If there were any doubts that Reform UK poses a serious threat to the living standards of workers, the announcement last week of a ‘DOGE-style’ efficiency drive in Kent County Council should put those doubts to bed. Kent was chosen for the Reform ‘pilot’ because the party won control of the council last month, with 57 out of 81 seats.
Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK, announced that new employees in the ten councils controlled by his party will no longer be allowed to join the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) and that existing staff will get lower pay rises to compensate for their “generous” pensions. Newspapers like the Telegraph, took up the usual – and wholly inaccurate – myth about “gold-plated” pensions.
The attack on pensions is only one part of Reform’s proposed ‘efficiency’ drive which, like Elon Musk’s in the USA, was planned to involve ‘assistance’ from ‘experts’ within Reform. The project was to involve party chairman, Zia Yusuf, and Arron Banks, the millionaire financial backer of Reform. Another notable aide was to be Nathaniel Fried, a supposed “leading tech entrepreneur”, who would head a team of IT experts and data analysts to closely examine the Council’s books. The whole operation was straight out of the Trump/Musk playbook.
Core intention of Reform is to gut workers’ wages and conditions
Within days, several wheels fell off the Reform bandwagon. First, Zia Yusuf resigned as party chair, writing on X, “I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time…” and following his departure, Fried also stood down. But the core intention of the Reform party to gut the wages and conditions of public sector workers remains the same. Reform councillors in Kent have said it is “business as usual“. The “engine room” for the changes, a Reform spokesperson told the BBC “is the 57 councillors that have been elected to run this council.”
According to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Reform has told council officers they will even face “gross misconduct” if they obstruct their DOGE-style ‘efficiency unit’ when it seeks to examine spending in the departments they control.
There should be no misunderstandings. This party, in control of local authorities – and much worse, if it came to lead a national government – seeks to undermine the wages, conditions and pension rights of all public sector workers: local government workers, health workers, teachers and firefighters, to name a few.
Pensions are apparently only “gold-plated” when they are for workers’. Neither Richard Tice nor Nigel Farage will complain about their far more lucrative European parliament pensions; Farage currently gets £73,000 a year, way above the highest local authority chief executive pension.
The leading question is, what will be the response of public sector trade unions? UNISON assistant general secretary, Jon Richards, condemned the Reform proposals, suggesting that “This looks like another Reform UK policy scribbled on the back of a beer mat”. He added that the LGPS is “well-funded and affordable” and that, anyway, manycouncil employees aren’t on final salary schemes (although, we might add, they ought to be).
Fighting through the courts is barking up the wrong tree
It might be correct, as Jon Richards points out, that local authorities are “obliged” to offer access to the local government pension scheme to all new workers. But if that is a hint that UNISON would only fight the proposal in the courts, it would be barking up the wrong tree entirely. Even without changing the law, Reform councillors, goaded by the national leadership and the press, will use every device they can to undermine workers’ pensions and rights. If they were in office nationally, they would change the law to make it possible.
In the education sector, teachers’ unions are already having to fight guerrilla actions where multi-academy trusts have tried to take on new school teaching staff, without them having established teachers’ pay and conditions like sick pay and maternity leave. It has only been by a militant response – threatening or taking strike action – that teachers have beaten back the attempts to create a two-tier workforce in schools.
At least the Fire Brigades Union responded in a bolder fashion. The union told the i newspaper that it would “fiercely resist” the Reform plans, which it described as “an assault on the pensions of firefighters and council workers”.
A spokesperson for the GMB, which also has a lot of members in local government, said the union “will do everything in its power to protect members’ rights” although what exactly that implies is not clear. GMB National Secretary, Rachel Harrison, was right when she noted that: “Council staff have suffered more than a decade of savage pay cuts – slashing their pensions is the worst form of bullying”.
Reform’s pretended sympathy for pensioners
Harrison asked the “why would Reform target poorly paid workers like this?”. The answer is simple, of course, and that is that this party, despite its crocodile tears and pretended sympathy for pensioners over the Winter Fuel Allowance, is fundamentally attached to the system of profit and greed, like the Tory Party on steroids. They have zero interest in the welfare or ordinary working class families, notwithstanding the fact that they have conned millions into voting for them.
The scheme proposed for Kent would create a two-tier workforce, with the pensions for established staff being different to those for new employees. The policy is intended to divide and weaken the workforce, but it is more likely to be a recipe for strikes, go-slows and other forms of resistance.
In November and December 2011, a whole number of trade unions took industrial action in defence of their pensions. As many as two million workers took strike action and two thirds of schools were closed. That dispute ended unsatisfactorily for the workers concerned, with the previous pensions agreements undermined for new starters. That failure to hold the line on pensions – and failure it was – was largely due to the unwillingness of public sector union bosses to coordinate militant action with other unions.
The current threat to local government – and perhaps all public sector – wages and conditions, is far more serious than the attacks in 2011. The trade unions must not make the same mistakes. Christina McAnea, Gary Smith and Sharon Graham, general secretaries of UNISON, GMB and Unite, respectively, should start meeting and planning now, not when it is too late.
These three big local authority unions, with the FBU and the teachers unions, should at least at this stage be planning to meet, to discuss a united strategy to stop Reform in its tracks. The drive to the bottom has to be stopped.
Local authority workers value their pensions
Local government workers have paid into and accrued their pensions over many years; they rightly value their pensions, and other benefits they gained over the years, often in lieu of higher wages. Reform cannot be allowed to taken them away now.
Whether it is in Kent alone, or in all ten authorities controlled by Reform, the trade unions should immediately call meetings of members if there is any threat of these plans being implemented. Workers should be balloted for coordinated strikes in defence of their pensions and conditions.
This should be taken up by the lefts groups in these unions – by Time for Real Change in UNISON, for example – and brought to trade union conferences as emergency resolutions. The demands should be made:
- No to two-tier working conditions!
- All new local authority workers, without exception, to be in the LGPS!
- Local government unions to meet NOW, to plan coordinated action!
- Local authority unions to call meetings of members, to ballot for strike action and to campaign for a ‘yes’ vote!
The only good that will come out of the proposed Reform policy of slashing pensions and working conditions, is that it will be an education to that minority of trade union members who have been seduced by Farage’s pseudo-radicalism and his fake concern for working class people. No less than the Tories, this is a party whose policies would be carried out for and by millionaires.
The trade union movement has enormous social and industrial muscle and they will have public opinion on their side, as they did in 2011 when they were fighting for their pensions. Reform can be stopped, if the trade union leadership want them to be stopped.
Postscript: Literally within hours of this editorial being posted, it was announced that Zia Yusuf was “rejoining” Reform UK. Not content with aping the Trump/Musk DOGE project, Yusuf is emulating the unpredictability and erratic behaviour of his US idols. Notwithstanding Yusuf’s U-turn, the political arguments of the editorial are unchanged.
