Reform UK has suspended four councillors after a leaked video showed an ill-tempered meeting in which their leader swore at colleagues and threatened to mute them.
The councillors sit on Kent County Council, one of 10 local authorities run by Reform UK and “seen by the party as a test case of its ability to govern”, said the BBC. The bitter public row has made some question if wider cracks are appearing in the party while it continues to gather momentum.
‘Suck it up’
The virtual meeting at Reform’s “showcase county council” took place in late August and showed there are “bitter divisions in their ranks”, said The Guardian. The video showed councillors complaining about “backbiting” and being told by their leader, Linden Kemkaran, to “f**king suck it up” if they didn’t agree with her decisions.
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After The Guardian broke the story, Kemkaran vowed to root out the source of the leaked video, which she called an act of “treachery”. In a message to fellow councillors, she said the “cowards” responsible would be expelled from the party and would have “no political future”.
This isn’t the first controversy surrounding Kent County Council since the party took over. During the election campaign in May, Reform “lambasted” the previous Conservative leadership for increasing council tax bills by the maximum 5% each year, said The Telegraph. But in "an about-turn”, a Reform cabinet member has since admitted that spending was “down to the bare bones” and said taxes would probably have to go up 5% again.
If Kent is “a window into what Reform could look like in power” it seems that “some voters aren’t all that impressed with what they’re seeing”.
‘Policy vacuum’
“Cracks are beginning to show” in the party, said The Independent’s political editor, David Maddox. After taking control of 10 councils last May, Reform’s “experience so far is that governing and running things is hard work. Easy political slogans and simple solutions are much more difficult to implement than say.”
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The team tasked with filling the party’s “policy vacuum” might be looking to “extreme social conservatism”, which would be a “narrow perspective” that’s “unlikely to get the sort of broad appeal needed to win in the UK”.
Reform’s support is “made up of a very diverse group of voters whose views often clash”. The “gulf” between the left and right of their base is “unbridgeable”, so one group “will be disappointed”.
Not helping matters is the fact that Reform is still “the Nigel Farage party”, so there is a “microscope” examining “those closest to him and surrounding him”, and discovering that “the picture is less than pretty”. Farage’s French partner, Laure Ferrari, is at the centre of a fraud investigation in Brussels, and the party leader has also faced unflattering headlines over his residence, or lack of, in his Clacton constituency.
One “school of thought” is that “displays” such as the Kent virtual meeting “meltdown” will be ”the thing that eventually implodes” Reform's “march towards Downing Street”, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. But “for my money”, it may well be that “enough people will have had enough” of the mainstream parties that, when it comes to Reform’s “loony lightweight tendency”, they simply “won’t care”.
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
