Councils led by Nigel Farage’s party are a preview of what a Reform government would look like.
On a quiet street off an A-road in Nottingham is a Victorian courtyard house of sash windows and red brick. It is home to the Nottingham Post: a stark, white office space in which a dozen local journalists tap out tight paragraphs on drug busts, traffic pile-ups and the desecration of a statue of Goosey, the city’s goose fair mascot, who’s had a red cross painted across his downy white chest.
It feels a long way from the grand, neoclassical gloom of Rayburn House on Capitol Hill where Nigel Farage recently snitched to the Americans about what he sees as the death of British free speech. And yet the Reform UK leader had to defend himself both to Congress and to reporters about his own party’s refusal to speak to this local paper.
Before Farage’s trip, the Reform leader of Nottinghamshire County Council announced a boycott of the Nottingham Post, its online outlet Nottinghamshire Live, and its BBC-funded Local Democracy Service reporters after being upset by a story exposing tensions over local government reform. He banned the paper’s journalists from receiving press releases and event invitations. Lee Anderson, the Reform MP for Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, joined the boycott, saying: “There are some media outlets I will engage with, but not you lot.” Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, also supported the ban, calling the paper’s reporters “activists”.
“Why did you tell the local government not to do interviews with your local newspaper?” asked US Representative Jamie Raskin, when Farage appeared before the House judiciary committee during a hearing on freedom of speech in Europe. “I can’t think of banning anybody; but maybe somebody else did,” replied Farage, looking a little clammier than usual. Outside, a BBC reporter asked if he would revoke the ban. Cringe-grinning throughout, Farage limply implied that the journalists had been seen as “bad actors”, but said he planned to “have a little chat” with the council leader, Mick Barton.
That chat, at the time of writing, doesn’t appear to have been had. There is a view at the Post that Anderson – the irate Facebook uncle of the Reform family – is “pulling the strings” of the ban. I asked Anderson whether this was true, but haven’t heard back. He has clashed with the paper before, refusing to appear at its hustings while boasting that his Facebook clips attract more viewers, and lashing out (through his press manager) at its “biased” reporting: “We will take our country back and these lefty, out-of-touch, low-level, so-called journalists will have to go and get a proper job.”
“It’s crazy,” said Oliver Pridmore, the paper’s politics reporter, whose story so offended Barton. At just 26, having first entered the newsroom seven years ago on work experience, he already has the phlegmatic defiance of an old-school hack – the kind of shoe-leather reporter in front of whom I feel embarrassed writing in longhand. Floppy-haired, in a maroon checked jacket and black-rimmed glasses, he looks the part, too. Pridmore is north Notts-born; his great-great-grandfather appeared on the Nottingham Post’s front page in the Seventies when his pit closed.
“The thing that worries me is if it’s this impulsive, after they’ve only been in office for a few months, and it was over an article that was so standard in terms of local authority coverage, then I don’t know what it’s going to be like,” he told me.
His boss, a slick and no-nonsense senior editor Natalie Fahy – the self-anointed “granny of the office” at 42 – described the 12 Reform-run councils as “like a rehearsal for government. Lots of these councillors are going to stand to be MPs. So how are they going to behave once they get into government? It’s very, very worrying.” In her two decades as a journalist, she says she has never known politicians of any party to impose a ban – even when her paper went in hard on Nottingham City Council’s bankruptcy after its failed experiment with an in-house energy supplier, Robin Hood Energy.
Nottinghamshire isn’t the only place where Reform has clashed with local reporters. In Croydon, south London, the head of the local Reform branch announced he would no longer engage with Inside Croydon journalists after they revealed the party was running a dead candidate for mayor.
But while Farage and his town-hall sheriffs may be mocked as free-speech hypocrites, the true reputational risk lies elsewhere. An unaccountable council ends up being a bad one. Transparency is vital, not as some abstract virtue, but because it makes policymakers do better. And while Reform councils have vowed to do better than their predecessors, they are trapped in the same “jaws of doom” – a local government nickname for the budget graph showing social care costs rising while funding falls (like the open mouth of a crocodile). Kent County Council’s Reform leader has even asked the Home Office not to restrict visas for foreign care workers.
Disillusionment is already haunting areas newly run by Reform town halls. In Mansfield, a Sherwood Forest market town 15 miles north of Nottingham represented by the boycotter-in-chief, Mick Barton, Kelly – a 32-year-old mother of four – is about to be made homeless through a no-fault eviction by her landlord. “There’s nowhere for me to go, and there are hostels housing asylum seekers on the opposite road,” she told me. Reform was voted in locally to change that, wasn’t it? “I won’t vote again,” she said. “They’re all corrupt. They all piss in the same pot.”
