"The idea was to put independents on the council"

What Steven asked Cllr Spalding, independent and possible Reform councillor for All Saints

Chris Spalding has been the elected independent councillor for All Saints on the Hoo Peninsula since 2023. Steven met Cllr Spalding at the Mast and Rigging pub in Gillingham and they spoke about why he is the councillor of All Saints, why he doesn’t vote on the council budget, what happened to his startup Medway People’s Voice party, and why he did or didn’t join UKIP, the Brexit Party, and Reform.

Editor’s note: This interview was initially conducted before the recent Medway Council by-elections that saw Reform win their first council seats in Medway. On the night of those elections, Cllr Spalding informed us that he had joined Reform. Since then, there has been some confusion about whether or not he is officially a Reform councillor. The below interview includes some supplementary responses from Cllr Spalding over the past few days.

Cllr Chris Spalding

Where are you the ward councillor?
I'm the ward councillor for All Saints, which is actually out on the far end of the peninsula, the forgotten bit of Medway, as my late colleague, Councillor Mick Pendergast, would say. It's nothing to do with a certain area of Chatham that had a former hospital here, although I often get constituents from there emailing me with their problems and I'd pass it over to Vince and Nina and Damola.

Why are you the councillor for that ward?
Well, quite simply, at the last election, more people voted for me than anybody else.

Why did you stand in that ward of all the wards that were available in Medway?
It's like a second home. Despite all the crap that I've had over not living there, I've worked out there for 10-15 years. I got into politics because I was walking along Rochester High Street, and there's a big, blooming great new UKIP shop and some bloke by the name of Reckless, and I thought, ‘I'll see what the fuss is about.’ I walked in, and there's a military veteran, partially sighted with his guide dog. We got chatting, and a few other people and there was a couple of people I knew through bits and pieces. There was everyone in there, not just anti-Europeans. There were Lib Dems in there, people who had previously voted, it was very much a people's party. I got involved with that, stood in the elections in 2015, got to know Habib Tajian (Conservative councillor for St. Mary’s Island), a couple of newbies on there. It's a friendship that has lasted the test of time.
I took over as the UKIP Chair for Rochester and Strood Branch, and of course, we returned four councillors, which very rapidly went down to three, as Mark Joy (now Conservative councillor for Rainham South West) went on his quest to join more parties. There I am, working with them, and my fall from grace was when Medway UKIP was split, we didn't all get the money we were expecting. Some of it went missing, and I wouldn't shut up about it. I was unceremoniously removed and sat on the sidelines, still working quite a lot with Mick (Pendergast, former councillor for Peninsula) and Roy (Freshwater, former councillor for Peninsula), particularly out on the peninsula. Then two became one, in the words of that ghastly song by a manufactured plastic girl group. It's a case of Mick wanted to give UKIP one last chance. Gerald Batten (former Leader of UKIP) came down and he was not happy.
The independent dream, perhaps independent disrupted sleep or possible nightmare, began in 2019. We were looking to put three independents out, ideally myself, Ron Sands (now Independent Group councillor) and Mick. Ron wasn't going to stand, then all of a sudden he did and it was a very dirty, nasty campaign. They took on independents that we were standing even in Strood Rural. They were taking a pop everywhere. It doesn't take a lot to gather where that was coming from. Alright, a couple of tactical errors on my part, but you then got Ron and Mick elected, and they could have formed a group.
They could have actually stopped an awful lot of housing on the peninsula because you had the one in the middle of Hoo that came in, and it went through on Diane Chambers’ (former chair of planning committee) casting vote. Now, if Mick had been on that committee, it wouldn't have happened. When Mick passed away from cancer, I'm sure he deliberately died about 10 days early because if he hadn't, we would have had the six-month rule (which would have meant no by-election for the seat), and we had a by-election. A lot of people were actually asking me to stand, George (Crozer, Independent Group councillor) was always going to win the Peninsula by-election. The fact that he overspent and ran the ‘They Don't Live Here’ campaign was just plain nasty in my view. But it's simple: Hoo and High Halstow were going to vote for him. I understand that most of my votes came from Grain or Allhallows and such. Then, of course, they put Julie Wallace (independent candidate for All Saints in 2023) up against me, which, call it what it is, was treachery.