In years to come they will write books, films and box sets about the great Reform swindle. They will centre on the racists and xenophobes who used fear and loathing to terrify otherwise fair-minded, ordinary people into handing power in local councils to liars and incompetents.
They will explain how humble folk in Sunderland came to empower their Reform administrators to scrap the 30-year campaign to fight racism in football.
They will highlight the disproportionate TV and radio platforming of a corporate lobby group with little in the way of actual substantive policy beyond targeting and expelling migrants and Black and Brown people from the UK.
Yes, there will be moments of clarity, where some saw the light and took action. Kudos to presenters Kate Garraway, Ranvir Singh and the production team at Good Morning Britain, for example, who last week finally realised that even trying to have a sensible, xenophobia-free chat with Reform gob almighty Zia Yusuf is like trying to play Scrabble with a chicken.
They faded out his microphone, mid-sentence, providing a blueprint for what most broadcasters should be doing to the unelected, unpopular populist.
Such is the momentum of the Reform circus, however, that the horse is long gone with the barn door swinging in the wind. Ask the residents with buyers’ remorse after the Reform-led Derbyshire County Council closed eight care homes – despite a long-running campaign by residents’ families to keep them open. The facilities now sit completely empty.
Or even the mums, groomed by Reform into fearing migrants – only to find “Stop the Boats” meant “Stop the nurseries”.
Ten publicly-run nurseries, to be exact. To be shut down by Reform-led South Tyneside Council, forcing mums and dads to grapple with soaring childcare costs in a cost-of-living crisis. So much for prioritising women and children.
Although the nurseries are set to close in July next year, staff among the 116 employees affected will start losing their jobs in December, this year. Happy Christmas. Residents were sobbing and hurling shouts of “shame” at councillors during a cabinet meeting.
And yet Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice actually paid tribute to the council’s courage. Yes, you read that correctly “Having the courage to make important decisions and in order to get the bills down, spend the money properly, means I’ve got great confidence in all of those councillors leading the way,” he said. “That’s why they voted for us to take bold decisions.”
Yes, Richard. The tear-stained, anguished faces of mums and dads going viral on social media over the past few days screamed praise and admiration for your principled councillors and their decision making.
As a registered political party, Reform would not have been able to directly subsidise the £1million it would have cost to keep those nurseries open from their recent £72million windfall, still fresh into their accounts from controversial benefactors.
But the optics are horrible, aren’t they? Especially with talk in the past week that they are to use big money to set up their own TV station.
And yet. If there is to be a ray of light amid the most horrible period in politics in the last 40 years, it is that even voters hoodwinked into backing Reform are now seeing the light. It is that others, elsewhere in the UK, can use the multiple examples of administrative vandalism being wreaked in real time by clueless councillors as a cautionary tale.
It is that voters can learn from the example of flagship areas like Kent, where Reform promised to cut council tax, then put it up while dealing with infighting, resignations, and downgraded Ofsted ratings for children’s services.
It is that residents in Reform-led Lancashire County Council are still furious over roads likened to “the surface of the moon” and data being withheld setting out pothole repair response times.
Because it’s one thing using racism and xenophobia to frighten good people into losing their country. But even the current snapshot of a UK being plunged into the abyss under Reform –with the Black and Brown people sidelined or gone – should send a shiver down your spine.
