Local elections: Can Starmer gain council in Medway towns not held since Blair?

On paper, Medway is not the kind of place you would expect Labour to be feeling optimistic about taking in this week’s local elections.

The unitary authority in Kent is not only governed by the Conservatives, but has also never been in Labour majority control since its creation in 1998.

The area is represented in Westminster by three Conservative MPs, all of whom have majorities of over 15,000.  Yet on the streets of Gillingham one Sunday in the run-up to polling day, optimistic is exactly what Labour politicians and campaigners are feeling.

‘Confident but not complacent’ of historic breakthrough

If Labour does take control of the council, the man in charge will be Vince Maple. The Medway Labour group leader has represented Chatham central ward for 16 years. Intensely affable, he speaks to me during a break between campaign sessions wearing a t-shirt for the 80s pop group A-Ha and, on the lapel of his blazer, a badge bearing crossed British and Ukrainian flags.

Maple says that Labour is “confident, but not complacent” about ending Conservative rule over Medway, which also includes the towns of Rainham, Rochester and Strood. “It will be a close election.”

While he credits the hard work of Labour councillors locally for the party’s solid position, Maple says the “chaos in national government” has had a large part to play in the turn against the Conservatives he says he has been seeing on the doorsteps.

“I think anyone in local government from any party would recognise however hard you work, whatever inspirational ideas you have for your community, when residents go to the ballot box, part of what they’re voting on is their appetite for the national party, the national leadership.”

For Maple, voters are increasingly recognising that more than two decades of Conservative government locally, and 13 years of Conservative government in Westminster, have not improved infrastructure or public services. 

Like all the councillors and candidates I speak to, Maple says Labour’s themes for the local elections, namely the cost of living crisis, NHS, and crime, are “on the money”.

In 2019 ‘I’d have laughed’ at the idea we can win

Maple, who ran for the NEC in 2020 as a non-aligned candidate, tells me he voted for Jeremy Corbyn twice. He is effusive about the way party leader Keir Starmer has “taken us to the place where we need to be”, however.

Recalling the pain of the 2019 election (Maple was Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Chatham and Ayleford), he says: “If you had said to me at 1am on that cold Friday morning that actually by 2024, we might have a Labour Prime Minister, and in May 2023, we will be in with a fighting chance of taking Medway council, I would have laughed at you twice. But now both of those are real possibilities.”

He says that this is the “most cohesive, best resourced, best focused campaign from a national level and a regional level” he has ever been a part of, praising the support Medway Labour has gotten from the parliamentary Labour Party. Starmer has visited, as have Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting and other senior figures.

Maple also praises the “joined up” nature of the way resources have been allocated.

“The training, the support that’s been available to new candidates, to existing councillors, to role holders, to leaders and deputy leaders, particularly for those who perhaps are seeking to take control of councils, has been the best it’s ever been”, he says. 

Boundary changes could help too

In Medway, the optimism has something other than good national polling and a buoyant campaign backing it up; Labour councillors, candidates and activists are hoping that a change to the ward boundaries will help tip the scales in their favour.

The changes are adding four seats to the council, which jumps from 55 to 59 members. 30 is the new magic number for overall control of the council; Labour are currently on 20 seats, with the Tories holding 33. The council has two independents, representing the same ward, who are primarily concerned with housing developments in their area. 

Gareth Myton is Labour’s candidate in Fort Pitt ward, which will see its borders change. He says he is “quietly confident” about a potential victory, while stressing how much work is left to do. Myton was an unsuccessful candidate in 2019 and, like everyone I speak to, is wary about his hope for a win.

He says that many people he speaks to on the doorstep feel taken for granted by their local Conservative representatives, and that anger remains at both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Many still feel the effects of Truss’ short-lived premiership on their interest rates and mortgages, he says in an area with reasonably high rates of home ownership. While this is coming up on the doorsteps less often than it did, people remain worried about “how long that effect is going to last”.

Pledge on local services ‘going down well’

Unlike Myton, retired headteacher Tracey Coombs is a first time candidate, hoping to take a seat from the Conservatives in Watling ward. She says she “wasn’t really sure what to expect” from standing, but feels “really positive and excited about the way the campaign is going”.

The issues on the doorstep – potholes, anti-social behaviour– are what one would expect, but Coombs noted that on such everyday issues, Labour has answers to offer. “The Conservative council used to do free bulky waste collection”, she says but that has stopped; Labour’s commitment to bring it back is “going down well on the doorstep”.

Alongside any potential benefits from the boundary changes, another small bonus for Labour is that the long-serving Tory council leader Alan Jarrett will be standing down as a councillor at this set of elections.

“With a unitary authority”, Labour group leader Vince Maple tells me, “that role is quite important”. The Conservatives don’t have a nominated successor, so Jarrett represented the party at a hustings against Maple.

Key test of party appeal in both UKIP and New Labour territory

Rochester and Strood’s dubious political claim to fame is that it was represented, between 2014 and 2015, by one of UKIP’s to-date only three MPs, Mark Reckless. Reckless’s defection from the Conservative party in 2014 prompted a high profile by-election, which he went on to win.

Labour’s candidate in 2014 was Naushabah Khan, who has been a councillor in Medway since 2015; now working hard to swing the council, she recalls the by-election experience as hectic and surreal.

The constituency was also the scene of Emily Thornberry’s infamous white van gaffe. In general under Ed Miliband’s leadership, Rochester represented both a drift in former Labour seats to the right and even far-right, and the party’s alienation from working-class voters in English towns like those in Medway.

Taking it would be more than just numbers on the board for a Labour Party that has been dogged by questions about its cut-through in not only ‘Red wall’ seats, but also many other parts of England. It would be a sign that today’s party can convince the voters it needs in areas where it has struggled since the days of New Labour.

Labour has been worried that the coronation will distract attention from Tory losses at the local elections, and with the party’s meteoric post-Liz Truss polling cooling off to simply good polling, Labour will be interested in not just how many gains it makes this week, but in what kind of gains those are.

While the talk might have been of Stevenage woman, Medway man is exactly the kind of person Labour is looking to win over, both this year- and next.

Medway’s parliamentary seats were not always Conservative held; under slightly different boundaries than those we use today, the whole area went red in ’97.

Jarrett is encouraging voters to “park any misgivings they have for the national Conservative brand and focus on local issues” before polling day this May, aware of how seriously his party lags in the polls nationally. “I would be nervous if I were any of the three Conservative parliamentary candidates”, Maple tells me.

Whatever happens on May 4th, political eyes will stay fixed on Medway for some time yet.