The Lib Dems and Reform on the coming local election
We discuss the upcoming Kent County Council election with Antony Hook, the Leader of the Liberal Democrat Group, and Thomas Mallon of Reform UK.
Editor’s note: This is the third and final edition in a short series of interviews with the political group leaders at Kent County Council, where we meet the candidates pushing to take control of the authority in May. On Saturday, we spoke to the Conservative leader of the council, Roger Gough. Yesterday, we heard from Rich Lehmann of the Greens and Alister Brady of the Labour Group. Today, we speak to Antony Hook of the Liberal Democrats and Thomas Mallon of Reform UK.
Antony Hook is the Leader of the Liberal Democrat Group. The Lib Dems are the second largest party on Kent County Council, currently holding six of the 81 seats. We discuss the priorities for his party, local government reorganisation, and their goal in this election.
How would you describe the Liberal Democrats?
The Liberal Democrats are a party primarily about freedom in the sense of wanting every individual to have maximum freedom to make the most of their life. In particular, our party constitution refers to freeing people from poverty, ignorance and conformity because those three forces, in particular, hold people back and stop people living their lives to the full. That means that we want policy, both at national and local level, that gets out of people's way, doesn't boss people around too much or control people too much, that lets people be free to be who they are. Equally, we want policy that brings people together to give opportunity to invest in high quality public services and health and education and social security so that fear doesn't hold people back as well.
We're both a new party and an old party. We're old in the sense that our history goes practically back to the English Civil War and roots in the side that wanted to put power on parliament rather than an absolute king, right through from then to the 19th century. Then, in about 1870, the Whigs joined with the Radicals and some other groups to form the Liberal Party and the Liberal governments of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George did all sorts of radical things, starting the first state education, starting the first public health work, in terms of combating sewage and cholera and then creating the first old age pensions, laying the foundations of the welfare state, before World War I and just after World War I as well. Political and democratic reform played a huge part in that all the time, extending the franchise beyond aristocrats to a wider pool of people and then eventually to all men and women, regardless of wealth. A really illustrious history.
Then, in 1987, the party was effectively refreshed from a merger of the Social Democrats, who were a breakaway from Labour, which had gone very left-wing in the early 1980s. The Social Democrats and the Liberals merged into the Liberal Democrats. We're also new and quite a young party in that respect compared to Labour and the Conservatives. Now, we're a party that puts people first. I think we're less dogmatic than the other two main parties. One thing we have resisted more than the other two parties is class politics. We're not here to promote class warfare. We think that policy needs to strike a fair balance between all people, and categorising people into groups always runs the risk of people losing their individual identity.
At a local level, that translates really well into being strong community champions. We invented community politics, focusing on local issues, bringing people together, not saying the council can solve every single thing. But often bringing people together, giving community power, working with communities to take control over what's happening so that people don't feel things are being done to us by the council.
What are your key focuses for the upcoming election?
Kent County Council is in really bad shape. 28 years of Conservative control has given us council tax rises year on year, about 21.5 % over the last four years, cumulatively. The idea that the Conservatives are a tax-cutting party is just wrong. But they've also given us cuts to services. In this year's budget, Kent is suffering at the same time that we have a 5% increase in council tax, a £70m cut in core public services.
Now that is not all entirely due to the Conservative administration. I regard myself as a very fair-minded person. Local government across England has been screwed by central government. We are one of the most centralised countries in the western world. People typically in Kent pay their council tax, it obviously goes to their local council, their county and the district or borough council in most of Kent, but pay about 12 times that amount to central government. The resources that people are paying into the state are considerable, but the share of that that comes to local government is squeezed and squeezed and squeezed every year. It doesn't really keep pace with inflation in all of the costs that you have in delivering public services, whether that's labour costs, energy costs, materials for buildings, and so on. Central government has proportionately taken more and more. That's why actually I get pretty offended when I see from some political parties, messaging saying, ‘Government has given your local council £8m to do this or that’, which is a bit of a cheek really, because it's coming from our communities in the first place.
We should have a fair system of local government finance. The local government is self-sufficient, based on money that people pay to their local government at a tax level they've chosen and pay slightly less to their national government. An example of how local democracy has been undermined by successive national governments is the fact that everyone now is 5% on the council tax each year. If you look across England, councils of whatever political control typically increase the council tax by 5%. The reason for that is if you want to do more than that, you have to have now a referendum on that council tax increase. The cost of a referendum in Kent would be two or three million pounds. But under the legislation, the council can't participate in the referendum. The council can't even make the case to the public for a bigger increase. Of course, if people are going to be asked at the ballot box, yes or no, ‘Do you want to increase your council tax by X amount?’, if the council themselves haven't made the case for why it matters, why we need it, people are going to say that you haven't proved it to me. I'm not going to support that.
On the other hand, it gets worse the other way. If you increase your council tax by less than 5%, then if you say to central government, we haven't got enough cash for our social care, for children's post-educational needs, for our highways, they'll say, what are you talking about? You didn't even increase it by the 5%. You obviously don't need it. So local democracy has been hollowed out and become a bit of a shell as to what it should be in terms of meaningful debate, meaningful decisions by our community.
Should 16-year-olds have been allowed to vote in the upcoming KCC election?
Yes, Liberal Democrats have supported a vote for 16 for a long time, and that's because 16-year-olds take on many of the responsibilities of adulthood. Many 16-year-olds have jobs and will pay tax and national insurance on their own to work. They'll often have some of their own money and will pay VAT on anything they buy. You can take on quite responsible roles. You can drive at 17, you can take on quite a lot of responsibilities. We think that if you're having those responsibilities, you should have a say in how our country is developing, how our local community is developing.
Would KCC benefit from proportional representation?
Absolutely it would. At the last election in 2021, the Conservatives won 49% of the vote but about 66% of the seats. That's bonkers. That is completely bonkers and means that the chamber and the weight of opinions in the chamber does not reflect the mixture and weight of opinions in the community as a whole in Kent. All organs of government would benefit from proportional representation because it then means that the composition of the body that's being elected much more closely reflects the views, the very varied views of the community as a whole. English local government is a real aberration in this because Scotland has PR for its local government, Northern Ireland does, and Wales is moving to it. England is really odd and archaic in having first past the post. First past the post means individuals can get elected with 30-something per cent, which is not a proper mandate, in my view. In this year's election, if you look at the national opinion polls, within a range of 10%, you've got four parties, the Conservatives, Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. You could end up with people winning seats with 26% potentially, which is definitely not a proper mandate. You could have a party becoming the large party, even winning a majority of the seats on quite a small percentage of the popular vote. I think that's just ludicrous.
How much should KCC support unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors?
It's something that we should be proud to do. It doesn't cost KCC very much now. In fact, because the government reimbursed KCC's costs and the government has given KCC money to refurbish a number of empty buildings that were not used and are now refurbished to use as initial reception centres for refugee children who have no adult with them. And actually, if you want to look at it in a self-interested way, that's very useful because, at some point in the future, those centres will no longer be needed for refugee children. Then KCC has a number of refurbished buildings that we can then use for something else. But I just feel deeply sorry for children with no adult with them arriving on the beaches of Kent. Can you imagine what it's like being in an inflatable craft crossing 20 miles of sea? I crossed the channel in proper sailing boats when I was younger. It takes a long time, and it's uncomfortable. To do that in a rigid inflatable would terrify me. For children, whether they're teenagers or very young children, to do it deeply upsets me.
We should be grabbing those children with both hands, putting a blanket around them, giving them a hot drink. That is exactly what social workers do for King County Council. What then happens is they go to a reception centre for up to two weeks, but in actual fact, it's less. We have one in my area, in Faversham, and I understand that the children are usually there now just for a few days before they go on to somewhere more permanent in what's called the National Transfer Scheme. It is not any real cost at all to Kent County Council, and it's something we should be very proud to do.
Has KCC done enough with regard to climate change?
No. Climate change is a really serious threat to our future. That's the overwhelming scientific consensus in the world that if we don't arrest climate change, we don't stop that process or stop contributing to that process, real harm is now being caused to people already. We see that in Kent now, through the changing of Kent's climate, it is getting more challenging to grow some of the soft fruits that we've traditionally grown in Kent, and they may be grown further north in future. Our summer climate is becoming more Mediterranean. The word Mediterranean has many positive connotations for people, but that actually poses huge challenges for us. How do you provide a sufficient water supply for the very dense population that we have? How do you adjust farming? How do you maintain our sea defences as sea levels rise? Every summer now, many of the communities who live near beaches in Kent will be familiar with JCBs appearing, bringing in tons of shingle to shore up the beaches and so on, which is a very expensive cost. We haven't done enough to address climate change. We have a target of net zero by 2050, and it's absolutely essential that we keep that target, and we have a really serious plan about meeting it. That target is not just for Kent County Council, it's for the whole of Kent. KCC has a role with others in promoting a move to net zero across the whole of society in Kent.
How should Kent County Council be devolved?
My short answer is not with a mayor. I think having a mayor is a terrible idea. I think it concentrates far too much power in the hands of one individual. The problem with that is that if that individual, however attractive they look when they're elected, turns out to make bad decisions, to break their promises, to not be very good at the job, you can't get rid of them. You're stuck with them for four years. Whereas in the council model and the same with parliament at a national level, if the council leader or the Prime Minister doesn't do well, if they lose the confidence of the parliament or the council, they can be changed and replaced. But you can't do that with an elected mayor, which I think is quite a worrying prospect. The other thing that I think is really key is the better form of devolution. We desperately need devolution of some kind because Britain is over-centralised. The better model is what they've got in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is a parliamentary or an assembly model where instead of electing one high and mighty individual, you elect a body of people who may then elect an executive from amongst themselves. The reason that’s better, first of all, the points I made already about changing the leadership if you need to, but secondly, you're taking decisions there collectively.
I will say something positive about Kent County Council: It has 81 members. Right now, and I hope this will continue to be true, it has some diversity in its membership. There are people aged from their 30s to their 80s from very different educational backgrounds, professional backgrounds, social economic backgrounds. Quite a diversity of different life experiences. People are able then to inform debates with a perspective that someone else might not have had. I think through that deliberative process where it's done well and done honestly, you get a better outcome in that the group will achieve a better understanding of the problem and the solution. I think if you invest power in one person, their view would inherently be more narrow and less widely informed than with a group. Power is usually best put in the hands of a group rather than a single individual in our view.
Of the four maps released for Kent, is there a model that you favour?
No, for two reasons. First of all, the four maps that have been offered are insufficiently flexible. They have used the borough councils effectively as givens, as pieces on the board to join up in this or that combination. We need to be more flexible than that. The White Paper is very clear that there is room for more flexibility, that instead of putting all of this borough with all of that borough, you might want to put the eastern bit or the western bit of this borough with that district and so on. For instance, where I am in Swale, that's an extremely relevant issue because where I live in Faversham, people use the hospitals at Canterbury and Ashford. Many more people commute in those directions for work or shopping trips than will go west to Sittingbourne, whereas people in Sittingbourne go to Medway Maritime Hospital and commute to the west more often and have connections that way. We need this local reorganisation process to take a very wide account of how people actually live their lives and where boundaries can be drawn that really reflect the lives that people live.
The second point is that should not be done by 14 men, i.e. the district borough council leaders and the Kent council leaders, in a room in private. There's an outrageous lack of transparency around this. Those meetings of the Kent council leaders still don't have published minutes and agenda, which is appalling. It needs to be a much broader process. We should involve every elected office holder in Kent in that conversation, every councillor. We must involve all of the town and parish councils. That really is essential that we do that, but also that we involve the public and not just at some late stage. Not let's cook up a plan and then stick it on a website and say, this is public consultation, tell us what you think. We need from the very early stage of the process to involve people. That could be by a constitutional convention. We have a big event at County Hall where anyone who wants to can come and be guided by some expert speakers and then maybe write down or go into small groups with others to offer different ideas and we'll see what ideas are most popular with people. That could be at County Hall, but that event could move around. One in Canterbury, one in Medway, all over the county. It's nice and accessible to people. We need a website now that is an interactive website, not just a website that says, ‘Here's a PDF, have a look at it and email us,’ but a website that allows you to create your own option and to see different data, like the population levels, the deprivation levels, the crime levels, and so on in different areas.
There's been no discussion yet about how we're going to divide the assets and the debts of the 14 councils. That's got to be done in a fair way. We mustn't just say, ‘Well, this expensive building is in this town, so it will belong to this council.’ That would just be outrageous. We need discussion about how that will be done in an equitable way. The process of LGR thus far, in my view, has been extremely lacking, and it is one area where I think we need the Conservative administration out because all the points I've just made, I've made with the Conservative leader and he doesn't seem to understand or agree with any of these points, because the process is continuing in a very non-transparent, a very inflexible way and not involving the public at all at this stage.
If you could change anything about Kent politics, what would it be?
I think electoral reform, which you've mentioned, is incredibly important, and that would be transformative. For each party or group to have a number of seats based on the number of votes they get or don't get would be transformative. That would require parties then to work together and be cooperative rather than adversarial, which is the case now. Having said that, I think it's very likely that after 1st May, Kent will have no overall control of a single party, and parties will have to start working together in some combination. It's really crucial that we end Conservative control of Kent because they've been there for 28 years. Many of them think that's the way it should always be, that they're the people who should be running things. They are quite arrogant about that. They have really run out of ideas and are managing decline rather than driving us forward as a county.
Kent is brilliant and can be better in so many ways. We've got beautiful coastline, we've got areas of outstanding natural beauty, and I think we should look at developing the Kent Downs potentially into a national park, like the South Downs about 15 years ago. We've got, in many places, a highly skilled population, but in many parts of Kent, a population that lacks higher education and skills. If we can bring the education and skills in all parts of Kent up, that will increase our prosperity and deal with many of the problems that we have. We've got a good connection to London, but we've also got the best connection to France anywhere in the UK. I think our European connection is something that Kent needs to make more of. I obviously opposed Brexit. Brexit has done great harm to Kent, and we need to rebuild our commercial and social and economic connections, get Eurostar back, get more cooperation with local government on the other side of the channel.
Actually, I think Kent should advocate to the government that we need to join the customs union because if we don't do that, European Entry and Exit (EES) is coming in this autumn and is going to be devastating to Kent. I think that is possibly the single biggest threat facing Kent. It will mean that every person going through the channel unless they're an EU citizen, will need to be photographed, give their fingerprints. I think they do a voice print recording as well. It's very similar to what they do in the States if you go into America. But the difference is that at an American airport, you've got tons and tons of space to put a Boeing 747's worth of people through in a line to scan their fingerprints and take a picture of them without them knowing about it. The customs officers ask you some friendly questions that get you to speak to record your voice. There's no space to do that at Dover or the Channel Tunnel. We have 10,000 vehicles a day passing through Dover and the Channel Tunnel. In the tourist seasons particularly, some of those vehicles get 50 people on a coach, four or five people in a car. How long is each one going to take to do these biometric checks? Even if it's just a couple of minutes, which is ambitious, frankly, we're going to add on huge delays.
The abolition of freedom of movement has been a complete disaster for Kent, clogging up our roads. We've had to spend £150 on a lorry park in Ashford. That could have been spent in many different ways to actually benefit people rather than literally concreting fields to park lorries on because there's delays at the channel. That will be small fry compared to what the chaos caused by EES will be. Now, one problem we've had is that the Conservative administration at KCC has never been willing, ever, since the Brexit process began eight years ago, to say to government, ‘This is not great. This is a problem.’ They always put Conservative loyalty ahead of telling the truth and speaking truth to power. We need an administration at Kent County Council that is prepared to say to the government, ‘Brexit is a problem, EES is a massive problem, trade restrictions are a problem.’ For instance, Kent County Council has had to vastly increase the size of Trading Standards and employ many more Trading Standards officers at the Port of Dover and Channel Tunnel to do checks on inward goods of various different kinds. That has had to be funded entirely by Kent County Council, it has not been reimbursed by the government despite us asking for it. Both Labour and Conservative governments have said, ‘Sorry Kent, that's your problem, you've got the port you deal with it, you meet the cost for that.’ We need an administration at KCC that is honest with the public and challenging the government about these issues.
Can we expect your party leader to be in Kent to support the KCC campaign?
I have to get back to you on that. Ed Davey has made a really positive impression on the public, which I'm very proud about. He has come to Kent a lot, particularly to Tunbridge Wells, which was our sensational gain in Kent at the General Election. We may see Ed Davey in Kent, but we're very much running this campaign on the local champions who our candidates are. We don't see these local elections as a proxy for the General Election or some kind of continuation of national politics by other means. We are really focused on Kent and local issues and local people.
What will success in the KCC elections look like for the Liberal Democrat group?
I think that we will considerably increase our number of seats. Kent Online recently mentioned a figure of 15 to 20. I don't know where they got that figure from, but that is roughly where I expect our group to be, and we will have KCC members across Kent from east to west. Success will be winning a number of seats in that numerical region, and ending Conservative control of Kent and hopefully being able to put together a cross-party administration with other parties to change things for the better.
Thomas Mallon is Reform UK’s first councillor on Kent County Council, winning a by-election last year to take a seat in the chamber. At the time of this interview, two sitting Conservative councillors had defected to Reform UK, but only one of them sits as a member of the group. We discuss the party, Kent devolution and reorganisation, and what success in the election looks like.
How would you describe Reform UK?
Reform UK is a party for the people by the people, mostly run by grassroots branches, obviously organised at the top by head office, but we're pretty much an up-and-coming new fledgling party. We do have a lot of experience from other parties coming over to us and people like ex-UKIP MEPs. We've got the experience, we've got the know-how.
Is there anything unique about the Kent group that you can identify?
We're definitely a bunch of characters, that's for sure, me included. A lot of the people I'm working with at the moment are all branch-based. There's some new faces, I've got new people to meet all the time. A lot of hard work goes on behind the scenes that people don't really know about when you're a branch chair, my hat goes off to every one of them. We've had a lot of defections, not only in Kent County Council, all over the county at local council level. I think people can see us as another alternative. One chap said to me, ‘I left my party, and I went independent because I had no other alternative party to go to.’ Then they've seen the rise of Reform, and they thought, ‘I like the policies, I like what they stand for, I'm going to try and join them.’ That's what a lot of people are doing now.
What are Reform’s key focuses for Kent County Council?
Well, in my local area itself, there's an issue, Galley Hill Road, where there was a landslide just about two years ago now. We're still trying to resolve that issue. We had a local town meeting about it, Kent County Council were there in attendance, Jim Dickson, the MP, was there in attendance. We were explaining to the residents how we're going to go about fixing this and how long it's going to take. The traffic there right now is really bad because it's a main arterial road running from Gravesend, Northfleet to Dartford. The traffic that builds up through the Swanscombe area is quite significant. I feel really sorry for the residents there. It's a nightmare living there right now, especially if there's an accident on the A2 or the M25, it just becomes horrific. That's one local issue we're trying to look at.
If we're successful and win enough seats and take power in Kent County Council, we would then be looking at other issues that we could maybe make an impact on. We can sit down, put our heads together, nearer to time. I've got a few ideas that I want to maybe look at, but we'll have to have a cross-party consensus of what we want to do moving forward. But at this moment in time, everyone's concentrating on the local issues for the local elections. Then if we talk about Kent countywide, we can sit down and discuss that. Plus, a lot of things from Kent County Council have already been voted on for the next year coming ahead anyway, like budgeting, some of the road infrastructure works they've already been voted on. We would actually be looking at not this year but actually next year when we could make a difference. We would have 12 months to actually sit down and discuss it.
Should 16-year-olds have been allowed to vote in the KCC election?
No, I'm not a believer in 16-year-olds voting. They tried it in Scotland. It's not a great success, to be honest with you. My personal opinion of it is we've got left-wing ideologies running the education department at the moment. People leaving school at 16 or still in the education system are still gripped with that ideology of left-wing thinking. That's where the benefit comes for left-leaning parties. I'm not a big fan of that. I would prefer someone who's old enough to make their own decisions and not be taught how to vote because, at this moment in time, the schools are teaching kids what to think. We need to try and make sure that people are making big decisions on how the country's run that they're fully tooled up with the means to understand what they're actually voting for.
Would Kent County Council benefit from proportional representation?
Now if you were going to ask me that a couple of years ago, I would say absolutely yes, because you know how hard it is as a small party or a new upcoming party, we would want proportional representation. But now we've actually got elections won on the first past the post system. Proportional representation, I would still say, is a fairer way of how representations for local communities are. So yes, there's benefits to it, and obviously, there's negatives to it.
How much should KCC support unaccompanied asylum-seeking children?
I believe that comes from government funding. Kent County Council actually receive funding from the government to pay for that bill, so it doesn't actually come out directly. We can decide how it's spent and where the money goes to. I think a large chunk of it is from government. If you ask me personally, I think it should be not just Kent's responsibility. People might be ashore in Kent, but we should maybe talk to other counties and ask to maybe redistribute some young asylum seekers to other parts of the country to ease the burden on Kent because what's going to happen in a few years’ time is we're going to be devolved into unitary councils. Would that mean that the small unitary council that includes Dover would have to bear the full brunt of illegal migration? Something has to be sorted before the unitaries, because I don't think that would be fair on one small unitary council to have to the brunt of that.
How should KCC be devolved?
Well, I don't particularly have a preference myself per se. We don't even have a say in the matter of how it's divided anyway because we have so little Kent County councillors. We are not on any committees; we're not on any boundary-changing committees. We have no say in it. No matter how it's divided up, we're just going to have to play with the ball we are given.
Do you support the idea of a Kent mayor?
Not really. I actually prefer the model of Kent County Council. It's worked well so far, and my motto is if it's not broke, don't fix it. If somebody in their wisdom thinks unitary councils is the way to go forward, well, we can't stop that at this moment in time because the wheels are already in motion. You have to use the tools that you're given.
Has KCC done enough with regard to climate change?
Personally, I've seen a lot of talk in the chamber about carbon capture lowering fuels. So, I believe Kent County Council does its fair share, shall we say. Even in Gravesham, I've seen 75% is recycling, 25% now goes to landfill. If that's copied all over Kent, I believe Kent is doing a fair share. There is talk in the chamber a lot about how much carbon footprint we have. They really do take it seriously. There's a couple of Greens and a few Labours and a couple of Liberal Democrats that keep the Conservatives on their toes in KCC when it comes to things like this. It's very much spoken about.
If you could change anything about Kent politics, what would it be?
I would probably change the unitary. The breaking up of Kent. I would keep it as one big Kent.
Within the time you spent in the chamber for KCC, how have you found that experience?
Well, there's always little tweaks and little upgrades you can give things without actually dismantling the whole system and starting again. Even in the chamber the last time, we were discussing how we appeal amendments, how we oppose amendments. Even now, there's still little tweaks and little things that can be done. But these things take time. County council has been going on for decades and decades now, and they're still finding little things that we could tweak. It's a growing machine. It never stops growing. It's always evolving. Sometimes you have to evolve and adapt to the times. This is where Reform comes in, because we are a reformist party. That's things we can look at if we win power.
Can we expect your party leader to be appearing to support the Kent election campaign?
Yes.
What for you will success look like in the KCC elections?
Well, obviously, if we win 41 seats, that's success. If we've got overall control and majority of the council, that would be absolutely phenomenal. Whether it happens or not, I don't know. I would be very happy with maybe 30 seats because then that would make the chamber very interesting because there would be no overall control. That's when you really have to sit down and have debates about things because the whole reason about democratic debates is so people can listen to other people's points of view. Sometimes it may change someone's mind, maybe an independent or maybe someone can come up with a eureka moment of why the bill they're trying to pass is the best bill possible for the county. Then people sit back, and they think, ‘Do you know what,? They're right.’ That's what it's all about. I'm not one for counting my chickens before the eggs have hatched. I'm not going to put any great thought into how we're going to run things. I'll put thought into things if we win. Some of the councillors we've got standing have got experience in the past. They can bring that experience with them and help others who don't have as much experience. They would be welcome with open arms, no doubt.
Footnotes
These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You can read our previous interviews here.
If you want to suggest ideas or send tips for people to interview, email Steven.