I see you, Reform UK.

I see you, Reform UK.

Well that was… thoroughly expected, wasn’t it? This is what happens when the bosun shouts “ICEBERG, DEAD AHEAD!” and the only response the captain can think of is to try and lean the ship to the right of it. I guess pushing a few pensioners and wheelchairs off the port side is one way of trying to do so, even if all it did was guarantee a head-on collision with the inevitable.

Who could possibly have seen this coming, apart from literally anybody paying the vaguest bit of attention? Local elections are always a litmus test for the country’s general level of satisfaction with the main parties. And right now, pretty much all of us are rolling our eyes and finishing ourselves off in the bathroom as soon as they’ve finished futilely thrusting away at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Keir Starmer remains about as personally popular as the Israeli leg of Kneecap’s world tour and he’s now pissed away one of the safest Labour seats in the country. On the opposite benches Kemi Badenoch is faring even worse; she’s slowed the complete implosion of the Tory party about as successfully as the fibreglass hull on a billionaire’s submarine.

The brutal economic calls and complete lack of passion and personality from our Prime Minister were only ever going to be forgiven by the electorate if the results in meaningfully improving people’s lives spoke for themselves. He still insists those results are coming, but given how utterly unreliable a narrator he is in his own story, faith in those words has now worn thinner than a third child in a household struggling on benefits.

So enter Reform, and Nigel Farage promising the moon on a stick. The orders have come in thick and fast, despite the man’s long and proven track record of vanishing into the ether as soon as the delivery date for moons on sticks actually rolls around. He’s already promising ‘efficiency savings’ in councils that have already been pared to the bone, pointing to DEI initiatives and work-from-home employees as easy targets.

Pure ideology with no basis in reality, desperately apeing Trump and Elon Musk despite the fact that all the polling suggests Brits of every political persuasion want as little to do with that pair of lunatics as humanly possible. The vacuous stupidity of Farage’s professed priorities for his newfound authority will soon meet reality. He’s just become the dog that actually caught the car; there’s every chance he and his performative band of grifters will now fall under the wheels that is the actual hard work of local governance.

Reform want voters to believe there are a thousand DEI managers with pink hair in every council office, all of whom do nothing all day apart from putting trans paraplegics on the bin lorries as part of their silly diversity initiatives. The simple fact is that the vast majority of diversity workers in local government are there to stop the local authority getting their arses sued into the ground in discrimination cases.

They’re a cost cutting initiative most of the time, but clearly financial prudence is not high on Reform’s list of priorities. By targeting WFH workers in local government, perhaps one of the most heavily unionised workforces in the whole of the country, all Farage is effectively announcing is his desire to speed-run a world record number of constructive dismissal tribunals. You can presumably add the cost of those to all the performative legal challenges against migrant hotels.

Richard Tice is no Elon Musk, and that’s saying something when Elon Musk is such a twat. In a fortnight when the Trump effect has revitalised the fortunes of the Liberals in Canada and Labour in Australia, it’s really saying something when our own government can’t even fake being centre-left well enough to avoid losing thousands of voters to a one-man band like Reform. Farage’s seat-sniffing proximity to and fawning adoration of his grotesque fascist of a pal Stateside would have seen a sane country reject him entirely.

England, it seems, is not currently that. Thank God it isn’t the whole of the UK, and that Reform are kidding themselves if they think they have any hope of repeating this sort of success north of the border.

That being said, this surge for Reform is clearly no joke or mere protest movement. The Conservatives are facing total armageddon, despite Farage’s party accepting dozens of their talentless cast-offs and simply rebranding them as the fresh new kids on the block. They just made Andrea Jenkyns electable again, for Christ’s sake, a woman who is sure to end up ranking somewhere between Diamond Joe Quimby and the bloke from Jaws in the final list of the worst mayors of all time.

All this talk of the Conservatives refusing a coalition at the next GE seems like nothing but wishful thinking at this point. The Tories will be lucky if Reform even offer them one; the corpse has already been plundered of its few remaining viable organs. Why would they go into partnership with whatever desiccated husk Badenoch is leading in four years’ time?

It’s looking like the real fight will be between Keir Starmer’s vision of the Labour party and Reform UK. What a shame Nigel smokes tailor-mades and not rollups; at the rate Labour are currently tilting right, we’ll struggle to find a fag paper to slip between the two.

I see you, Reform UK. I fucking see you.