Roller coasters can be exciting, thrilling, and lots of fun, but when they stop, you usually get off exactly where you started. Reform UK’s three months in charge of Kent County Council have for many, been a white knuckle ride as the ‘turquoise tornado’ turns the Garden of England into a carnival field. But how far has the council moved?
Well, so far, not far. That’s mainly because so many of the new Reform councillors have little or no idea what they’re doing. But on the other hand, it ain’t been dull.
The scale of Reform’s victory last May was astonishing. Farage’s crack regiment captured 57 of the council’s 81 seats, completely usurping the Conservatives, who had held power in Kent since the dawn of time or at least for nearly 30 years.
So large was the Tory wipeout that they failed to even become the main opposition, ending up with five seats, the same as the Greens. The Liberal Democrats doubled their numbers from six to 12, Labour fell from seven seats to just two, while the independent and residents’ association representatives disappeared entirely.
Suddenly, Reform was in total control. Understandably, an air of triumph hovered over the 57 Reform councillors as they trooped into County Hall to elect their own group leader.
Cost-cutting crusade begins with threatening letter
In a closely fought contest, former BBC journalist and Taekwondo martial arts practitioner Linden Kemkaran fought her way to victory. Still, Kemkaran’s election as leader may not have quelled others’ ambitions. More of that later.
Reform councillors arrived at County Hall waving big promises. The party’s core belief about local government is that it is mired in widespread waste, with public money being chucked about.
Reform promised to slash spending by rooting out inefficiency. Its national leadership created an Elon Musk-styled DOGE, or rather DOLGE – Department of Local Government Efficiency – and DOLGE’s plans for Kent were rolled out almost immediately. Well, sort of.
Kent County Council staff soon received a threatening letter from Kemkaran, demanding they co-operate with cost-cutting or face disciplinary action.
But question marks were immediately raised about the legality of this threat. The letter was signed not only by Kemkaran but also by Nigel Farage, Reform UK’s national leader, plus its then national chairman Zia Yusuf … and sent out on Reform UK headed notepaper.
Clearly, neither Farage nor Yusuf have any legal status as far as Kent County Council is concerned, nor any right to threaten staff over how they carry out their duties.
Kent County Council: no fat left to trim
Whether this legal lapse was due to bravado or incompetence is unclear. What became increasingly clear was that most of Kent’s new Reform councillors had zero experience of local government, had little understanding of how it operates or what they should do or not do. Only a handful had ever served on councils before.
Funding is the council’s biggest headache. According to the Financial Times, Kent’s budget report had a particularly ominous ring and warned “the council does not have the capacity within its reserves to fund the impact of delays to difficult policy decisions nor a failure to deliver on savings within services.”
In other words, BIG money troubles ahead.
One of Reform’s repeated claims was that the previous Tory-run council had been thriftless and improvident, spending resources inappropriately. Even the Tories’ opponents, though, reject that charge. Sevenoaks Liberal Democrat councillor Richard Streatfeild dismissed Reform’s promises to cut waste and excessive spending, as “based on the false claims that Kent Council was wasteful. But years of austerity have seen local government finances slashed by 40%. So there is now simply no waste or fat to cut” he insists.
Council paralysis: cancelled meetings stall Reform UK’s agenda
Kent County Council currently has a budget totalling £1.6bn, but only 5% of that can be spent on ‘discretionary services’. So most of the funds are earmarked for essential issues such as education and adult services.
Which means, according to Streatfeild, there is no money for Reform’s big promise to fix the county’s potholes.
Repairing the county’s potholes is expected to cost £900mn – more than 56% of the entire budget.
Early indications that Kent County Council’s problems may be too daunting for the inexperienced Reform councillors surfaced with the tearing up of the council’s procedural timetable. A string of committee and council meetings were postponed or cancelled as the new councillors struggled to get to grips with their responsibilities.
Problems continued into June where four out of five committee meetings were again cancelled. Crucial decisions needed to be taken, but could not be because of repeated failures to hold essential meetings.
Then, as the inability to organise crucial meetings became ever more evident, local Reform UK chiefs were hit with another headline-grabbing headache.
Less than a month after the elections, the Kent Reform group numbers were reduced from 57 to 56. This followed the arrest of Daniel Taylor – who represents Thanet’s Cliftonville ward.
Domestic abuse and threat allegations
On Reform UK election literature, Taylor described himself as a “local businessman and devoted family man”. In early June he was arrested on three criminal charges, including threats to kill his wife and also sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message to her. He denies all the charges.
Reform withdrew the whip, and Taylor now sits as an independent. Inevitably, there were soon calls for him to resign to allow a by-election. Heading these was East Thanet Labour MP Polly Billington, who argued: “The people of Cliftonville deserve better than a councillor accused of threatening to kill his wife, and Reform cannot get away with saying they have suspended the whip while happily allowing Daniel Taylor to continue voting with them.”
Meanwhile, council leader Kemkaran was unsuccessfully trying to put the brakes on agreed plans for the wholesale reorganisation of local authorities right across Kent.
Before the elections, Kent’s 12 district and borough councils, plus the Medway unitary authority and Kent County Council, approved in principle the creation of 3 or 4 unitary authorities. The hope is to provide simpler, more efficient structures which offer all local government services. The final proposals are due by November.
Local Government shake-up faces resistance from Reform UK
Kent’s Reform group quickly gave hints it may oppose the reorganisation idea. In her first speech as council leader, Kemkaran spoke of “the spectre of Local Government Reorganisation hurtling down the tracks at a quite incredible speed”.
“I’m not entirely convinced it’s the right thing for Kent”, she said. “I will be making it my priority to find out as much as I can over the coming weeks and months to help formulate our response to LGR.”
In truth, the final decision on reorganisation is out of her hands and in Whitehall’s. But to no one’s surprise, Kemkaran attempted to kick the proposals down the road. Claiming the November deadline was “almost impossible” to meet, she pleaded for it to be postponed until March. She got short shrift and a “hard no” from local government minister Jim McMahon, who told her to get on with it.
Council staff working from home was another early target amid claims from Reform’s DOLGE chief, Yusuf, that it was costing Kent County Council £100mn a year. Those figures were nonsense according to Conservative councillor Sarah Hudson, who explained: “People have always worked from home – it’s not just a Covid thing. For instance, social workers who are on call can’t have a normal, nine-to-five office life.”
Leadership rift emerges within Kent’s Reform UK council team
Liberal Democrat opposition leader Antony Hook suggested Yusuf’s “real agenda is to deflect from the fact that Reform is failing to get to grips with the real issues facing the council, such as the crisis in adult social care and the poor state of local roads and transport”.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, it’s not sweetness and light between Kent’s Reform councillors.
As mentioned earlier, Linden Kemkaran secured leadership of the group against a crowded field of contenders, one of whom was Sevenoaks Rural North East councillor Maxine Fothergill, who has shared a post on social media appearing to undermine her leader’s position.
Evidence of this came with Fothergill’s decision to re-post an attack against her own group leader on the LinkedIn social network.
The attack was originally posted by another LinkedIn subscriber known as Peter H, who describes himself as a security consultant/manager/coordinator.
The 247-word article begins with the suggestion Kemkaren’s appointment should be reconsidered because she is too inexperienced and “not up to the job”. Those accusations have been reposted by Fothergill, a Gravesend-based estate agent and property manager, on her LinkedIn page. Although the article has been reposted relatively recently – after the county elections – it is tucked way, way down the page.
The attack on Kemkaran concludes with the warning “Reform UK needs to act before it’s too late”.
Then the reposted article on Fothergill’s Linkedin page calls for Kemkaran to be replaced … “with someone like Maxine Fothergill”.
Reform party turmoil deepens with high-profile council sacking
Further early evidence of disharmony within Reform’s ranks erupted with the first sacking from the county council’s cabinet.
Post-election, Ashford Rural South’s councillor Bill Barrett was put in charge of Kent’s highways and transport.
In June, Farage arrived at County Hall to condemn the budget for transporting disabled children to and from school as “beyond belief”. Within hours, the transport chief was flung out.
To start with, council leader Kemkaran tried to make it look like “mutual consent”, claiming Barrett had “stepped down”.
“Lies!” replied an angry Mr Barrett who told POLITICO: “It’s a complete lie. There was no mutual arrangement that we left. I walked into an office, basically to an ambush, where they basically spent 50 minutes saying how shit I was.”
Well, after the turquoise tornado, anyone care to have a go on the dodgems?
