NIGEL FARAGE pitched up at Kent’s County Hall last week. Britain’s largest county acquired a Reform UK majority in the local government elections earlier this year, largely at the expense of the Tory Party which has ruled the garden of England for more than a generation with just a brief period of no overall control in the mid-1990s.

Reform UK gained 57 out of 80 seats on just over a third of the votes. The Lib Dems scored 11 seats on 12 per cent, the Tories five seats on 22 per cent and Labour two seats on 13 per cent.

Ever the man with his finger on the pulse of the nation, Farage came up with the idea that cutting spending on school transport was an urgent priority.

“There are things called parents who for as long as modern times remember have had the aggravation of getting their kids to school.”

His other bright idea was a proposal to conduct a referendum on plans to reorganise local government and replace the giant Kent County Council (KCC) with three unitary authorities. He had no concrete arguments for or against but seemed concerned about how it might affect Reform UK’s prospects.

KCC leader Linden Kemkaran, however, thought the reforms “a bit communistic.” Rather than answer awkward questions about her team’s scrappy performance, she used Farage’s visit to big up the new administration’s plans to cut council spending.

For two months after Reform UK took over the council the council failed to conduct business, subcommittees were cancelled, Reform UK councillors failed to sign their declaration of acceptance of office, others failed to complete their register of interests and the planning committee’s work was on hold after half the Reform UK members failed to turn up for their statutory training that qualifies them to take planning decisions.

The new administration’s big wheeze was the creation of an Elon Musk-inspired “Dolge,” or department of (local) government efficiency. Initially made up of now resigned Reform UK national chair Zia Yusuf, who was parachuted into Kent, it rapidly fell apart after a confusing melange of unverified claims about an “asylum budget” that subsequently turned out to be an imaginative fiction and complaints about spending on the county’s children’s care system.

One Dolge initiative was to send a letter to KCC staff demanding their co-operation and threatening disciplinary action if they failed to co-operate.

Recruitment to Unison’s Kent branch shot up from a routine 13 new applications to 71.

Bizarrely the letter, on Reform UK headed notepaper, was signed by council leader Kemkaran and both Farage and Yusuf, who at that point was still Reform UK chairman.

The Green Group on the council warned that Reform UK’s actions “risk reducing transparency, undermining scrutiny and eroding public confidence in council decision-making.”

And leader of the group Rich Lehmann added: “This bizarre and unexpected move feels like it could go one of two ways. On the one hand, the controversial flag policy [taking down Pride flags from council offices] and the rushed ‘Doge’ announcement both appeared on Mr Yusuf’s Twitter feed before anywhere else, so there was a sense that, despite being an unelected bureaucrat, he was very much running things at KCC instead of the locally elected representatives.”

The initiative may have been yet one more example of Reform UK’s incompetence and unfamiliarity with the norms of local democracy or it may have been a bid to test the vigilance of central government and its local opponents.

The latest incident involves the removal of Reform’s Ashford Rural South councillor Bill Barrett, who now claims that his reported decision to “step down” was a “complete lie.” Meanwhile Cliftonville councillor Daniel Taylor has been charged with making threats to kill his wife, sending offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing messages and engaging in coercive control over a period of 11 years.

The KCC leadership tried to run interference on their bad press by claiming that “trans ideological material” was available at the county’s libraries and as an exemplary act of executive power banned The Autistic Trans Guide to Life, a book which, however, was not available to children in Kent libraries anyway.

When eventually the full council did meet it was to provide an unedifying spectacle of racist stereotyping, allegations of “misogyny” and highly speculative “financial savings.”

A full £202,500 is to be saved from the council’s £2.6 billion budget by cutting councillor allowances by 5 per cent. Another £180,000 by cutting some subscriptions. Some £14 million is to be saved by cancelling a move from the current administrative centre to another building.

Serious “savings” are to include ending a £2m net-zero renewable programme of property renovations over a four-year cycle and another £7.5m by cancelling the council’s transition to electric vehicles.

How are we to understand what these Reform UK wins mean? Kent Communist Party secretary Nathan Bolton says: “We need a local authority in Kent that will arrest the decline overseen by the last Conservative administration, not a Reform council that commits to going beyond the previously scheduled £75m cuts to budgets. If early signs are anything to go by, if you have a child with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) and rely on school transport, want to see action on the climate crisis, or investment in your local community infrastructure, from roads to children’s services, this Reform administration will leave you bitterly disappointed. That’s if they can turn up to council meetings and stop their infighting enough to even make these decisions.”

Including Kent the party now controls 10 local authorities where it won outright majorities — Durham, Lancashire, Doncaster, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire.

It is the largest party in Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Leicestershire.

It is not that these wins convey much actual power. Local government exists as the highly compromised gift of central government which controls its finances and, as exemplified by the Labour government’s refusal to delay KCC’s election pending the proposed local government reorganisation, it has no effective independent existence or significant autonomy.

Neoliberal administrations of Tory, Lib Dem and Labour exercise effective control over budgets. The last time local elections produced a challenge to the authority of the state — in the municipal socialism era of the 1980s — the Greater London Council and the six main metropolitan councils were abolished.

Dissident and disobedient councillors were personally surcharged when they set deficit budgets and before long education was hived off and social services and social care outsourced to private contractors.

Reform UK’s electoral pitch centres largely on ill-informed or downright mendacious claims about council spending laced with a poisonous narrative about migration issues over which no local authority has any real purchase.

Among the things Reform UK advance are the creation of a local “Doge” to cut spending, a refusal to house asylum-seekers, sack or redeploy diversity and inclusion staff and a zealous abandonment net zero initiatives. Its bid to end employees working from home is more likely to increase accommodation costs than reduce them.

In Kent, of course, in 2015 Reform UK’s predecessor Ukip won control of Thanet Council. In the following election Planet Thanet, as it is disrespectfully known, returned the Tories after a much depleted Ukip group split over personalities and issues so arcane that no-one can recall them.

Reform UK is caught in the same bundle of contradictions that affect every local authority administration. Central government funding for councils has been in freefall for more than a decade while councils are caught in the grip of a double whammy of rising demand and a reduced ability to deliver statutory services. Like every council, Kent spends most of its income on the costly statutory areas of children’s services and adult social care where the very outsourcing to privatised services carries an extra cost burden.

Holding office and therefore responsibility is a poisoned chalice for a party that bases its electoral appeal around issues — immigration control in particular — where it has no power whatsoever but nevertheless will be judged on the basis of its performance as every other political formation, but with the added expectations it has encouraged producing even greater disappointments.

After just a few weeks in office Reform UK at Kent County Council has already suffered desertions and expulsions. This is inevitable in a formation that has become a dumping ground for every chancer, schoolboy fantasist, malcontented and defeated Tory as well as the detritus of Farage’s previous electoral vehicles.