Week two on the Medway campaign trail
Somehow, there's still another month of this, plus people really like hustings, Rochester 'festivals' have a man problem, news in brief and more
Two weeks ago, the General Election appeared to still be a long way off, and yet, here we now are, with a full week of the campaign behind us. As is becoming a new Tuesday feature, we look at the state of the current campaign in Medway. Further down, we have news of our General Election hustings that we’ll be holding in all three Medway constituencies, which are proving incredibly popular, as well as a look at the lack of gender diversity at Rochester Castle Live, and our usual news in brief section.
As ever, thanks for reading these dispatches. It’s going to be a busy few weeks.
Week two on the Medway campaign trail
Last week saw the General Election campaigns kick off in earnest, and while parties have been busy all across the country, what has been going on within Medway?
The Conservatives finally selected their candidate for Chatham and Aylesford a week ago, so this has been Nathan Gamester's first full week on the campaign trail. So far, he seems to have avoided any issues and did manage to bring out a lot of activists to launch his campaign on Saturday. He claimed that his team had delivered 10,000 leaflets to the Medway parts of the constituency in a single day, which does sound like quite a big number.
Rochester and Strood candidate Kelly Tolhurst spent the weekend visiting the ‘Unofficial Dickens’ festival in Rochester High Street, which gave her the opportunity to knock Medway Council for cancelling the real thing. She was also out campaigning in Strood, where helpfully, residents she spoke to apparently agreed with her positions.
Gillingham and Rainham candidate Rehman Chishti has been having a busy week, meeting people in front of multiple hedges. For some reason, he hasn’t been doing this in his own constituency but on St. Mary’s Island, which is in Rochester and Strood. He’s posted at least three of these videos, all of which claim to be chatting to a Gillingham and Rainham resident that he apparently bumped into several miles away.
Elsewhere, in other signs that Chishti’s campaign is going just fine, he publicly called out a resident who previously voted for him because they once dared to question him on social media. He then proceeded to set out his ‘vision for Gillingham & Rainham’ in a video at Riverside Country Park with storm clouds forming in the background. On Sunday, he posted a video of himself sitting at an oddly small table in a strange position at the bottom of some stairs, and finally, in a delightfully Thick of It moment, he met the team from St John Ambulance and was pictured practising resuscitation.
Medway also had its first big cabinet visit today, with Home Secretary James Cleverly bringing the Conservative battle bus to Strood as part of a visit to R Swain & Sons. While there, he met all three Medway Conservative candidates and announced further plans to cut immigration.
Over on the Labour side, things continue to be fairly boring. Rochester and Strood candidate Lauren Edwards brought a lot of activists to St. Mary’s Island over the weekend, though there’s no word if they met Rehman Chishti at any point. She also promised to hold weekly constituency surgeries if elected. Big, bold stuff.
Gillingham and Rainham candidate Naushabah Khan has been plugging away on the doorstep, including being joined by MPs as the party continues to pour resources into the seat. She also managed to swoop in and win over the voter that Rehman Chishti called out above.
The strangest Labour campaign is the one being operated in Chatham and Aylesford. While other candidates are pictured out with scores of supporters, there’s none of that from Tris Osborne. He talks a big game on social media, but his ‘campaigning’ photos never show any people or, perhaps most importantly, say where he is. So, while he may indeed be having a ‘busy day on the doorstep’, there’s little indication that the doorstep is in Chatham and Aylesford.
The lesser-spotted Green Party managed to do some actual campaigning this weekend, popping up in Halling, an area where they did surprisingly well in the local elections. Elsewhere, their crowdfunding campaigns for election deposits rumble on, having raised £610 in Chatham and Aylesford, meaning they presumably will be on the ballot paper there. They have nearly hit the goal in Rochester and Strood, too, but are still less than halfway to the line in Gillingham and Rainham. Will all three of them do it? It’s genuinely the most exciting thing about their campaign so far.
Reform has supposedly been out campaigning, but more importantly, they now have their own baseball caps over in Rochester and Strood. There’s no sign of the party in Gillingham and Rainham, and in Chatham and Aylesford, the activity seems limited to occasionally posting to their 33 followers on Facebook.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems have been posting quite a bit on Twitter.
Like last week, there’s still no sign of the SDP or the Worker’s Party on the campaign trail. No rush, guys.
We’ll find out the full candidate lists for the election on Friday. Who will make it onto the ballot? Who might not? Who might turn up as a surprise independent? We’ll find out soon enough.
We can only do what we do here at Local Authority with the support of our generous paid supporters. From these weekly updates to putting on election hustings to holding Medway figures to account, all of it takes time and resources. We are doing okay, but to provide the kind of independent journalism that Medway deserves, we need more readers to support our work. If you are able, please consider upgrading your subscription so we can keep this thing going.
People really like hustings
In case you missed our earlier announcement, we are proud to be hosting three General Election hustings events in the run-up to the General Election. After a lot of scrambling behind the scenes (thanks, Rishi), we’ve managed to pull together a debate for each of the parliamentary constituencies in Medway.
The three hustings dates are as follows:
Thursday 13 June: Gillingham and Rainham hustings at St. Margaret’s Church, Rainham
Tuesday 18 June: Rochester and Strood hustings at Rochester Baptist Church
Wednesday 19 June: Chatham and Aylesford hustings at Lordswood Leisure Centre, Chatham
As ever, these debates are free, but booking is essential. When booking, you can submit a question for the candidates. We can’t guarantee we’ll be able to ask all of them, but we will put as many as we can to the candidates on the night.
We should point out that we can’t compel any individual candidate to take part in this kind of event, but we are grateful that the majority of candidates standing in this election have agreed to participate. We are hopeful that the entire slate of candidates will attend each event.
People often bemoan the lack of interest in local politics, and we are forever amazed by just how often our readers disprove that. Within hours of us announcing these, nearly 40% of the hundreds of available spaces have been booked. These events are going to be fully booked, so please don’t hang around if you’d like to join us.
Rochester ‘festivals’ have a man problem
Rochester Castle Live, the newly rebranded Rochester Castle Concerts, is upon us, so it seemed like a good time to check in with what the three ‘festivals’ in July have to offer this year.
First of all, the word festival is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Festival conjures images of lots of artists across multiple stages, and Rochester does not offer anything close to that. The Sunday event, branded as ‘Uptown Festival’, offers a grand total of five acts, while ‘Downtown Festival’ on Friday is little more than a gig, with The Kaiser Chiefs being supported by Daytime TV (no, us either) and The Wedding Present, who are better than this sort of thing. Only ‘Superboxx’ on Saturday is something resembling an actual festival lineup, with 10 acts and a couple of DJs for the pop nostalgia day.
The number of bands isn’t the only metric where Superboxx is outperforming the other events either. Following years of festivals being pushed to do better in terms of gender diversity, Uptown and Downtown both fail quite spectacularly. No women at all can be found on the lineup for Uptown, with the exception of members of the Kent Soul Choir, while Downtown is little better, though The Wedding Present do sometimes have a female guitarist.
The organisers are trying to open up some opportunities at least. For the Downtown Festival day, a battle of the bands has been launched to find a local band to join the bill. Four local (depending on whether you count Broadstairs as local) bands have been selected, and every single member of all four are men. We still have an awful long way to go.
In brief
🏥 Medway Maritime Hospital has been ordered to improve following a surprise inspection. The Care Quality Commission visited the hospital in February and issued recommendations, which they will report on in the future.
🏊 The Strand Lido in Gillingham has had to close just days after opening for the 2024 season. A ‘significant leak’ has meant that the pool needs to remain closed until this weekend to allow it to be repaired.
🚘 A car somehow managed to drive into the Londis store on Canterbury Street. The incident happened yesterday (Mon 3 Jun), and no one seems to know how it happened.
More Authority
Over the weekend, we interviewed long-time Labour councillor and now candidate for Chatham and Aylesford, Tris Osborne. The discussion includes why he’s chosen to run again now, how much of a priority the constituency is for his party, whether Labour hates motorists, and just how many social media accounts he’ll be running during the campaign.
“I'm pushy, and I like people pushing me as well”
Our full Sunday interviews and midweek pieces are now exclusively for our paid supporters. To receive those, hear about our events first, and have full access to the archive of Local Authority, hit the big orange button below.
Footnotes
Music that soundtracked the creation of this edition: Mad Half Hour by Panic Pocket, Smart Mouth by Riverby, and Romance is Boring by Los Campesinos!
Reform were out in force in Rochester on Sunday, near the war memorial. It was like trying to avoid the chuggers. Had to repel them twice, on the way up and the way back. The broadly grinning woman had apparently forgotten that I'd held my hand up and said, 'No. Absolutely not,' when she tried to give us a leaflet a second time. Her smile did not waver when I said it again.