighbours. If people don’t see that, they will be voting for Farage anyway.
So the establishment is still running miles behind the electorate’s appetite to expel every illegal immigrant from the country; to drastically reduce legal migration; to reverse the post-Brexit Boriswave and return costly and unassimilable foreign nationals to their countries of origin; and to ban the intolerable customs of Islam. They will use anger at the millions of third-world migrants who have entered Britain since 2021 as an excuse to introduce ID cards and reintroduce a limited free-movement scheme with the European Union.
Nevertheless, it is very telling that the Conservatives are pivoting to posture as the hardest-line party on illegal immigration. It says a lot about the direction of political travel.
So, what will Reform UK do next?
Chairman Zia Yusuf promised on Laura Kuenssberg’s show, on the BBC last Sunday, that Reform UK-controlled councils will launch legal action to close migrant hotels within 100 days.
“Reform-controlled councils will launch the resistance to the dispersal of illegal immigrants into their communities within their first 100 days.
“We are serious about defending the communities we now represent.”
Labour is seeking to relocate illegal migrants, being battery-farmed at taxpayers’ expense in four-star accommodation, costing £145.00 a day, into “dispersed accommodation”, costing £14.00 per day.
Keir Starmer's Plan to Battery-Farm Foreign Criminals
Despite growth projections halving, unexpected borrowing being double the announced cuts to disability benefits, and Britain going from the fastest growing economy in the G7 to 0.1 percent growth last quarter, Labour are set to spend more on illegal migrant accommodation.
A new Telegraph investigation confirmed what everyone knew to be true: that these illegal immigrants are working as delivery drivers for Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eats, breaking the law further and making thousands a month without paying taxes.
This controversy was a catalyst for Reform UK winning 13 local council seats in North Northamptonshire. Last year, North Northamptonshire Council mistakenly told elderly couple Jose & Ted Saunders they had to sell their home. The Council said they were “struggling” to find accommodation for a “considerable increase” in single male asylum seekers. Labour lost 6 seats, and the Conservatives lost 9 for their treachery.
I have also received confirmation from a senior Reform UK source that councils in districts with historic and ongoing Pakistani grooming gangs will be launching local inquiries into allegations of cover-ups by previous authorities.
Most of all, though, we hope that this victory will provide Reform with the confidence to deliver these promises without recoiling when the inevitable smears of being “Far Right” and “Racist” are levelled.
However, during GB News’s VE Day celebrations coverage, Nigel Farage resorted to using the term “Alt-Right” (meaning white nationalist) to describe critics of the party’s antagonistic stance to imprisoned activist Tommy Robinson. He also insulted former members of Reform, Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe.
As the largest party at the local level, Reform UK does not need to take this defensive posture. It behoves them to salami-slice potential supporters off with a position that anyone to the right of them is Adolf Hitler; and confines them to a narrow window of operation, as set by hostile actors in Westminster media who would rather see them sabotaged than succeed. The sorts of people who call Farage “Far Right” are those racing to keep up with him, and the British public — who are already more radical than Reform UK.
Despite early signs of suspensions and resignations, we can only hope that Reform UK use this repudiation of the uniparty as an opportunity to enact necessary change. Otherwise, the growing disillusionment with democratic politics will have unpleasant consequences.
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