If you want a window into how a fragmented nation and a splintered party system are reshaping British politics, look no further than the drama at Worcestershire county council. It shows the consequences of Britain governing like a two-party state, when it now votes like a multiparty democracy.

Last week, opposition councillors from the Conservatives, Greens, Liberal Democrats and a group of independents formed a rainbow coalition to remove Reform UK from power. Nigel Farage’s party had gained control of the council in last year’s local elections, winning a plurality of seats but not a majority. What has unfolded since then has been chaos.

On the local election campaign trail in 2025, Farage had said: “Worcestershire is broken. Reform will fix it.” There was a good case for overhaul, as the previous Tory administration had left the council £600m in debt. But by March of this year he said he wished Reform “hadn’t bothered” to take over, having previously described Worcestershire as a “total basket case” when quizzed on broken campaign promises in the area.

The details of Reform’s year in power at Worcestershire are long and convoluted, and culminate in a story of co-belligerence reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But the precis is that Reform’s tenure had been marked by absences, derelictions of duty and procrastination. The Conservative group leader on the council, Adam Kent, has spent the past year publicly documenting these failings, saying in July 2025 that the council was being run by an “inexperienced team clueless on what their view is” on key local issues. On his TikTok account, Kent posted that a month after its election, the Reform-run council had spent just 20 minutes reviewing £1bn worth of spending, a process that should have taken days.

Concerns also emerged over the apparently tyrannical leadership of councillor Jo Monk, who was accused of “authoritarian” attempts to silence political opponents, after sending a legal threat to a Labour councillor, demanding he stop mentioning her name in public.

After campaigning on a promise to reduce taxes, in February the Reform administration hiked council tax by a staggering 8.98% after receiving special permission from the government, which was attributed by Kent to its failure to plan early enough to identify savings. In protest at the hike, Reform councillor David Taylor quit the party live on BBC Politics Midlands to sit as an independent. Reform subsequently ousted Monk as council leader. Her replacement, Alan Amos, himself a controversial figure who once described rape as “an allegation which is ‘easy’ to make”, and has represented both Labour and the Conservatives in local and national politics since 1978. That appointment, combined with Reform’s broader mismanagement, united the opposition councillors to prevent his potential leadership – resulting in the Green Matt Jenkins becoming leader of the council earlier this month.

This looked like a vanishingly rare thing in politics these days: cross-ideological cooperation in service of a greater good: functioning local administration that delivers for local people. It’s the kind of cooperation voters want to see. Frustrated by the gridlock, partisan point-scoring and absolutism of Westminster, the Electoral Reform Society found that “the public wants a fairer, more honest, more cooperative politics”. That was written three years after the Brexit vote, when our two-party democracy looked fragile but still robust. Now in our time of increasingly pluralistic administrations, particularly after this month’s local elections in England, in which first-past-the-post produced distorted outcomes, surely this is more urgent than ever. It is not as if you have to look far to see a model for this either: coalitions and power-sharing agreements between opposing parties are as regular as clockwork in the devolved governments of Scotland and Wales.

But Westminster is refusing to meet that reality. When it came to Worcestershire, the national Conservative party balked. Reform had gone on the offensive, producing an image of Kemi Badenoch in bed with the Green party leader Zack Polanski captioned “Vote Tory. Get Green.” And so – after the coalition of councillors had been appointed to cabinet positions, and were ready to get on with the job of governing – Badenoch and the Tory chair, Kevin Hollinrake, announced the suspension of Kent, the Tory leader, for entering a coalition involving Green councillors. When I approached Kent for his version of events, he said he could not comment on his suspension. Though his side of the story is known to be different. He has since told the BBC of his intention to sue the Conservative party over remarks made by Hollinrake (who wrote that Kent was “dishonest”), saying: “What he has said about me is false, defamatory and wholly inaccurate – and the matter is now with my lawyers.”

Before his suspension, Kent had said that residents had “suffered appallingly due to the instability of Reform”, and “at some point, responsible councillors have to stop standing on the sidelines”. What this looks like is an example of a local representative prioritising administrative stability, which voters crave, over party orthodoxy.

When I spoke to David Taylor, the ex-Reform and now-independent Worcestershire councillor who quit over the council tax hike, he expressed his discontent with Kent’s suspension. “I have a real issue with this. What I don’t like to hear is somebody sat in an ivory tower in Westminster trying to decide the best thing for a resident in Worcestershire.” He also says that in suspending Kent, the remaining Conservative councillors were de facto under a form of “threatened suspension”, which produces the kind of paralysis and confusion that the council had just voted to end.

He also cannot see how this can be good for residents. “I’ve lived in Redditch [in Worcestershire] all my life, and on the ground, residents are fed up with politics, particularly the council. In the last year, Reform have had two different leaders, two different deputies, two cabinet members sacked. They’ve had council tax rises. The efficiencies promised weren’t found. Residents just want the potholes fixed. They just want the roads to be nice and safe. They want their children to go to good schools. They don’t want to see the politics.”

More turmoil is particularly troublesome considering that Worcestershire is slated to transition to a unitary system by 2028, meaning the county council along with six borough councils will be absorbed into one or two bodies.

This might look only like a specific issue of Conservative interference – but it speaks to the broader refusal of Westminster to adapt to the end of two-party democracy. After May’s elections, it is an issue that local politicians will have to contend with while risking discipline from national parties. Take Birmingham city council, which this month fell to no overall control, with Reform the largest party with 23 seats, followed by the Greens with 19, Labour with 17, Conservatives 16, independents 14 and Liberal Democrats 12. As reported in the Financial Times, Labour announced that it would not negotiate an arrangement with any other parties, which a source close to Birmingham Labour claimed came at the direction of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC). This threatens to plunge Birmingham council, never short of dysfunction, into further disarray.

Worcestershire could have been a story about Reform incompetence – a story writ large across the country, where Reform councillors are dogged by scandal and are resigning in droves. Instead, it has become a glimpse into an increasingly obsolete political system that cannot accept the old rules no longer apply, and parties whose stubbornness is letting Reform off the hook. And so, even when their record in local government disappoints, the appeal of insurgent parties will persist: people will still go to the ballot box and vote for what they see as change.

• Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian