After all of the headlines in the last few weeks it’s worth remembering that Reform still only has majority control of 24 councils. For now, they are a political insurgency which has 2,357 councillors, eight MPs, and a further eight councils where they hold a minority leadership.
There is no doubt that Reform has done very well and while it has strongholds in the parts of the North East and the Midlands Reform has won seats in County Councils, Metropolitan Boroughs, Unitary authorities, and a single London borough. Parties like Reform have done well before, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party won over 5m votes in the 2019 European Parliament elections, but the scale, sweep, and spread of Reform’s win feels like a fracturing if not a permanent change.
We should always be cautious not to treat local elections like a referendum on the government but Reform has also led some voting preference pools for over a year now and amongst the people most likely to vote they are even more popular. There is a long way to go before Nigel Farage is Prime Minister but their insurgency locally is beginning to crystallise into governing while their national position will only benefit from whatever self-inflected disaster Labour walks into next.
Moments and momentum
It is comforting to believe that this is a political moment not a sign of political momentum. Perhaps the big two will choose leaders that can galvanise voters or the Liberal Democrats can be king-makers in a grand centrist coalition.. Maybe, but the next general election is no help to dealing with the local authorities who are drawing up their turquoise tinged plans for infrastructure, bins, parks, environmental health, and social care.
Like all political parties Reform is not a hive mind whose delegates operate within one voice. Their voters are not all that engaged in the economic policies of the party. Their views on tax and spending, investment, and redistribution are much less strongly held than their views on migration, multi-culturalism, and crime. Their voters simultaneously believe that the rich should be taxed more and welfare benefits are too generous. Around 2/3 of their voters support equal marriage compared to 78 per cent of the country and around 5 per cent of 2024 Reform voters believe Reform voters are generally racist.
It would be a mistake to believe that Reform voters and the Reform party are socially conservative. Their programme for government is a mixture of detention, exit from the European Convention on Human Rights, prison expansion, scrapping net-zero, and politicising the civil service. It is illiberal but it is radical. It is not a programme of governing that has anything to do with the economic realities of demographic decline, aging, or low productivity, but a vision of Britain design to win elections.
The error that those to the left of Reform have made, will make, and should not make, is to try and argue against culture politics with economic reasons. Capping university places, cutting funding to universities which “undermine free speech”, and arbitrarily twiddling with visa rules to bring about electoral collapse would obviously be terrible things. It is also obvious that this isn’t a serious reform programme for universities but a signal about politics.
There clearly isn’t a deep well of affection for universities from Reform at a national or local level but this is because institutions are downstream of politics. No politician wakes up and thinks things are basically fine and should be left alone, or looks at international trade and says let’s just see what happens, or surveys the NHS and local government and sees their role as maintainers of the status quo. The difference with Reform is their approach to institutions is obviously much more radical than any other party. As YouGov puts it
Reform UK are the party most associated with being patriotic and offering radical change, but also being weird and extreme.
Institutional decay
The difference with Reform is they do not have any natural respect for institutions. They are not the founders of the NHS, the long-standing partners of a permanent civil service, and within their candidates and representatives exists former Revolutionary Communist Party members who definitionally do not believe in the state at all. Their abiding mission as far as one exists is a dismantling of institutions which maintain stability to unsettle a political consensus.
Patriotism, radicalism, and extreme views are not an obvious programme at a local level where issues are often of the more prosaic issues of street lamps and errant housing extensions. Nonetheless, given the intra-relationship between local authorities and combined authorities when it comes to devolved decision making and funding, the practical role local authorities play in planning, arts and other areas, and the ability for local politics to make political weather universities have to consider how they engage with Reform regardless of how unpleasant that may feel.
Locally, these wings of Reform coalesce into two broad outlooks on the world. The first is that there is a fiscally conservative wing which has sought to introduce and then quickly abandoned a version of “Doge” in the UK. This wing of the party is fundamentally more sceptical of local government and believes it is a wasteful permanent bureaucracy. The councillors determined to keep council tax down even where it would harm local services are part of this coalition.
There is then a second is a grouping represented by the likes of former Wonkhe column inch enjoy Jonathan Gullis whose concerns are not really about using local authority as the tip of the spear to reform national politics. Their programme is parks, high streets, absent landlords, and skilled jobs. In the case of the local authorities where they have been in charge this has come with some pretty unprogressive things around flags, net-zero targets, and asylum hotels, but on every front they are rendered to symbols of their own politics beyond being able to actually change national priorities.
These tensions open up a space through which universities might engage. The job isn’t to beat Reform or even to assume that every part of a party deeply disinterested in institutional continuity can sign up to the university-investment-growth consensus. Changing the things universities obviously stand for as open-minded, liberal, and internationalist institutions, would also be a bad idea. Beyond any obvious impacts it would have on the institution trying to follow politics with messaging whether its missions, or levelling-up, or moonshots, or Reform, always comes across as trying too hard.
The task instead is to talk directly to the people that have turned to Reform and demonstrate how their investment into universities through tax makes their lives better. It isn’t a communication problem but a substance one where the political consensus in a post-institution landscape can only be maintained through material change. The Reform authority now on your patch is a political beast but it is also an unsteady bureaucracy uneasy with its own existence that needs more agility in engaging with, disagreeing with where necessary, collaborating where practical, and finding ways to make people’s lives better.
A new hope
It is entirely possible for an institution the size of a university to ignore much of what their local authority does. It is not possible for the people in the local authority whose lives depends on the collective ability for institutions to make their lives better.
This isn’t about compromising with a political agenda which in places is actively hostile to universities but it is about being clear where power flows. If universities are concerned that a nationally successful Reform will harm their institution the answer is not to retreat but to redouble the efforts to show how institutions make people’s lives better, locally.
Politically, where there are Reform councillors it is worth knowing where they are on the wings of their party. It is strange to see well known university agitator Jonathan Gullis talk about university collaboration as a key part of his Reform programme for local government but he has. It is ok for institutions to have deep policy disagreement with Reform, at the moment there is even a whiff that leaders believe Reform voters are somehow ignorant or wrong; it will only serve to reinforce the ideas that institutions don’t understand why people feel disaffected by the status quo. Again, this doesn’t mean agreeing with Reform by sympathising with citizens who believe their lives are getting worse.
Practically, the meta-debate isn’t about whether a Labour council or Reform council will be better at collecting the bins. The votes people are making is whether the status quo or radical change will make their lives better. By definition universities are structurally the status quo. The enormous benefit of a university is they have usually been around for a long time, they can fund things, and they employ people. In an era of political upheaval local politics is not about being the anchor institution which maintain a place in aspic or attempting to be more like business (one of the most common but unexplainable phenomena in higher education today) but about combining permanence of presence with radical capacity to change. Being a permanent and great employee while extending those benefits to local communities. Offering a world-class education while redoubling efforts to support local education. Investing in world-leading R&D while translating that learning into great benefits and jobs.
The mistake for universities would be to mourn for a world of stability that if not lost seems to be slipping away. It is to take this moment as the time to own a local agenda and in doing so demonstrate that it is universities, and only universities, that can power the future of local, national, and international economies. It is not a policy of acquiescing to collective worst instincts nor gyrating to every political change. It is a moment to deeply analyse why many people’s lives feel worse and responding to it with compassion. The only hope for maintaining the consensus that the future of the UK runs through universities.
