Will the establishment accept a Reform election victory?

The British establishment, we are assured, is entirely comfortable with democracy. Should Reform UK win the next General Election, it will be welcomed with open arms by the civil service, the public-sector unions, the teaching profession, the senior judiciary, the cultural establishment, the third sector, the arts and the unelected House of Lords. Everything will proceed with the smooth courtesy that marks the peaceful transfer of power in a mature democracy…

Of course, if you believe any of that, then I have a bridge available, if anyone is interested.

What actually confronts a Nigel Farage-led government is the most comprehensive mobilisation of institutional resistance that any incoming administration has faced in British peacetime politics. This is not a matter of inference or speculation. The resistance is not hidden. It is loud, organised and proud of itself.

Consider the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents nearly 200,000 civil servants. Last week, delegates at the PCS annual conference voted to put £3million a year towards a war chest to fight a potential Reform UK government. General secretary Fran Heathcote warned delegates they would ‘need every penny’, backing a motion to double its budget surplus to 10 per cent of members’ subscription fees, ring-fenced until at least the end of 2029.

Pause on that. A union representing the state’s own administrators is formally preparing to resist a government that has not yet been elected, on the grounds explicitly that it disapproves of its politics. A further motion, which the conference ran out of time to vote on, called for a comprehensive ‘Industrial Defence Strategy‘ specifically designed to counter a hostile Reform government, expressing fears of a ‘culture war aimed at demoralising public servants’.

Reform’s Danny Kruger, who has been doing the most serious thinking about civil-service reform from any frontbencher in living memory, responded with appropriate directness: striking on grounds of political objection to an elected government would be illegal, and those civil servants who do so would soon find they have no jobs to return to. He is right, and right to say it loudly.

But the scale of the provocation matters as much as the response. We are witnessing something that constitutional theorists prefer to discuss in careful academic prose. Dr Ben Yong, in a lecture at UCL last year, gave voice to views held in certain Whitehall circles: that the civil service might have duties to ‘the continuity of the state’ separate from its duty to support incumbent governments. Officials, he suggested, might legitimately engage in ‘guerrilla government’, including bureaucratic shirking, leaking and whistleblowing, if they disapprove of an incoming administration. This is the doctrine of the permanent government asserting its primacy over the elected one. It is profoundly unconstitutional. It is also, I am afraid, all too predictable.

Then there are the schools. The National Education Union’s annual conference passed a motion describing Reform UK as a ‘racist and far-right party’ and agreed that the union’s political fund should be used to campaign against Reform candidates at elections. The NEU’s general secretary, Daniel Kebede, warned that Reform would make education a ‘hostile place’ for many children, and suggested that the party’s ‘divisive messages’ were already ‘playing into the classroom’. The union has also introduced ‘anti-fascist’ training sessions for its members, with Reform UK in mind.

The NEU has nearly half a million members. Those members teach every child in England. The voting data collected by Teacher Tapp tells you something important about the political monoculture involved. In 2024, 62 per cent of teachers said they would vote Labour, with nine per cent for the Liberal Democrats and a mere three per cent Conservative. In the actual 2024 General Election, only two per cent of teachers voted Reform. We are entrusting the formation of the next generation to a workforce that is, as a matter of statistical fact, overwhelmingly hostile to the political movement that leads every national opinion poll.

One should be careful here. Teachers are entitled to their political views like anyone else, and the vast majority are professionals who, whatever they think privately, do their jobs conscientiously. But when the union that speaks for them votes to use its political fund to campaign against a specific party, the line between private conviction and institutional action has been definitively crossed. Kebede has already claimed that ‘Austerity Labour is paving the way for a Reform government’, a statement that reveals his understanding of the NEU as a political actor rather than a professional body.

Extend the view and the picture darkens further. Unison – representing public-sector workers across local government, health, education and the emergency services – has mobilised over 1,000 activists in its ‘Responding to Reform UK’ network, sharing resources, conducting conversations with colleagues and campaigning publicly. The arts establishment, from the subsidised theatre to the publicly funded gallery, from the Booker longlist to the museum profession, is uniformly and vocally hostile. Leading academics at the institutions training our teachers, doctors, lawyers and civil servants treat Reform as an embarrassment to be managed rather than a democratic phenomenon to be engaged with. The third sector – that vast archipelago of charities, pressure groups and advocacy organisations substantially funded by the very state it exists to lobby – is already writing its position papers. Even some prominent sporting figures have felt it necessary to discover political passions that coincide, with remarkable consistency, with those of the institutions that fund and platform them.

This, broadly, is what I prefer to call not the Blob, which is a useful shorthand but lacks precision, but the Stables: the accumulated detritus of decades of institutional capture, comprehensive and self-reinforcing, every bit as formidable as anything Augeas managed. The task of reforming this is akin to a labour of Hercules, requiring a river diverted at its source and a willingness to accept that things will smell considerably worse before they improve.

And then there is the House of Lords. This is a chamber now composed exclusively of appointed loyalists and the accumulated obligations of successive prime ministers. In December 2025 alone, Starmer appointed 25 new Labour peers, alongside five Liberal Democrats and three Conservatives. Reform, meanwhile, despite receiving over four million votes at the 2024 election and leading the polls for months since then, has zero representation in the upper house. Farage wrote to Starmer describing the situation as a ‘democratic disparity’. The Conservative leader in the Lords, Lord True, called for Reform peers to be appointed as ‘a sensible constitutional principle’. Starmer declined. The Liberal Democrats, who received a slightly lower vote share than Reform in 2024, have 73 peers. The DUP, with a fraction of Reform’s national support, has six peers. Even the Greens have two.

Let us be plain about what this means in practice. If Reform wins the next election, it will face an upper chamber packed with the appointees of its predecessors, with no members of its own, and with the capacity to obstruct every bill it wishes to pass. The Salisbury Convention, which holds that the Lords should not block manifesto commitments, may or may not hold in a chamber that is collectively committed to the view that Reform represents an existential threat to the values of public life. The Parliament Acts remain available, but they are slow, cumbersome and politically costly to deploy. The king could be asked to create hundreds of new Reform peers, as Lloyd George threatened in 1911: that avenue exists, but it constitutes a constitutional crisis of the first order.

Every member of a Reform government, from cabinet minister to parliamentary private secretary, needs to understand before they take office that the opposition he or she will face is not Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, comfortably confined to its green benches and bound by parliamentary convention. It is dispersed through every government department, every classroom, every committee room, every subsidised arts venue, every quango boardroom, every unelected chamber that has been carefully prepared to second-guess the choices of the electorate.

Kipling had the precepts for such a moment. Whether you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Whether you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting, too. Whether you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.

If Reform wins the next election, it remains to be determined whether the institutions that exist to serve the people will honour that verdict or whether the stables will outlast the will to clean them. The stakes are Britain’s future. They cannot be understated.

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK. His Substack is Fainting in Coils.