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Reform has a plan for local government. What about the left? [1]
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Date: 2025-05
The UK’s local elections are symbolically important. For pundits, they demonstrate political momentum. For insurgent parties, they allow voters to get into the habit of voting for them and demonstrate electoral credibility. Convincing a left-leaning voter that, say, the Green Party should win is pretty easy; convincing them that it can is harder.
But what should the left actually do when it does win power in local government? Since 2010, its primary job has been administering austerity. Councils have been given more responsibility (for instance, over public health) while losing, on average, more than half of their central government funding. In most big cities, nominally progressive local politicians have been the face of cuts to libraries, children’s centres, jobs and social care.
Until now, Labour and Green councils have justified these strategies as a way to bide their time until a Labour government can turn the money back on. Now, ten months after Keir Starmer’s Labour Party entered office, it is clear that no such money is coming. The Birmingham bin strikes are totemic because they mark the beginning of a new crisis in local government, in which austerity seems permanent.
This crisis will only get sharper. While the local elections held across England last week were largely fought in right-wing Tory heartlands, next year will see them take place in London and several other large cities that are more likely to lean left. The Greens and, if they are formed, new left-of-Labour parties could be put in charge of local authorities. They will need a plan.
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The right-wing populist Reform Party, which won ten councils and two mayors last week, has a clear plan. Leader Nigel Farage says he wants a Trump-style “DOGE in every county.” On the morning of her election last week, Andrea Jenkyns, Greater Lincolnshire’s new Reform mayor, said she planned to sack about 10% of the council’s workforce.
Commentators make a basic error when they gleefully point out Reform’s lack of experience in governing. Farage knows he is unlikely to mend many potholes. Instead, he will use Reform councils to generate headlines – on migration, net zero and diversity – and to create legal and political friction with the Starmer government.
Historically, there have been two broad approaches on the left when it comes to running local government in a time of austerity.
Illegal budgets
The first is outright defiance, as practised by the Poplar Rates Rebellion in 1921. Led by Labour politician George Lansbury, Poplar Council in east London defied the courts and central government to deliver its programme of social reform and equal pay for women.
At the time, Poplar was one of the poorest areas of London. But as well as funding its reform, residents were required to make the same contributions to London-wide bodies such as the police, the water board and the London County Council as the wealthier boroughs in west London.
When 30 councillors refused to impose heavy increases in rates (a property tax that preceded today’s council tax) on their poor residents, they ended up in prison for contempt of court. It became a popular struggle that embedded Lansbury as a tribune of London’s East End and forced reform of London’s taxation system.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a wave of left-led Labour councils tried to do something similar. In 1972, Labour Party councillors for Clay Cross in North East Derbyshire refused to impose the rent rises for council tenants that had been set out in the Conservative government’s Housing Finance Act. Eleven of them were surcharged – effectively handed personal fines – for their defiance. Faced with mass social mobilisation, primarily from the trade union movement, then Tory prime minister Ted Heath called an election in 1974 to ask ‘who governs Britain?’ He lost to Labour, which scrapped the Housing Finance Act.
The Thatcher years saw a much wider revolt – the Rate-Capping Rebellion – in response to a central government drive to force local councils to cut taxes and services. More than a dozen councils set illegal budgets, most famously Liverpool City Council, which was led by the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist grouping which had deep roots in Merseyside and in the Labour Party.
To cut a long story short, the rebellion failed. Almost all councils stepped back from the policy, and Margaret Thatcher’s government used overwhelming force, with dozens of rebel councillors fined. Ministers also abolished the Greater London Council, run by Labour figures Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell, which had looked to spend money on socialist policies and championed causes such as gay rights while Thatcher was leading a conservative moral crusade.
Labour Leader Neil Kinnock used his speech at the 1985 party conference to denounce the “grotesque chaos” of the situation in Liverpool and used it as a pretext to begin the mass expulsion of the Marxist left from the party. Kinnock viewed the strategy of defiance as futile and refused to support it, despite a number of party conference votes.
Dented shield
Kinnock’s motto – “better a dented shield than no shield at all” – became, on paper, the policy of the Labour right, which believed local government could not stop cuts entirely, but it could use whatever legal powers it had to soften the blow and kick against privatisation. In practice, many councils run by the Labour right effectively abandoned this strategy years ago, becoming enthusiastic purveyors of outsourcing and efficiency savings.
Between 2010 and 2024, it was left to more radical council leaderships, or at least soft-left ones, to actually pursue a dented shield. Community wealth building, pioneered in the UK by Preston City Council, became a talking point during Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership from 2015 to 2020, when the party was in opposition. It attempts to reinvest wealth in the local community rather than having it hived off as profits by multinationals. Local councils can use procurement powers to boost cooperatives, wages and economic democracy.
The road is paved with compromise. Some councils have managed to leverage rising asset values to cushion cuts to public services – often at the expense of their own residents. The redevelopment of Elephant and Castle in south London raised large sums of money for the Labour-run Southwark Council. But it also entailed the demolition of local businesses and community institutions. Luxury flats have replaced the 1,200 council homes that once stood at the Heygate estate.
After 15 years of austerity, councils now need a massive injection of funding just to stand still. This is because, as many campaigners argued at the time, cuts cost money in the long run. Right-wing newspapers have decried a rise in youth violence while cheering on cuts that saw more than two-thirds of the country’s youth centres closed. Financial and social hardship means more people relying on council services.
Southwark’s neighbour, Lambeth, which has been run by the Labour right for decades, is about to enact a further £99m of cuts to libraries and other key services. The main driver of its financial difficulties is an unprecedentedly high demand for statutory services like emergency accommodation and child social care. The council is refusing to use reserves as a stopgap, effectively betting that Labour will not turn the money back on from central government.
Green Party spokespeople often like to argue that the party’s ability to turn one or two councillors into a more sizable contingent shows that voters like what the Greens do in office. But in Bristol, where the Greens won a majority last year, they have had to address a £52m budget gap for 2025. After U-turning under pressure from unions and residents on cuts to museums and libraries, the administration has raised council tax and reduced funding for domestic abuse services and waste collection.
A new defiance
There are no easy answers. Producing a balanced budget in the current climate reduces even radical politicians to platitudes about ‘difficult choices’.
If you want to paint by numbers, it is easy to demand that Green and left-led councils simply repeat the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. But legislation introduced after these revolts (the Local Government Finance Act 1988, Local Government and Housing Act 1989, Local Government and Finance Act 1992 and Local Government Act 1999) essentially forces councils to set a balanced budget, including council tax rates, by a set date each year. Every council has a ‘monitoring officer’, who is obliged to report any plans for a deficit budget.
When the central government appointed a housing commissioner to enforce rent increases in Clay Cross in 1972, council workers were instructed not to lend him so much as a pencil. A policy of total non-compliance would not work now. If a council sets an illegal budget, or refuses to set a budget entirely, councillors are not surcharged as they were in Clay Cross and Poplar (that was abolished by the Local Government Act 2000 and replaced by a criminal charge, Misuse of Public Office). Instead, council officers, commissioners and central government simply take over.
This is not to say that a strategy of defiance is impossible, but it is to say that the left’s thinking on local government often puts the cart before the horse.
A revolt in local government could well play a role in forcing a Labour government to think again about austerity – but it could only ever be part of a much wider strategy. It would have to be backed by a mass movement of residents and workers. It is this movement, not the council, that would end up on the front line of the fight against centrally directed cuts. And to cause a political crisis for Starmer, there would have to be a coordinated nationwide revolt, as there was during the Rate-Capping Rebellion – not just one or two Green councils.
So, just as important as the question of budgets is what councils could do to nurture political agency in the community and to mobilise people. The Greater London Council in the 1980s hired community organisers and opened up its doors as a hub of political activism. In 1921, when Poplar’s councillors marched to the High Court and to jail, they were accompanied by a procession of 2,000 local residents.
Imagine if even a handful of towns, cities and London boroughs could repeat that effort now. The anti-establishment and anti-austerity mood in the country has rarely been this sharp, but it has rarely been this lacking in organisation, too. Just as Reform’s advances this year act as a stark warning, a radical shift in local government, starting with the local elections in 2026, could become a tool to reassert progressive politics in Britain.
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