Politicians have started campaigning ahead of England’s local elections on 1 May. Over the past week or so, there have been the usual posts of MPs doing photo-ops, pretending to leaflet in their constituencies and standing among small groups of locals with ‘Vote Labour / Tory / Green / Liberal Democrat’ banners.
Like most people, I tend to ignore local elections. Over the past 20 years, turnout has dropped off a cliff and a councillor can be elected with just a couple of hundred votes. Although, with local services declining and council tax rising, and with a very unpopular national government, the stakes are much higher this time around.
The East Midlands was once a Labour heartland. Now Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is eyeing up this part of the country as a potential future heartland of its own. Ashfield, my hometown, already has a Reform MP in the form of Lee Anderson, who is very popular in the area. Since his election in 2019 as a Conservative, and his re-election in 2024 with Reform, he has been known for his local presence, approachability and connection to constituents. He also grew up here.
It was no surprise, then, that when Farage turned up last week in Ashfield he was met by friendly and welcoming locals in pubs, chaperoned by Anderson. Farage then went to the former coalfields and to Silverhill Colliery, where my dad used to work. It was closed in 1993 and all that is left now is a memorial to the pit and to the men who worked underground. During the 1984 Miners’ Strike, Arthur Scargill’s wife, Anne Scargill, was arrested for picketing outside this colliery. My dad was there and remembered the brutality and violence the police meted out towards striking miners and their supporters. The scars of the 1984 strike still exist here in the landscape and on its people.
This history makes the area fertile ground for Reform. Speaking to people in Ashfield, both Anderson and Farage not only lamented the loss of heavy industry, but also spoke about how a Reform council might deliver the services that people need. Ashfield – along with deindustrialised areas across the north, the Midlands and the coast – has suffered 40 years of political and social vandalism at the hands of politicians. That includes local councils.
Reform and Farage have also been in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire meeting steel workers. Scunthorpe’s blast furnaces were saved at the weekend from the brink of closure, when Keir Starmer’s government rushed through emergency legislation to prevent its Chinese owner, Jingye, from shutting them down. Jingye had previously stated that the Scunthorpe steelworks was ‘no longer financially sustainable’. Farage was one of the early voices calling for the nationalisation of British Steel, which the Labour government seems to have belatedly accepted as necessary.
The people of Scunthorpe have seen what happened to the mining communities. They know that, without the steel industry, their town will become another part of Britain’s deindustrialised lands of decline, poverty, poor mental health and lost people. It would be no surprise if they put their vote behind Reform candidates next month.
Farage and Reform’s focus on the UK’s industrial heartlands is throwing down challenges to the Labour government and to the many Conservative-run councils in these areas. Reform’s focus and rhetoric on building an economy based on good working-class jobs is catching the attention of those communities that both Labour and the Tories have failed to ‘level up’. Starmer’s government is still completely fixated on the south, with zero plans or ideas about what to do with the former industrial heartlands. I am sceptical that Reform will do any better if elected, but the party is at least present and speaking to the challenges of working-class life here.
In the absence of any other political offering that speaks to Britain’s working class, it is unsurprising that Farage is welcomed in places like Ashfield and Scunthorpe. As it stands, Reform is set to become the largest party on Nottinghamshire County Council. In Lincolnshire, Reform looks set to reduce the Tories to a minority administration in what used to be a safely Conservative patch.
If what remains of the British left plans to protest against Reform, or dismiss its voters as ‘far right’, then it is living in the wrong decade. No one who has been paying attention should be surprised by the mood of revolt that is spreading across the country, especially in its most neglected towns.
Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.
