Vehicles for the bombast of Nigel Farage have never got out of first gear in Greater London. But Reform UK might fancy its chances of revving up more support among the capital’s voters over the next few years than its ancestors have managed.
True, the party has only one borough councillor out of 1,817, and he is a defector, having been elected as a Conservative in 2022. But it won a London Assembly seat last year through the proportional representation route, it’s vying for top place in national opinion polls, and last week their candidate in a Barnet Council by-election won 18.4 per cent of the vote, his party’s highest yet in such a London contest.
By the time of the May 2026 borough elections, Reform, with good organisation, with careful targeting and perhaps with momentum imparted by victories elsewhere, will surely hope to win some London council seats.
The prospect of what Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University, carefully terms the “populist radical Right” party doing well in those contests might excite some Londoners – after all, 40 per cent of us voted Leave in 2016. But those of us who would prefer our Town Halls to be unsoiled by Donald Trump cheerleaders in Union Jack socks boring on about London not being English anymore need to figure out how best to keep them out.
It should help them the local government institutions and local councillors are, in certain ways, better equipped to repel them than more elevated counterparts. Reform, as populists do, parades as a plain-speaking, “common sense” alternative to a smug, out-of-touch, indistinguishable – “they’re all as bad as each other” – elite that ignores the values and desires of a sidelined majority. To strike a chord, that type of pitch depends on there being a high degree of cynicism about those who’ve been elected, and a scornful, not to say vengeful, mistrust of them.
The advantage local government has is that voters tend to hold it in higher esteem than national government and even local MPs. In that sense, there’s less potential for Farage and his crew, who feed off disillusion like high-achieving ticks, to rubbish them all and proffer crowd-pleasing, fake solutions.
Of course, the outcomes of local and also regional elections are strongly influenced by how voters feel about political parties at national level and the state of the nation. But matters close to home can be of great importance too.
At the last borough elections, held in 2022, Labour made gains overall and took control of three councils which, for years, had been Conservative flagships: Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet. Those results went with the tide of national opinion polls at the time, which showed the Tories were unpopular and Labour well ahead.
But that wasn’t the whole story: Labour was replaced by the Conservatives in Harrow and also lost power in Croydon, due to a Tory winning the borough’s inaugural vote for a directly elected Mayor. Labour was also ejected in Tower Hamlets, by the local Aspire party. In all three cases, specific local factors were decisive in bucking the national trend.
So, if Reform is riding the crest of a national wave next spring, it doesn’t follow that its candidates will invade the capital’s municipal corridors of power in large numbers. And if incumbents of any party who feel Reformers breathing down their necks make the most of the relatively high esteem in which local politicians are held, they can, if they eschew it as they should, drain the swamp in which Farageism thrives.
It is nearly 20 years since another political party from the outer Right of the spectrum made a major breakthrough in London. In 2006, the far-Right British National Party won a dozen seats on Labour-dominated Barking & Dagenham Council. Had they fielded a full slate, they might have formed the country’s first ever fascist council.
Labour locally, moribund and complacent in working-class suburbs where a combination of huge demographic change and rapid de-industrialisation had seen the whole place “left behind”, got its act together. Fresh blood was injected. Engagement with voters intensified.
In May 2010, on the same day that Labour’s long spell in national government came to an end, the party purged the BNP and won every seat in Barking & Dagenham. That full-house feat was repeated in 2014, in 2018 and in 2022.
Every scenario is different, and different forces act upon each one. The campaign against the BNP, for example, included anti-fascist groups and others on the ground. But there are surely lessons to be learned from that east London story, and not only by Labour.
A key one seems to be that having good lived experiences of being helped by committed, hands-on politicians who inhabit your own back yard can dilute the appeal of those peddling fake solutions.
In a recent piece about defeating populism, political commentator Peter Kellner wrote:
The populism we face today is wrong, and we should say so. But our core message should be that the policies of populist parties are stupid and won’t work. The trouble is that such a message is credible only if it comes from people that voters respect.
Local councillors can be such politicians, be they in London or anywhere else. They can help Britain defeat Reform.
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky.