A Kirklees council meeting descended into extraordinary scenes this week after a newly elected Reform UK councillor stood up and explained, on behalf of her entire party group, that they did not understand what the council’s constitution was, what standing orders were, or what an amendment was – before the vote to elect a council leader collapsed twice and the chamber adjourned without forming a functional local government. Another attempt will be made on 28 May.
The moment was captured on video and has been shared widely online. Councillor Sarah Wood, speaking for the Reform group, addressed the chamber with a candour that has been simultaneously praised for its honesty and scrutinised for what it reveals about the readiness of the party’s newly elected representatives to govern.
What Sarah Wood said
Wood’s statement was, in its way, admirably direct. “We don’t understand the constitution. We don’t understand what standing orders are, nor do we understand what an amendment is. We might vote for something we don’t understand, even if you were to slow it down and describe it properly.”
She continued: “We understand that, because we don’t understand it, this vote may not be constitutional. We are at a disadvantage. We don’t necessarily know what we are voting for. We don’t understand some of the procedures… we have been partly confused because we don’t understand the rules.”
The statement covers, in one intervention, three of the foundational elements of how any democratic assembly functions. The constitution sets out how the council operates and what powers it has. Standing orders govern how meetings are conducted – how votes are called, how debates proceed, how business is transacted. An amendment is the basic parliamentary mechanism for changing a proposal before it is voted on. Without understanding any of these three things, meaningful participation in council business is not possible.
What happened next
The council attempted to elect a leader. The vote collapsed. They tried again. It collapsed again. Reform had proposed Sarah Wood as leader of Kirklees Council. The vote failed twice. The council adjourned without forming a functioning administration.
Kirklees is now in a race against time to elect a leader and establish a functioning local government, with another attempt scheduled for 28 May.
Tanisha Bramwell, independent councillor for Dewsbury West, did not mince her words. “Throughout the meeting, Reform councillors openly admitted they did not understand key parts of council procedure, including the constitution, amendments and, at times, what they were actually voting on. Kirklees Reform proposed Sarah Wood as Leader of the Council, yet the vote collapsed twice. When asked about policies and plans for running the council, clear answers were difficult to find. Our residents deserve better than what was on display this evening.”
A Conservative councillor offered a more charitable assessment, observing that “the first day of school is always hard.” Whether that framing brings comfort to the residents of Kirklees whose local government is currently unable to elect a leader is not recorded.
The governance context
The Kirklees farce is not an isolated incident. It is the latest episode in what is becoming a sustained and documented pattern of Reform struggling to govern the councils it has won.
As we reported in our tracker of Reform councillors kicked out, resigned or defected, approximately 99 Reform representatives have left the party through expulsion, resignation or defection – with 22 of those departures occurring in the two weeks since the local elections. The party that claims “some of the strongest vetting procedures in the country” has suspended councillors for sharing Islamophobic content, removed others for alleged racist posts, seen an internal war in Worcestershire where one councillor publicly attacked Nigel Farage, and watched a St Helens councillor resign rather than apologise for his adult content platform.
As we detailed in our analysis of Reform’s first year in local government, the councils Reform controlled before May 7 raised council tax after promising to cut it, attempted to close care homes before being reversed by their own grassroots and found nothing to cut through their DOGE-style efficiency reviews. The party now governs hundreds of additional councils.
The Kirklees situation adds a specific dimension to that picture: not misconduct or broken promises, but a basic unfamiliarity with how councils actually work. The constitution, standing orders and amendments are not advanced procedural knowledge. They are the minimum requirements for participating in democratic governance. A councillor who does not know what an amendment is cannot effectively represent their constituents in any council vote.
Sympathy for Wood – and what it misses
It is worth acknowledging, as several online commentators did, that Wood was placed in an uncomfortable position. She was not alone in her confusion – she was the representative chosen to speak on behalf of the whole group, making her the face of a collective failure of preparation. Her candour in stating the problem directly, rather than concealing it, is a form of honesty that Westminster politics rarely demonstrates.
But the sympathy for Wood’s personal position cannot extend to the institutional situation it describes. Kirklees has over 400,000 residents. Its council is responsible for adult social care, children’s services, highways, planning, housing support and a range of other services that affect people’s daily lives directly. The residents of Kirklees voted for a Reform council and are entitled to expect that the people governing their services understand, at minimum, how a vote is conducted.
Danny Kruger was laughed at on Question Time for not knowing the numbers behind his party’s welfare policy, as we reported in our Question Time piece. Piers Morgan said “the difficult part starts now” for Reform after the local elections. The Kirklees council meeting is a specific and vivid illustration of what that difficult part looks like in practice.
What Reform said nationally
Reform UK has not issued a formal national response to the Kirklees meeting. Farage, who vowed to “throw absolutely everything” at the Makerfield byelection while simultaneously declining to answer questions about his £5 million personal gift from Christopher Harborne – as we reported in our Channel 4 getaway piece – has not commented on the governance situation in Kirklees.
The clip of Wood’s statement has done the rounds online with a consistent reaction: the man who promised to bring competent, businesslike management to Britain’s public services leads a party whose newly elected representatives needed to pause a council meeting to explain that they didn’t know what an amendment was.
There will be another attempt to elect a Kirklees council leader on 28 May.
