BRITAIN is now confronted with a Reform UK threat of a new scale and character.

The party is no longer fringe, but a powerful force, controlling 10 councils and two elected mayoralties outright. The polls suggest it can make serious gains in Scotland and Wales as well.

It has already indicated how it will use its new powers. Within a day Nigel Farage and Richard Tice were threatening refugees (saying Reform councils would seek to stop accommodating them, and suggesting they be moved out of buildings and into tents) and local government workers. In the latter case the attack concerned both terms and conditions and jobs relating to concepts Reform doesn’t believe in, from climate change to equalities.

The left faces three essential tasks.

The first is to defend those being threatened — above all refugees, immigrants and black communities. Reform’s direct aggression will be directed first at asylum-seekers but it will also normalise racism and harassment of black and Muslim communities.

Our job is to fight the racists and to prevent a hostile environment from taking hold.

It is not a lost cause. First past the post, so good at marginalising third parties, also exaggerates breakthroughs when they come. Reform won a minority of the seats contested on Thursday (41 per cent) on a smaller minority of the vote (31 per cent).

There is scope for mass anti-racist mobilisation, as took place last August, and there will be even in Reform-controlled authorities. As we saw over a year of anti-racist organising at Erskine in Scotland, mobilising against racists can itself over time help build a new spirit of solidarity across a community.

That process is key to the other two tasks, which involve breaking up Reform’s voter coalition.

Hard-core racists must be isolated from the wider layers of people casting an anti-Establishment vote in anger. And the latter must be convinced that a vote for Reform does not serve their interests.

Isolating racists requires sustained community engagement. It will not succeed if it denounces as racist every complaint against immigration: wall-to-wall media and mainstream party propaganda mean that concerns that are really about the availability of housing, jobs and public services may be expressed in this way. The sleight of hand that allows the right to blame capitalism’s consequences on immigrants must be exposed, the real issues teased out.

An analogous process applies to Reform’s anti-environmentalist agenda. The pitch will be that “green” policies cost money and are bad for jobs, but what does Reform’s attitude mean for flood defences, insulation programmes, nature preservation, clean rivers? None are unpopular.

Reform’s councils make it much more dangerous. Those who say in office it will be exposed as corrupt and incompetent are complacent: lots of Tory and Labour councils are corrupt and incompetent, and local government has been so stripped of funding and agency that it is often dysfunctional already. Councils are platforms for it to pick eye-catching battles with central government, including over cuts.

At the same time, specific responsibilities will make it easier to attack Reform on specific policy areas.

To do so effectively, though, we must recognise reality.

Denouncing cuts by Reform councils without attacking central government for its overall responsibility for the funding situation (and refusal to reform the regressive council tax system) would merely echo the blame game in Scotland, where the SNP and Labour blame Westminster and Holyrood respectively for all problems and neither offers a way forward. We cannot fight Reform without fighting Starmer’s government.

And the labour movement encompasses less than a quarter of workers.

Unions cannot assume a moral high ground and expect people to follow. We have to start organising within communities on the issues that matter most to them, to rebuild our numbers and our relevance, before we are guaranteed a hearing on why Reform should not be trusted.