“You would struggle to pick a fight with me on social media these days”

What Steven asked Cllr Alex Paterson, Medway Council Portfolio Holder for Community Safety, Highways and Enforcement

Following the General Election in July, Medway’s Labour administration had its first reshuffle as three existing cabinet members were elected to parliament. One of the new cabinet members was Rochester West and Borstal councillor Alex Paterson, who was appointed Portfolio Holder for Community Safety, Highways and Enforcement. Steven met him to talk about his past in journalism, entering politics, Scottish Independence, and more.

Cllr Alex Paterson

Where were you born?
I was born in the Royal Maternity Hospital in Glasgow.

What brought you to Medway?
I've lived in England longer than I ever lived north of the border. I came down south, first to London in 2000, to work for the Sunday Mirror and met my now wife within six weeks so that the die was cast. Then we had a small child, a 14-month-old who was ready to walk, and we lived in a flat in Deptford in southeast London. We needed somewhere that she could stretch her legs and not be hemmed in, and we were used to making trips out on the A2, as a lot of people did. We found the first place that we liked and could afford, and that's how we ended up in Rochester in October 2003.

Did you enjoy school?
I enjoyed secondary school. I don't think I enjoyed primary school very much. I think I was just one of these people that wanted to grow up a bit too fast, and I found primary school a little bit stifling, but I really enjoyed secondary school and the opportunity to expand horizons into different subject areas and extracurricular activities. I was never going to be in the primary school football team, but when it came to the debating team, that was much more up my street.

Where did you go for university?
To Glasgow. Yeah, it's not uncommon up there. Glasgow alumni are maybe a little snobbish about others, and will point out that it's the fourth oldest university in the English-speaking world. It would have seemed slightly obtuse to decide to up sticks and go somewhere else. I went to study Law, and for me, that was the prestigious place to study Scots law. It was where I wanted to go, and it just so happened that I lived there, and that made it slightly more cost-effective, I suppose.

What was your first full-time job?
I was employed straight out of university. In fact, I hadn't even graduated when I started working at the local newspaper. I got a newspaper called The Glaswegian, which was part of the Daily Record group in Scotland.

You never considered going into the legal profession?
I was put off almost instantly. I think there was an element of expectation management by our lecturers, and they pointed out that there were 200 odd of us just in that cohort at Glasgow, plus probably the same number at five other universities in Scotland and there certainly weren't a thousand new vacancies for solicitors or advocates every year. I suppose maybe that planted the seed that I would need to look elsewhere. I studied law, I picked law long before I ever went to study it, because it just seemed like such a natural fit. It matched my sense of social justice, and I was in the debating team. Also, quite apart from political heroes, at that time, you had all these incredible miscarriages of justice that were being exposed by people like Michael Mansfield, and these crusading QCs that, to me, were forces to be reckoned with, and that really appealed to me. The reality check is just how few people ever make it in the profession that far. I suppose maybe, from being someone who had never struggled at school at all and had excelled in exams, you suddenly meet a cohort of people, many of whom are a lot smarter than you are, which is quite a sobering experience as well.

What was your role at the Daily Mirror?
I was a sub-editor at the Sunday Mirror. Then I moved to news and features at the Sunday Mirror, and then I went to the Daily Mirror in 2005 as a news sub. I ended up being rapidly promoted to deputy editor of our regional editions. We produced a Scottish Mirror from London, we also produced regionalised content. For us, the critical edition was the Lancashire edition because I think it's probably still true today that the one place in the country the Mirror outsells the Sun is in Liverpool because of the Sun's conduct after Hillsborough. Sometimes, it was as simple as making sure that the right football match was featured on the front page rather than expecting a lot of scousers to be interested in Spurs v Arsenal. But that was a lot of fun, especially with the Scottish Mirror, which took me back to my roots and allowed me to add a Scottish flavour to some of the dreadful puns we would put in headlines.

Why did you leave journalism?
I took redundancy in 2017. I feel like I got out just at the right moment. Journalism, with all due respect to local online journalism, had been in decline pretty much the entirety of my career. I suppose I got in just when the internet was in its infancy and maybe not perceived as a threat. I'm guilty of it myself. I'll buy a paper at the weekend, but I'm unlikely to buy a paper through the week. And sadly, from working at a newspaper that sold two and a half, three million copies a day to the point when I left, it was probably lucky if it was selling 400,000 a day. I don't know if that was all my fault, but through all that, there was constant contraction and decay, and I think probably by the end, I had fallen out of love with what I was doing, although I maybe wasn't conscious of it at the time.

You ended up working in parliament?
Actually, the first job that I did outside of journalism was working here as the political assistant to Vince and the Labour Group, as was, which at that point was a group of 15. I was doing press and social media for them, but that was only a part-time role, which I subsidised by continuing to do some freelance newspaper shifts. An opportunity came up after the 2017 General Election to be the press officer for the group of Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster. That just felt like such a perfect fit. I lived within striking distance of Westminster. I knew Scottish politics and had the journalistic chops to deal with that. That was a fantastic opportunity, and it was a wild rollercoaster through the Brexit years in Parliament.

What is your official occupation now?
My day job is Communications and Campaigns Manager at the Canal and River Trust.

What is the Canal and River Trust?
First and foremost, there's no conflict of interest here because we don't have any canals south of the Thames. The charity looks after 2,000 miles of inland waterways across England and Wales. It was the successor to British Waterways, which was the state corporation. Then, in 2012, a charity was created to take on those assets and look after them, maintain navigation and all the other benefits that people get from walking by or cycling by the water as well as on narrow boats and all the other uses.

Are you having constant issues with water companies and waste in the water?
It's not so much that. We do get questioned about that quite a lot, partly because of the name of the organisation, but our rivers tend to be what they call canalised rivers, which have been straightened and turned almost into canals. It's not so much your flowing rivers as bits that link up the canal network. The water companies would much rather pump effluent into flowing water than somewhere that it's likely to hang around and be spotted.

You’ve recently become a cabinet Portfolio Holder for Community Safety, Highways and Enforcement?
Yes, that was a role vacated by the new MP for Chatham and Aylesford. A really exciting, expanded portfolio, taking on all of Tris' portfolio and some of Simon's as well. A lot of logic behind some of those changes to responsibilities. I think a real opportunity to make an impact in lots of the areas that I care about. There is a video we put out encouraging people to walk with their kids to school, and these are things that I think can really make a positive difference to kids' lives. We've got this campaign, Child-friendly Medway, but it's not particularly friendly if you're walking to school and contending with Chelsea tractors reversing up the street. It's something that I intend to really drive forward with as portfolio holder on School Streets, because I think making children the priority on their journey to school is a lifesaver potentially. These things are quite difficult to provide evidence for in terms of raw statistics. But there's no question that if you visit one of those areas that now has a school street at the point when unauthorised traffic is banned, it's been transformative. It just makes the atmosphere so much more relaxed, more pleasant, nicer air to breathe and to see kids being able to safely cross the road and wander into school. I’m really proud of that and proud that we have done that because I'm not convinced the previous administration would have had the guts to see that one through, because understandably, when something's new and some people are actively spreading misinformation about it, it's natural for politicians to take flight on things like that. But I'm really confident that it's the right thing to do.

Within your new role, what are the plans regarding anti-social motorcycles in Medway?
A lot of the expectation placed on the council for enforcement is misplaced. The reality is the only people in this country who can legally stop you in the street are police officers. It's a tough issue. We have an underfunded police force who, again, were impacted by 14 years of Tory cuts. Whether you bought into the austerity myth or not, I don't know that anyone that even voted for them through that period thought that austerity applied to whether your community felt safe at night. So, in terms of enforcing these things, we've got to be realistic. I've been in committee meetings where the Conservative councillors are sort of railing against young people using vapes and telling us that they should be confiscated. And I genuinely think, what planet are we on? There's no question that these individuals who are riding nuisance bikes are causing a danger to the public first and foremost, and if they wrap themselves around the lamp post, then to themselves as well. We can try to equip the police with as many tools as we can in terms of the Public Spaces Protection Order, which gives them additional powers to fine. I'm keen that we move towards a situation where bikes and nuisance vehicles can be confiscated because ticking somebody off and then sending them on their way is not solving the problem. Let's not solely focus the attention on kids misbehaving. That behaviour has been enabled by a lot of people along the way. I'm realistic that that problem can't be solved overnight.

What should be done about HMP Rochester?
There's no question that the fabric of the building at Rochester is fundamental to some of the issues that are faced there. I've visited the prison a couple of times, most recently last April. I visited with the then Prisons Minister, and in terms of the regime there, I was positive about the attitudes, but I think they are dealing with a very difficult situation. Prisoners, when we were being shown round wanted to show their cells, which they kept immaculately clean, but every morning, they were clearing up mouse and rat droppings. Regardless of what people might have done, these are pretty inhumane conditions, Victorian conditions to keep people in.
There's a specific issue with ageing prison infrastructure, but there is also the fact that we've had a government asleep at the wheel for 14 years and done very little to remedy what is essentially a slow-motion car crash in our criminal justice system. It's not helping the prisons. The court system is on the verge of collapse as well, and I think it's quite dispiriting to think that we're locking people up with no real prospect of them being rehabilitated. If we're locking them up in those numbers where it limits the amount of recreational time, the amount of time they can spend in education and meaningful activity, are we really surprised that it's a revolving door? That's not me voicing a bleeding-heart liberal viewpoint. Just on a purely economic basis, that's madness. It's madness to have a criminal justice system that doesn't seem to be built around rehabilitation. The specifics of the current acute issues, I couldn't really comment on it, but we expect our prison officers to literally be punched in the face and just take it. We're not protecting prison officers. We have prison officers who are easily poached by jobs with less hassle. The issue last year was that a lot of prison officers were finding they could get paid more and not get punched in the face working for Border Force. That staffing issue isn't resolved. In all the despair around the creaking system and the acute problems at Rochester. I think the positive is that we've got a Prisons Minister (Lord Timpson) who gets it, and I hope that some good comes of it.

Do you enjoy getting into Twitter spats?
I don’t think many people enjoy Twitter at all anymore. I’ve been on Twitter since 2009. I look back, and certainly in the early days when it felt important and I was a new candidate and using it as a campaigning tool, it seemed worthwhile to try and convince some random stranger somewhere in the country that they were wrong and you were right. I don't really care for it very much anymore. I used to have a policy of not blocking people. I would mute them, but then you realise that that doesn't stop people from invoking your name in your ignorance. I've got a lot more adept at blocking certain negative individuals. But no, you would struggle to pick a fight with me on social media these days. There is absolutely no point trying to reason someone out of an opinion they were never reasoned into. You look at the contact that you get on social media as a cabinet member, and there'll be particular criticisms of policies that we're bringing forward, and they'll try and pin straw man arguments where they'll try and pin ulterior motives on you that you'd never even considered. There's a perception of councillors as people who are on the make and in it for their own ends. If that's the case for some people, they’re certainly not my political allies, and they’re not people that I've met, and that crosses the political divide even with people who I might strongly disagree with. I think generally people who put themselves forward, whether they are misguided in their approach or not, genuinely want to make things better, want to do some good. I think it's disappointing the lack of respect in terms of debate. I'm someone who loves a robust discussion. I'm happy to defend my views. What I won't do is I won't engage in debating straw man arguments, people trying to pin opinions on me that I don't hold. I'm answerable for my own opinions or things that I've said.

Well, in that vein, how much should we judge somebody on decade-old tweets?