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If there’s one thing I love more than being canvassed at local election time, it’s being canvassed when I’m at someone else’s house. I promise those people the earth. Sure, my friend whose house it is will definitely vote Lib Dem, I tell them; I once saw him make a chicken salad to take on a protest march.

When a Green campaigner came to my sister’s front door, I confidently promised her a hard yes from both the adult kids, a definitely-maybe from my brother-in-law and the shoo-in of my sister. Given that there are three councillors in her ward, that was between nine and 12 more votes than the Greens had had a second before.

Vexingly, my sister then appeared, it being her house. She said she was going to vote Labour and I said: “Oh right, because of Reginald Popoola,” a young councillor who fights immigration raids, and the canvasser’s face lit up as she said: “He joined the Greens ages ago.”

But no, it was the threat of Reform. The polling numbers for the 7 May elections point to a rout in England and Wales for Labour and the Tories and huge wins for Reform. The canvasser whipped out a bar chart: Reform are nowhere in this area of south-east London; it’s the postcode that the right forgot. Voters can comfortably choose between Labour and the Greens here, with no more peril than a squeaky recount – and who doesn’t love one of those?

Nevertheless, where this calculation is in play, its gravity is hard to overstate. One tragedy of Britain’s overcentralised politics is that councils are at the mercy of Westminster when they’re trying to do something good – improve social care or Send provision, fix potholes while declaring a climate emergency. All of that hits the buffers of budgetary constraints over which they have little control.

On the other hand, a council trying to do something bad – replace the Victorian street lights with cheaper cod Victoriana; give contracts to party supporters; halt DEI hires, even though there are barely any of these roles to begin with and it’s just Trumpian cosplay – can do a lot of damage with no extra money. Just by mishandling what they have, they can foment discord and create an atmosphere of mistrust. A Reform-led council is not an empty threat.

But what is the compromise solution? It’s more useful to know what the people in your street think than the country as a whole, not because these elections are local, but because a herd against Reform will only reach stampede velocity within strictly demarcated parameters. From London, I cannot unite with sort-of fellow sort-of progressives in Dorset to beat the right, so it makes voting calculations feel strangely primitive.

This doesn’t mean pollsters have outlived their usefulness. At an event for Best for Britain’s report on rejoining the EU, the psephologist John Curtice said the best hope for Labour was for the Tories to recover. The party that defeats you isn’t necessarily the one to which you lost your votes (Labour is losing votes to the Greens, but the Tories are losing more votes to Reform). Fair play to Keir Starmer; he’s doing everything he can to make Kemi Badenoch look good.

Amid all this, like a gift from the universe, it has emerged that Reform’s pledge to pay the energy bills for an entire street in Wigan, Greater Manchester, after one household won a competition, had so far missed off half the residents, including the first house on the street. It’s so far out of the bounds of normal political broken promises that it’s like a script from The Office.

My advice on tactical voting to face down Reform would be to trust your neighbours: they have eyes, too; they can see what you see. Where the rightwing threat isn’t real, vote how you want for a change.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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