The elections last Thursday were for local councillors and mayors (except one: a Parliamentary bye-election due to an MP’s resignation. That one went to Reform too).

I’m afraid I’ve never taken much interest in local politics, and so am not sure what the newly-elected councillors and mayors can do; but the followng Facebook post, by a organisation calling itself ‘Ripples’ (‘a progressive digital campaigning platform launched in 2020; registered non-profit and not supported by any political party’), may gives a few clues.

‘Their first acts in office? Reform leader Nigel Farage has declared that he wants to set up a Trump-style ‘DOGE’ in every council to make brutal spending cuts. He has warned anyone at a council “working on climate change initiatives or diversity” to seek “alternative careers”. Reform’s new mayor of Lincolnshire, Andrea Jenkyns, even declared that she wants to put refugees in “tents”’.

That’s for starters.

I’m comforting myself after last week’s earthquake by thinking that not all Reform voters were rabid right-wingers. Disillusionment with politics generally was clearly a factor, with Reform’s carefully cultivated anti-politics image drawing the disillusioned in. If there had been a new anti-establishment left-wing party with as much popular allure as Nigel gave to Reform, it might have taken some of those votes. (The leftish-wing Lib-Dems took some of them, but they’re still too ‘establishment’.) And of course a national election – due in Britain in about four years’ time – won’t necessarily reflect these local results.

Another encouraging bit of news has been the recent national election results from Canada and Australia; suggesting in both cases that Trump was a negative factor, alienating voters from right-wing, Trump-like policies. Let’s hope that as he goes on he’ll antagonise more and more people in the rest of the world; and hopefully in America too.

Still, I can see the lasting appeal of many of the common planks in the populist programme world-wide: its anti-wokery, its (often fake) nostalgia, its deep resentment of the clever people who are mocking it (Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’), its tribalism, its democracy (in a fashion), its appeal to the (false) god of ‘common sense’; – all this I feel I could share with the populists, if I weren’t as privileged as I am in so many ways. Add resentment of social inequality, of capitalist greed and of indiscriminate bombing to that list, and a left-wing populism might be as powerful as Trump’s and Farage’s versions clearly are.

Our new mayor of Hull – the boxer – seems a nice boy, and untrammelled by political dogma (https://bernardjporter.com/2025/05/02/a-mayoral-election/). Maybe he’s young enough to think again?