If Reform UK raise council tax then they're just the same as Labour and Tories

OPINION

Reform UK rode into the local elections earlier this year on a wave of deceit — promising to slash “waste,” restore fiscal sanity, and crucially, lower council tax bills. They told the British public that by cutting bureaucratic fat, they’d deliver leaner, more efficient councils. They promised to end the waste of taxpayers’ money. They promised to give us a break from decades of mismanagement. But just a few months later, the reality hit. In Kent, one of Reform’s flagship councils, they are now supposedly preparing to raise council tax by the maximum amount allowed — 4.99%. That’s the very same rise we’ve seen year after year under the old, tired parties.

The very thing Reform pledged to end. The story unfolding in Kent is the perfect symbol of what Reform UK is becoming: the Tory Party 2.0 — all bluster, slogans, and empty promises. During the campaign, Reform’s head of the so-called “DOGE” unit (a name laughably borrowed from Elon Musk’s US efficiency project), Zia Yusuf, boasted that in Kent alone, £350 million could be saved just from recruitment services. Hundreds of millions, he claimed, were being wasted and would be clawed back for the people.

Now we’re told that there were no big savings to be found. Now we hear that services are “down to the bare bones,” and that Reform councillors just want more money.

What happened to the bold talk? What happened to the “cut the waste, cut the tax” mantra? What happened to the movement that said it was different from the establishment? It's difficult to see that big talk as anything other than dishonest.

When Kent County Council’s Reform cabinet members admit they can’t find savings, when they shrug and say there’s nothing left to cut — they are repeating the same tired refrain we’ve heard from Labour and the Conservatives for decades. They are proving that, once in office, Reform is no different from the rest.

Council leader Linden Kemkaran even had the gall to call Kent “a test bed for Reform’s national policies” — the “shop window” for what a Reform government might look like.

If that’s true, then the shop window is shattered. Because what we’re seeing is not radical reform, not fiscal discipline, not courage — but capitulation. The same bureaucratic excuses, the same tax rises, the same “we’ve done all we can” defeatism that has rotted through British politics for years.

Reform promised to fix the immigration problem and to cut waste, only to discover that county councils have no power over immigration and no great pots of money lying around to be saved.

It was smoke and mirrors — designed to win votes, not deliver results. So here we are: a party that swore to lower your bills is nfeared to be raising them by the maximum amount allowed. A party that claimed to fight waste has become wasteful in words.

A party that claimed to be anti-establishment has melted into the very system it condemned. This is the real danger of Reform UK. Not that it will revolutionise Britain, but that it will become yet another branch of the uniparty — promising change while delivering nothing.

If this is what Reform looks like in power — excuses, backtracking, and tax hikes — then let’s drop the pretence. Nothing will change under Reform UK. The same betrayals, the same apparent contempt for the people, the same disappintments — only now painted in turquoise instead of red and blue.

The truth is simple: Reform UK has become what it once claimed to fight. The British public deserve better than slogans. They deserve integrity.