Will Wales be Farage’s Minnesota?

Ben Wildsmith

If there’s one thing populist politicians can’t stand, it’s responsibility. Contemplate the soul-destroying, obsessively documented processes we all have to submit to in our jobs then imagine a chancer like Donald Trump or Lee Anderson coping with them.

These people are in politics to avoid what everyone else considers work, it’s just not their thing.

So, winning all those councils in England last year was a double-edged sword for political entertainer, Nigel Farage.

It’s one thing pointing at a troubled local authority and blaming its difficulties on immigrants/the woke/climate science, but quite another going through the procedural grind required to implement changes.

What the party has discovered is that central government devolves blame to local authorities. Your neighbourhood Facebook page is awash with complaints about supposedly lazy or corrupt councils that, in reality, continue to operate under austerity, even as central government claims credit for money it spends on its own initiatives.

Reform’s flagship council is Kent, where Farage is an MP. So, when its head of ‘DOLGE’ – Department of Local Government Efficiency – told the Financial Times that the council hadn’t made any cuts at all, it didn’t go down well. Matthew Fraser-Moat was required to resign for failing to cut what had already been cut before Reform took control.

In essence, the further away from its source of funds a body sits, the more of a nightmare it is to run.

This is painfully apparent in the Senedd, where even sharing party affiliation with the Westminster government won’t win you the first biscuit, let alone preferential treatment.

Reform’s recent confusing messaging about Wales suggests that its unhappy experience in English councils, where its representatives have been resigning rapidly and in numbers, might have dulled the party’s ambition to govern in Cardiff.

The appointment of an unknown leader who has no connection to the Welsh branch of Reform must have infuriated the party’s grassroots here.

Tory defector

Another Tory defector, Dan Thomas has chosen not to engage with questions about his residence, eligibility for candidature, nor anything else that a serious contender for national leadership would be keen to clear up ASAP.

Nobody in Wales seems to know him, certainly nobody has voted for him, and he seems to be absent from the electoral roll here as recently as December.

Reform’s appeal in Wales is slightly different from what it offers in England. There, it is a refresh for the right of the Conservative Party. Home Counties types know that Nige will never mess with their tax rates, or inheritance arrangements, so he’s a safe repository for their despair at recent Tory incompetence and malfeasance.

In Wales, though, Reform was posited as an insurgence against the exhausted complacency of a Labour machine that behaves more like an established church than a democratic party. Reform was sold here as a radical force; something that would puncture the inflated entitlement of a century’s uncontested Labour dominance.

In a way, despite the right-wing ideology, Reform appealed to a rebelliousness in Welsh politics that seems to have been wrung out of the governing party and the defanged trade union movement that birthed it.

A homegrown tub thumper who was across Welsh issues and understood just how desperate life has become in many of our communities would win support from any ideological position. People are clearly desperate for change.

Perplexing

Reform’s choice, then, is perplexing. If the former Conservative leader of Barnet Council recalls anyone in Welsh politics, it’s not the radical standard bearers of yesterday but parachuted-in placemen like Alex Barros-Curtis of Cardiff West and Torsten Bell of Swansea West.

He is, in other words, precisely the sort of figure that Welsh Reform supporters have been telling us their party will consign to history.

For a while last year, it seemed that Reform was serious about winning power in the Senedd. Farage was, you’ll recall, keen to emphasise his support for devolution.

The defeat in Caerphilly and bad times in those English councils seem to have changed all that. Reform-friendly accounts on social media are openly for abolishing the Senedd and nobody from the party seems keen to refute that possibility.

If electoral success in Wales is not to be Reform’s bridgehead to winning power in Westminster, then our place in Farage’s strategy might be altogether less comfortable.

Whipping boy

With a presence in the Senedd, but no power, Reform will be able to use Wales as the exemplar of all it seeks to overturn in the wider UK. Wales will become its byword for all that is wrong, and should it win in Westminster, its whipping boy.

An incoming Farage government will need somewhere on which it can paint the endless grievances required by a populist regime.

Donald Trump took umbrage at Governor Tim Walz during the presidential campaign and, resultingly, Minnesota has been libelled, bullied, and abused by his regime.

Is Farage teeing up Wales for the same fate? This week’s bizarre threats against Bangor University suggest he may well be.