Cllr Shazna Muzammil is the Leader of the Conservative Group on Milton Keynes City Council
Reform has money. But we Conservatives still have something money cannot immediately buy: local infrastructure, experienced councillors, casework, community relationships, voter data, institutional knowledge, activists who’ve delivered the same streets for years, and residents who know our names.
That is our advantage. But it’s a head start, not a lead and Reform now has the resources to close the gap.
Politics has changed again. In May, Reform looked unstoppable in many places. Five months later, Conservatives are competitive with them in some national polling. Nobody should conclude from that, that the threat has gone away.
The local elections this May were some of the most unpredictable I can remember.
Here in Milton Keynes, Reform secured the highest city-wide vote share with 24 per cent. Labour received 22 per cent, Conservatives 20 per cent and the Liberal Democrats 19 per cent.
Despite predictions that Reform could win more than 20 seats, the result was very different: 20 Liberal Democrats, 19 Labour, 12 Conservatives and just 9 Reform councillors.
It is a useful reminder that National polling, vote share and winning seats are not the same thing. And it is worth looking at that result again now because the landscape has already shifted.
Reform has received an extraordinary £72 million from two donors. Money on that scale can fund plush offices, professional staff, digital advertising, polished PR campaigns, data and an enormous amount of literature. They now have the resources to build their organisation very quickly.
Whilst Conservatives would be foolish to underestimate that, our experience in Milton Keynes showed us something else.
Local elections remain intensely local, and grassroots campaigning and local infrastructure still matters.
Ahead of May elections, Farage came to Milton Keynes. There were leaflets through every letterbox, a rally at the MK Dons stadium, a drop-in at the Bletchley Conservative Club and a photo opportunity serving fish and chips. There was no shortage of drama and slick videos.
But no Farage leaflet offered to fix someone’s pothole, help residents with a planning application, chase their missed bin or know what was happening at their parish council. That is where established local parties still had the edge.
After the 2024 general election, here in Milton Keynes, we decided not to wait for the next short campaign to rebuild. We strengthened our local teams, trained our new candidates and got much more disciplined about connecting what our councillors did in the chamber with what residents saw outside it.
Council speeches became short videos. We explained complicated council decisions in plain language. In the final five months before polling day, our team produced more than 80 videos.
One of them was a slightly mad game of pothole golf on our local roads. The potholes were soon filled within days after that. A resident messaged me to say they had been reporting them for more than two years and had given up. They weren’t thanking us for a clever video. They were thanking us for getting something that mattered to them done.
We delivered detailed surveys to residents, asking what they thought we should focus on locally. It went out with a freepost return envelope and more than 15% of the households we targeted responded.
Those surveys, alongside doorstep conversations and online engagement, shaped our local campaign.
And what residents talked about was remarkably consistent. Roads. Anti-social behaviour. GP access. School places. Council services. Housing development. Infrastructure.
They weren’t waiting for an ideological lecture. They wanted their neighbourhoods to work. That became the basis of our “getting the basics right” message.
Conversations mattered on the doorstep too. One couple in Bletchley, Conservative voters for years, told me they were voting Reform this time. Then they invited me in for a coffee and told me exactly how disappointed they were in our party. I listened, talked about what we would do locally, and left them our manifesto.
Later, they emailed me. They said it was refreshing to receive something where we weren’t using our leaflets to tell them how awful everyone else was. Instead, we were telling them what we would actually do if we ran the council.
That had changed their minds.
We stayed Conservative in our policies and in our ambition.
Behind every effective local campaign, is also an infrastructure we sometimes take for granted: federations and associations, volunteers and members, experienced agents and campaign managers, candidate training and CCHQ support.
Then there is also the infrastructure of a modern political party: VoteSource, digital platforms, toolkits, websites, communications support and years of accumulated campaigning knowledge.
It has taken established political parties decades to build that.
Reform now has the financial resources to try to build it much faster. And that is why we cannot afford to be complacent.
Money can close organisational gaps. A well-funded party can recruit people, build infrastructure and learn from every election it fights. Nor should we assume that voters who moved to Reform will automatically come back to us simply because the polls change.
And we shouldn’t spend all our time talking about Reform either.
The message for Conservatives is much simpler: use the organisational advantage we have, while we still have it.
The political landscape will change again and again before the next elections. What May taught us is that national politics matters enormously in local elections, but it isn’t the whole story. Support still has to be earned street by street, community by community and, ultimately, resident by resident.
The Conservative Party’s local government network remains one of our greatest political assets. We have councillors who know their communities. Members and volunteers who have spent years campaigning in them. Associations and agents that understand their patches. Candidates who are building relationships long before polling day.
Those things still matter. But an advantage only lasts for as long as you use it and maintain it. With elections fast approaching, now would be a very bad time to take any of that for granted.