Reform promise savings after council election wins
BBCReform UK members in Worcestershire are promising to cut spending and end what they call "woke politics", despite not having overall control of the county council after Thursday's elections.
The party is now the biggest on the authority with 27 seats - two shy of an overall majority.
Alan Amos, a former Conservative councillor who defected to Reform earlier this year, retained his Bedwardine seat in Worcester and said his party was capitalising on the failures of Labour and the Tories.
"People want change," he said.
"They want a government that listens to them, for instance, on all these illegal immigrants, on all this nonsense wokeism and all this diversity nonsense.
"People want a government that's going to listen to ordinary people."
Local councils do not have control over nationwide immigration policy, but Reform's leader Nigel Farage has said his party will "resist central government plonking hundreds of these young men in these counties that we now run".
Amos - who is being touted in some quarters as the next leader of the council - said one of the first orders of business was to take control of the authority's finances.
"We want to audit the council's books," he said.
"We're going to cut out all the unnecessary expenditure on programmes and things that nobody wants just to please powerful minority groups."
Tony Travers, professor of public policy at the London School of Economics, told the BBC there have been 15 years of cuts to local council budgets and warned it would be "very, very hard to find substantial savings in this part of the public sector".
Amos also promised Reform's success was "not a one-off".
"The objective is to replace the Tories," he said. "They're finished, they've got no new ideas.
"And now, they've got their comeuppance."
The council's Conservative former deputy leader, Marcus Hart, held on to his Chaddesley seat in Wyre Forest but the Reform candidate for his ward was not far behind.
Speaking before the full extent of Reform's gains had become apparent, Hart said he was confident the Conservatives would bounce back because of the "cyclical" nature of politics.
However he conceded people were expressing their dissatisfaction with both the Tories and Labour.
"Reform are clearly the protest party, he said.
"What's clear from [Friday] is the Labour vote has collapsed and so has the Conservative vote, to a large extent.
"Reform are taking votes from Labour and votes from the Conservatives and they're coming straight through the middle."
The Green Party's Tor Pingree, who won Riverside from Tory council leader Simon Geraghty, agreed voters were looking for answers elsewhere.
But she said that had also worked to the benefit of her party, which increased its seats on the council from three to eight.
"They don't really want to vote Labour any more, they don't want to vote Conservative," said Pingree.
"They want actual change.
"They haven't seen it from the two main parties, so they are putting their votes elsewhere."
Representing St John's in Worcester, Richard Udall is now one of just two Labour councillors in Worcestershire.
He said he was grateful to be re-elected but acknowledged the "tidal wave of discontent" shown by the election results.
He said it was time for Labour to "listen a little bit more, and condemn a little less", citing immigration as a key issue on which people want more concrete answers.
"I think we need to understand what people are saying," he explained.
"Not necessarily condemn them for their views, but to understand them and understand where they're coming from and respond to them in a way which is potentially more positive."
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