After Reform UK’s major gains in the recent local elections, much of the national conversation focused on strategy, polling, and what the results might mean for Westminster. Commentators discussed Labour’s losses, Conservative collapse, and Nigel Farage’s political resurgence. But for many racialised people, disabled people, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and other vulnerable communities, the emotional response has been very different.
For many of us, these results did not feel politically neutral.
They felt threatening.
Not because people are incapable of accepting democratic outcomes, but because the rhetoric surrounding these elections has already revealed how certain groups are viewed within sections of British political culture. The concern is not abstract. It is rooted in repeated public incidents involving Reform candidates and figures accused of racist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and discriminatory remarks.
One newly elected Reform councillor was suspended after reports resurfaced that he had written online that Nigerians should be “melted down and used to fill potholes.” Other candidates linked to the party were scrutinised over alleged racist comments, far-right symbolism, Islamophobic posts, or conspiracy rhetoric. These incidents were not invented by political opponents after the fact. They were reported publicly during and after the election period, and in several cases the party itself responded through suspension or investigation.
And that matters.
Because political rhetoric does not simply disappear once ballots are counted. It shapes social atmosphere. It influences what people feel permitted to say openly. It affects how neighbours treat one another, how strangers behave in public, and how institutions respond to vulnerable groups.
When political figures repeatedly frame immigrants as threats, refugees as burdens, Muslims as suspicious, or disabled people as drains on public resources, some people become emboldened. Prejudices that once remained quieter begin surfacing more openly because individuals feel their views are now politically validated.
That is one of the deepest fears many racialised and vulnerable people are carrying in the aftermath of these elections.
Not only fear of policy changes, but fear of social permission.
Permission for racism to become louder.
Permission for xenophobia to become casual.
Permission for disabled people to be treated with even greater suspicion.
Permission for hostility to be reframed as honesty.
Many people from Black and brown communities already know what it means to live under constant low-level racial hostility: the comments about immigration, the assumptions about belonging, the questioning of competence, the subtle and overt reminders that whiteness is still treated as the national default. Muslims already know what it feels like to see ordinary existence politicised. Refugees already know what it means to be discussed more as problems than as human beings. Disabled people already navigate systems built around disbelief, surveillance, and conditional dignity.
That is why these election results feel emotionally heavy for many communities.
Because politics never remains confined to Parliament or council chambers. It enters workplaces, schools, GP surgeries, buses, streets, waiting rooms, universities, social media spaces, and everyday interactions. Once hostility becomes normalised politically, it often spreads socially.
And local government matters profoundly in this context.
Councils oversee social care, housing support, safeguarding systems, community services, and disability provision. For disabled people especially, local politics can shape the conditions of survival itself. Support packages, transport access, home adaptations, safeguarding interventions, and welfare assistance are all connected to institutions now operating within a broader political atmosphere increasingly shaped by anti-immigrant rhetoric and suspicion toward welfare systems.
For racialised disabled people, these fears become layered. Because race already affects whose pain is believed, whose distress is minimised, and whose vulnerability is treated compassionately. Many Black and brown disabled people already encounter systems where they must work harder to be perceived as deserving, credible, or non-threatening.
And perhaps that is what unsettles so many of us most deeply: the sense that prejudice is no longer remaining at the edges of political discourse but is becoming increasingly normalised within it.
History shows repeatedly that discrimination rarely begins with policy alone. It begins culturally. Through repetition. Through jokes. Through “common sense” rhetoric. Through the steady framing of certain groups as excessive, costly, suspicious, dangerous, or less deserving than others.
Then eventually institutions begin reflecting those assumptions back onto the people forced to depend on them.
I think many people underestimate how frightening that process can feel when you are already vulnerable. When your survival already depends on systems that are overstretched, conditional, and often shaped by disbelief, political hostility does not feel theoretical. It feels personal.
Because for many of us, politics is not an intellectual exercise.
It lives in whether you are safe walking down the street.
Whether racist abuse becomes more common.
Whether disabled people are treated with dignity.
Whether refugees are seen as human beings.
Whether support systems become harsher.
Whether compassion survives public life at all.
And that is why, after these election results, many vulnerable people are not simply thinking about politics.
We are thinking about what kind of society people are becoming willing to tolerate.
So what do we do now?
First, we refuse silence.
We refuse the idea that racialised people, disabled people, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and other vulnerable communities should quietly absorb fear in order to appear “reasonable.” We refuse to normalise rhetoric that dehumanises people and then dismisses our concern as oversensitivity once we respond to it.
Second, we pay attention to local politics with the seriousness it deserves.
Too often, people focus only on Westminster while ignoring the fact that councils shape daily survival. Local government decides who receives support, which communities are protected, whose needs are prioritised, and which forms of vulnerability are treated as disposable. If we care about justice, dignity, and social protection, then council chambers matter just as much as Parliament.
Third, we document everything.
We document racist incidents.
We document discriminatory treatment.
We document cuts, exclusions, hostile rhetoric, and institutional failures.
Because one of the ways prejudice survives is through denial. People always claim vulnerable communities are exaggerating until evidence becomes impossible to ignore.
And finally, we protect one another.
This political moment will require solidarity across communities that are often deliberately divided against each other. Disabled people, migrants, Black and brown communities, refugees, Muslims, queer people, poor people, and all those pushed to the edges of public sympathy cannot afford isolation. Political rhetoric becomes most dangerous when vulnerable people are separated from one another and taught to compete for dignity.
We should not respond to this moment with panic.
But neither should we minimise what many people are feeling.
Because history shows that societies do not become hostile overnight. They become hostile gradually, through repetition, through normalisation, through public exhaustion with empathy.
And if we want a different future, then we have to resist that hardening now, socially, politically, locally, and collectively.
Not only for ourselves.
But for the kind of society we are still trying to protect.
