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22 May 2025: a new dawn for Lancashire. Outside Preston’s grand old county hall, 53 brand new Reform UK councillors in turquoise ties – and one petite woman with an enormous turquoise hair bow – are hot-footing it past a gaggle of protesters for their first full council meeting. Most keep their heads down and get into the building as quickly as possible. But Joel Tetlow, a first-time politician who has made a few unfortunate headlines before even taking his seat, is intrigued. He stands in the doorway, vaping, as a demonstrator bellows: “Reform is a far right party and Nigel Farage is a racist and a fascist!”
Tetlow – late 40s with a full head of vertiginous hair, wearing a powder-blue three-piece suit – insists he isn’t bothered. “They don’t know us as people,” he shrugs. “It’s a word that’s slung around now so much, to be a racist. You know, what is it to be a racist? All we want to do is stand for our country, look after the people within it. So we’re not racist. None of us are racist.” (Farage, too, has denied accusations of racism, and Reform dispute that they are a far right party.)
The protesters are entitled to their opinions, he concedes. “But one thing they don’t understand is that all this is bringing the profile of Reform higher every day.” Voters realise that Reform’s opponents are “just loony left”, he says. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity, as they say.”
It’s an interesting take from a chap whose first taste of the limelight after the local election was having to explain a Hitler meme he’d posted on Facebook. It featured a picture of the Führer looking at a map, with the caption: “Why don’t we invade them slowly? A few men at a time in small boats.” The accompanying text then read: “Let’s be grateful this idea was never put to him ... or the world as we know it would be a whole lot different.” He took the post down but defended its meaning. Daily boats showed “no signs of abating”, he noted, adding: “We do not know who these people are, and I was likening it to an invasion. Just as in Greece they used a wooden horse to sneak into Troy during the Trojan war, disguising their soldiers inside.”
Tetlow is perhaps exactly the sort of person Reform’s opponents might expect to find in Nigel Farage’s turquoise army: a keyboard warrior with a Millwall vibe (“No one likes us, we don’t care”). But after spending seven months monitoring Reform’s Lancastrian takeover I’ve learned to put preconceptions to one side. The party is full of surprises. Take Tetlow’s day job: he’s a renewable energy consultant. Among his colleagues in Lancashire there is a neuroscientist, a radiographer, a truck driver, a barber, an accountant, two nurses, a criminal law barrister and a milkman.
With dozens of polls now suggesting Farage is heading for Downing Street, it’s important to know what happens when Reform UK takes power. In May’s local elections in England, the party won 10 of the 23 councils up for grabs and 41% of all contested seats. Lancashire was as good a place as any to see how this would play out: as an exiled Lancastrian, living just over the border in Greater Manchester, I retain a special interest in the red rose county.
Lancashire has a bit of everything. There are deprived seaside resorts such as Blackpool and Morecambe, where I grew up – northern versions of Farage’s Clacton seat. But also multicultural towns such as Blackburn and Burnley; swathes of farmland, plus the natural beauty of the Lune and Ribble Valleys and the Forest of Bowland. Rural and urban, rich and poor, it is the perfect location to put Reform’s offer to the test. Will their anti-woke agenda melt into insignificance once they are in charge of a £2bn budget and responsible for the safety of the most vulnerable children in society as well as caring for a rapidly ageing population – not to mention libraries, schools and roads? Will they crash and burn when exposed to the harsh realities of local government? Or prove more competent than anyone expected?
Reform won Lancashire on a remarkably flimsy policy platform. Though many candidates spent much of their time posting anti-immigration rhetoric on social media, they were vague about what they would actually change as councillors, perhaps because many of them didn’t understand what a county council can and can’t do.
They promised to “cut bloated salaries” – notably the £236,960 paid to the council’s chief executive – as well as “woke spending”. They pledged to freeze council tax and fix “all” potholes. They said no to four-day weeks – “Public servants should work full-time for full pay, like you do” – and vowed to reintroduce weekly bin collections, something out of the council’s control.
Some of the new councillors seem to have totally different priorities from the party’s leadership. I get chatting to Ellie Close, councillor for Leyland South. She says that more than anything else, she wants to speed up diagnoses for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send). “If we can fix that, and that’s the only thing we manage to fix in the next four years, I would still say that’s a success,” she says. I say that’s interesting, given Farage’s views on the “overdiagnoses” of Send which he said was “creating a class of victims”. She looks shocked and asks me to repeat it. “I’m not really sure what to say to that,” she says, “because I’ve got personal experience with it. I think it’s something that we need to currently look at.”
It’s clear that following Reform in Lancashire is going to be an interesting ride.
In his opening speech to the chamber in May, the new council leader, Stephen Atkinson, says Reform UK have “been given the mandate for change”. Which is a bit rum considering he was a Tory until March, having previously led the lower tier Ribble Valley district council, where he was, in fact, in charge of bins, as well as running a business selling furniture to schools. He promises “the highest levels of professionalism and courtesy”. Balancing the budget will be tricky, he warns, saying the council is £1.2bn in debt and must find £100m of savings in the next two years.
In addition to Atkinson, just three of Reform’s Lancashire councillors have done the job before, also for the Conservatives. But Atkinson insists that real-world experience is more important than local authority service, as he unveils his all-male cabinet (none of Reform’s nine female councillors make the top table). He puts a former executive at the motoring organisation the AA in charge of transport, gives a mental health nurse the health brief, and – in a decision that has subsequently been questioned – makes the owner of a private care company the cabinet member for adult social care.
For the first few months, Reform say a lot but do little. They remove the word “climate change” from one of the council departments, freeze their own salaries and quietly accept that they can’t actually force the chief executive to take a pay cut. One afternoon they pass a free speech motion that seems to be an excuse to bring up grooming gangs made up of predominantly Asian men, saying: “Baroness Casey’s recent audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse highlighted denial and avoidance of ethnicity issues, supporting the need to encourage a speak-up culture.” On another, they vote to play the national anthem at the start of each full council meeting.
In June, Farage arrives for a visit and says the “first saving” should be the scrapping of a £520,000 contract to provide “ergonomic chairs” for Lancashire county council staff, most of whom, he claims, work from home (local reporters later reveal that just £20,000 has so far been spent on fancy chairs). He says Reform’s unit of cost-cutters modelled on Donald Trump’s “Doge” initiative will arrive at county hall the following week. They never even cross the threshold after a row over data protection regulations.
In July, Reform introduce a new flags policy, declaring that the council will now prioritise “only the union flag, the flag of England, the Lancashire flag, royal flags, and military flags and ensigns”. In other words: no pride flag, no rainbow flag. One Lib Dem councillor suggests Reform are “dishonouring” the lives of trans people like the murdered teenager, Brianna Ghey, but Atkinson gives him short shrift. “This country is more fragmented than it’s ever been, and we need to come together as a country,” he says. “Free speech is an individual situation that should be defended absolutely. So if you want to wear a pride lanyard, so be it. That is your choice. This is a civic institution that should be concentrating on providing public services, not being overly political for frustrated people who couldn’t become MPs.”
Reform talk a lot about free speech but have remarkably thin skins. One day, I arrive at a cabinet meeting to find a furious Ged Mirfin, lead member for resources, HR and property – a boring job title that disguises the fact that as far as I can tell, he is in charge of trying to cut jobs, sell off buildings and lead the war on woke. He is fuming because the Lancashire Evening Post has done some Photoshopping on its front page to make it look like Atkinson is wielding a chainsaw, Elon Musk-style. The editor “really ought to apologise, it’s disgraceful”, fumes Mirfin. (The editor declines to apologise).
Mirfin has a striking appearance, with longish grey hair slicked back like Nick Cave. He wears a ring on every finger – a nod to his days as a heavy metal roadie for a band he has forbidden me from naming “because they’d hate to be associated with Reform”. He likes to present himself as a bit of a rogue. One day I compliment him on his tartan scarf and he says it was “a present from one of my lady friends”. Plural. Sometimes I wonder if he is trolling me. We have a pub lunch and he orders a pint and a pie and chips “with none of that extra stuff”. He means vegetables.
He is deliberately provocative, once standing up in a debate about local government reorganisation to pay homage to Enoch Powell, whom he calls “a very prescient individual”. Mirfin does not like government plans to simplify Lancashire’s muddle of district, unitary and county councils by replacing them with two or three single-tier authorities. It would be the same mistake as the UK joining the EU, he suggests, something Powell opposed, back in the 70s.
“I agree with Enoch,” he tells the council chamber. “Enoch said that local identity and national identity were much more important than economic efficiency, and that’s the concern that I have. In future years, when residents get asked to pay more and more council tax going forward they’ll get more and more disenchanted. If you think the Reform revolution was strong now, you just wait for a couple of years’ time – it’s going to be even stronger.”
After leaving the rock’n’roll lifestyle behind, Mirfin was an academic and then chief data officer for the North West Development Agency, before sitting as a Tory councillor in Ribble Valley for 15 years. He loves data and is an AI evangelist, telling me in great detail about special “AI camera technology” that Reform has installed on Lancashire’s bin lorries to work out exactly how many potholes the county has. He is very excited about two new pothole-filling machines the council is leasing from a Blackburn firm called Multevo “which can do a day’s work in two hours”.
He claims to be working 18-hour days, rising at six to pore over spreadsheets and working straight through until 1am. I go to his office and on the white board he is keeping a running tally of how many HMOs (houses of multiple occupancy) each area of Lancashire has. HMOs are a Reform obsession, along with asylum hotels. They are powerless to stop the latter, as they find out within a few weeks of taking power when a local hotel, the Tickled Trout, closes to paying customers and Afghan refugees move in. So they’re now more focused on HMOs, which they claim are hotbeds of crime and illegality, saying that “family homes” are being stuffed full of undocumented “fighting-age males” who terrorise communities and frighten women.
While other Reform councils have made unhelpful headlines by, for example, appointing a teenage leader (Warwickshire) or someone who thinks you get your backbenchers on side by telling them to “fucking suck it up” (Kent), Mirfin says Farage and his lieutenants see Lancashire as a beacon. “They regard us as a kind of model council in Reform central office,” he claims, particularly when it comes to cost-cutting and restructuring. Now he’s looked at the books, things are even worse than Reform thought when they took the reins, he says: they need to find £75m of savings in the next year, £95m the year after and £133m the year after that: a whopping £303m package of cuts by 2029. The full impact of this will only be revealed in their budget next year, but in late November Reform identify £21.9m of initial savings, over a three-year period. Most come from not filling vacancies, reducing reliance on agency workers and streamlining procurement, as well as cutting council grants. But they also plan to go big on AI, claiming it offers “productivity gains of nearly 100,000 hours”. In the council’s two most expensive departments, adult and children’s social services, they think they can make big savings by using AI prompts to speed up assessments for children applying for EHCPs (education and health care plans) and adults needing care.
I ask Mirfin if they will have to raise council tax to balance the books, and he refuses to answer. “I’m not going to deliver the budget here. You’ll have to wait for that, but I think you can probably guess.”
I guess that they will raise it by the maximum 4.99%. He doesn’t deny it. “Reform’s challenge at a local level in Lancashire is to show competency and to show that we can actually manage a big council with a budget of over £2bn a year,” he says. What they’re doing in Lancashire, he says, is “localising Reform’s policy agenda … It’s about forensically saving money, it’s about challenging orthodoxy, it’s challenging the whole DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] regime, it’s civic pride.”
At a meeting in October, he announces that the cabinet will be rewriting the council’s inclusion and fairness policy, “so that DEI doesn’t spread to any further within the organisation”, he says. He claims “there are 18 substantive DEI posts within LCC costing the organisation £1m, more or less. There are also 2,219 roles whereby a significant minority of the job function of LCC employees are related to DEI activities.” Never mind that those roles include things like social workers and youth workers (basically anyone whose job description includes any reference to diversity). All in all, it is costing LCC £37.5m, he claims: money that could be better spent elsewhere.
Samara Barnes, one of the Labour councillors and a persistent thorn in Reform’s side, stands up. She is wearing a Choose Love T-shirt supporting a refugee charity, exposing tattoo-covered arms. “I don’t think it is at all appropriate for a cabinet of all white men to be making decisions about inclusion,” she says. “That is not what inclusion is.” She is heckled by several Reform councillors who call her a racist.
After the meeting, a young guy called Tom Pickup edits a clip of Barnes’s intervention to make it sound as if she doesn’t think white men should be allowed to make decisions full stop – it goes viral. “And the comments below it were awful. Very much, ‘She’s racist, she is sexist. She needs stringing up’,” says Barnes.
Pickup says he edited the video “for brevity” and that he removed it on learning that Barnes was upset.
Tetlow posts a message on Barnes’s Facebook page telling her: “We enjoyed putting you in your place. Point of order!! You are racist. If we singled out a panel of men or women that was all coloured, would we be racist? Because you call us racist and you are the biggest of them all. People get roles on merit. Not colour, not gender … It’s our house and you playing our game now. You’re just along for the ride.”
A few days later, Tetlow appears in Preston crown court, summoned by a judge to explain why he failed to turn up for jury duty, having previously deferred it three times because he was too busy being a councillor. His latest excuse is an unusual one, but washes with the judge. He says he missed his last jury service on doctor’s orders: he was recuperating after a trip to Turkey for an eyelid lift to correct “overlapping hooded eyes”, which would “cause sweat to run into his eyes when he was reading, and sting”, according to the court report in the local paper.
Pickup, meanwhile, is suspended from Reform after it emerges he’s been a member of a WhatsApp group where one member allegedly called for a “mass Islam genocide”, encouraging others to stockpile weapons to attack “lefties” and “migrants”. Confronted, he admits to being in the group but says “99% of what occurs in groups, I don’t see.”
Things start to get crunchy for Reform in Lancashire when they launch a consultation on closing five local authority old people’s homes and day centres and moving residents into the private sector. The buildings are dilapidated, they’re not fit for purpose and they’ll cost millions to fix, is essentially the argument. And they reckon they can make £4m “selling off the family silver”, as one Labour councillor puts it. The idea immediately provokes controversy and a flurry of bad press, largely thanks to a 92-year-old resident of one of the homes earmarked for closure, who becomes the face and voice of the campaign to keep them open.
I visit Dorothy Devereux at Woodlands in Clayton-le-Moor near Accrington, where she has lived for 12 years in a cosy room surrounded by family photographs. The former nurse is “devastated, angry, frustrated” at the thought of being evicted, and cries as she says: “I’ve always said I’m staying here till I’m either dead or forcibly removed, and that’s how I feel.” Woodlands is not just a building, she says: “This is my home. I sold my home to pay to live here..” She is doubtful that any money will be saved by shunting her and other residents into the private sector, and is worried about the fate of the 70 staff, whom she describes as “angels”.
We meet just after Farage announces plans for government that include abolishing indefinite leave to remain and deporting hundreds of thousands of people, maybe more. She’s worried that Reform’s proposals could see many of her “angels” deported: “They want to send all the people that have worked here back where they came from. If no people from abroad worked here, it couldn’t run.” Her daughter, Frances Duxbury, writes to Jordan Fox, the local Reform councillor, and receives an unexpected reply. It turns out his grandmother is also a resident. “Having visited Woodlands multiple times, I believe it is an excellent facility,” he writes, before explaining that he “has no choice but to personally distance myself from the decision-making process. As a county councillor, I am expected to act impartially and without bias.”
Fox excuses himself from the relevant scrutiny committee. In his place he sends … Joel Tetlow, who tries and fails to stop opposition councillors from asking questions, by saying, “If these were normal councillors that would be fine, but these are the councillors who have whipped up a lot of this issue throughout the county.”
Among them is Kim Snape, a Labour councillor whose patch includes Grove House, another of the homes earmarked for closure. She had been asking questions on Facebook about a potential conflict of interest involving the cabinet member in charge of adult social care – former church minister Rev Graham Dalton, who runs a private care company with his wife. Dalton “didn’t like it”, Snape tells me, and threatened her with legal action. She accuses Dalton of behaving in a very un-Christian way, liking posts on Facebook that mock her appearance, including one that said “Just look at the state of it!” with lots of poo emojis. Snape’s hands aren’t entirely clean, with one of her posts about Dalton containing a montage of images including that of a placard depicting him with devil’s horns.
Dalton says he has been advised that his company ownership amounts to neither a pecuniary (financial) or non-pecuniary interest, but Snape believes questions remain. For example: “If [a resident’s] family members had to take their loved one out of Grove House and needed to fund private home care provision, if they phoned up his company, would that business be turned down?” A spokesperson for LCC says the services provided by Dalton’s company fall under healthcare – such as clinical nursing support – which is distinct from the social care services commissioned by the county council.
For all their talk about fighting the “woke blob” and bringing common sense back to British politics, it is how Reform handle these human battles that will ultimately decide whether voters judge Farage fit to move into Downing Street. They can mess about with flags and play the national anthem and rail against DEI all they like. But if they shut down your mum’s nursing home, will you vote for them?
Sitting at the back of the meeting with a big St George’s flag is Phil Price, whose 93-year-old mother lives in Grove House. He believes Dalton does stand to benefit from the care home closures. “I’ll be honest with you,” he tells me. “I’m a paid-up member of Reform and I’m disgusted with him. I wrote to him [Dalton], I wrote to Nigel Farage, because I thought they were going to come and change everything. And all they’re doing is coming in and tearing people’s lives apart.”
I put it to him that Reform did make clear they were going to make cuts in Lancashire, to save money and eliminate “waste”: “If there are parents who have paid into the system all their lives, worked hard for this country, if they’re waste, then we might as well just give up,” he says. I ask him why he voted Reform. “I thought it was going to change Great Britain for the good. You know, to stop all the boats and everything coming in, and to be fair to the people who’ve paid into the system, who’ve lived here all their lives. All politicians, they’re all in it for themselves, I think. I was really excited about them and now I’m disillusioned.”
