“We haven't had a King of Kent for over 1,000 years”

Cllr Mark Hood is the leader of the Green Group at Kent County Council. Steven met him in the group office at County Hall, where they discussed how he came to be Green group leader, the likelihood of defections to the Green group, his issues with local government reorganisation, and his Extinction Rebellion arrest...

What is your official occupation? 
I'm meant to be a gardener. I was a printer for 25 years. That whole industry was imploding, everything was going digital. I decided I love gardening, so to go for a career change. That allowed me to get more involved in community stuff, and then I started attending Green Party meetings as well. I'm lucky now if I get to do a day's gardening. If I get a second day in, that's great because you end up building a relationship with your customers and they become your friends, and it's good for your mental health as well.

Do you have any additional roles, paid or unpaid?
Well, I'm a county councillor and a borough councillor at Tonbridge and Malling. 

Which division are you the councillor for? 
I'm councillor for Tonbridge division, alongside Paul Stepto, and I'm borough councillor for Judd ward in southwest Tonbridge. 

Why are you the councillor for that division? 
I'm an incomer, as Tonbridge people may describe people who are from outside the town, because I only arrived when I was four years old. My mum is from west Kent, Brenchley and Matfield, and my dad is from Deal, so I've got an affinity to the whole of Kent. I feel a deep sense of responsibility as a councillor to the whole of Kent. I've lived in Tonbridge almost all my life, and I'm really passionate about that. Being a councillor, your community should be the most important thing. Your party affiliation comes second, and that's the way I think things should be. 

Which party are you a member of?
I'm a Green Party councillor since about 2015.

Have you ever been a member of any other parties?
I've never been a member of another party. 

Was there a particular moment that led you to actively join?
We had a residents' association for Barden residents which I helped set up and we found that we were having some problems with our local council. They wanted to sell a youth centre, and they wanted to sell the plot of land called River Lawn next to it for development and we had seen the way that some of our residents had been treated at planning committee meetings and in the end I thought, we needed to have a voice for our community in the council. I decided to stand for election and then I started going along to Green Party meetings. It made sense to stand for the Green Party. 

You decided to stand before you joined the party?
No, it really started all happening at the same time. I started at the residents' association at about the same time as I joined the Green Party. I found I had more time on my hands, because I'd changed jobs. Then I had a couple of people saying you should stand as an independent, because you're never going to get in, in Tonbridge, as a Green candidate.
I agreed with all the policies. I'd been voting Green for a long while and I agreed with the manifesto and the more I got to know the people in the local party, I realised that the Green Party, in my experience, was based in the community. We didn't take instruction from anywhere else. It was a bottom-up party. We had lot of freedom to develop our own policies, which subsequently, some Conservative councillors, I've come across, have found it difficult to comprehend that you can have a different position to your national party on some issues. 

Can you give an example? 
It was a really minor thing, but he basically read out our policy word for word, and I said “Well, that's the thing. We make our own policy locally. That's just the way it is.” I can't even remember what the issue was about. There are politicians who represent the party and they wheel off things and you get people who are almost a voice box, you hear it parroted, and this particular councillor was, and is, like that. Everything's by the manifesto or the policy guidebook. Sometimes situations locally are different, and you have to do what's right. You have to be an advocate for your community, and if what's best for the community isn't what's in your policy, you need to decide for yourself. You have to use your own interpretation of the situation and come to a pragmatic conclusion. That's what it's about being a county councillor, making pragmatic decisions within the envelope of funding that we have, and I think that's what we've found so difficult in the last year is that we know what the envelope is, and we know what the limitations have been, but when you've got the opportunity to make that envelope of funding bigger, and I'm alluding to charging the maximum amount of council tax, then your duty bound, I would have thought, to do that in order to protect the most vulnerable of Kent's residents from the pain that is going to be coming their way because of a very risky budget. 

When did your name first appear on a ballot? 
I must have been a Green member in 2015. I appeared on the ballot, as a paper candidate. I think almost immediately after I joined, they asked for paper candidates for Burham and Wouldham, and I got 300 votes and I found out on a walking holiday up in Snowdonia. I didn't know the community at all.

You're now the leader of the Green Group on KCC. How did that come to be? 
When we were re-elected, Rich Lehmann was our leader and then he had some time out and he's left the national party. He's still a member of our group, but he's left the national party, because he had a conflict with his local branch of the Green Party that he's been unable to resolve. Politically, he's still in the same place and he's a very valued member of our group, but he stood down. I was already the deputy leader from the previous term, and we agreed that I would fill that space. I became the leader and I'd been filling in for him while he'd been away.

The council now has a new third largest group. Where did that push the Green Party in terms of ranking on the council? 
It's the proportionality of how many seats you get on the committees that’s the important thing. They'll get more seats on those cabinet committees. I can understand why they've formed a group of seven. What I do struggle to understand, having got to know some of them, is that why not just form a group of seven? You could have all those benefits without joining Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain. When I speak to those people, I'm not sure that I think that Restore is their natural home. I'm surprised that the party that is as right-wing as they are has managed to attract the seven councillors that they have from KCC.

With Reform there's been a number of fluctuations in the size of their group with expulsions and defections. Is there any likelihood of any defections to the Greens in the next couple of years? 
The doors are always open. You don't get anywhere in politics if you don't communicate and collaborate with people. We are a small party. Wherever we are in local government, we work with other parties to try and get the best outcomes for our residents. I am finding it difficult to see where those defections would be coming from, to be honest. But never say never.

Will your party leader be coming down to support the Cliftonville by-election?
We hope so. We're very much hoping that Cliftonville is going to be Kent’s Gorton and Denton. I lived in Gorton for a year actually and seeing Gorton turning Green has been quite something.

That toxic masculinity that seems to be pervading some sectors of society, it makes me sick to my stomach

You’re feeling confident you can do the same to Cliftonville?
I can't see why not. The Labour vote there is in free fall. People have seen what they get with Reform. Obviously, they've been without representation for a long time.
We're really disappointed as a party. One of our first motions here was to try and get some clarity about where the new administration sat in terms of violence against women and girls. We brought a motion and they turned it into a political rally. They used it as an excuse to blame any violence against women or girls on the trans community and on asylum seekers, which was a real eye-opener. I'd never seen that in the chamber. To see that happening in a council that used to fly the white ribbon flag, I always wear my ribbon. We're very proud supporters of the White Ribbon campaign.
He [former Cliftonville councillor Daniel Taylor] still hadn't been expelled and I think that says everything about Reform UK. The fact that their leader endorses some of the most… Andrew Tate… he's happy to stand next to him and have his picture taken and shake his hand and tell young people he's a role model. I've got a 22-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter and it's just terrifying that that kind of messaging is out there in social media. That toxic masculinity that seems to be pervading some sectors of society, it makes me sick to my stomach.

Following the success at the Gorton and Denton by-election, the Prime Minister referred to the Green Party as extremist. How do you respond?
Well, I'd say that we're not the party that's supporting a genocide. We're not the party that's supporting an illegal war which is happening as I speak. I can't think of many policies that we have that are extreme. 

Because I've read it, and therefore it must be true, are you not supporting turning children's playgrounds into crack dens? 
What we're doing is we're asking for a changing policy to treat drug use as a public health issue because the war on drugs has been a colossal failure. It's completely failed communities and individuals. The outcomes have been terrible. By continuing with the current policy, we're in a situation where we're supporting organised crime. We've got a situation where nobody knows what they're taking. They've got no idea what's in those drugs. They aren't getting the medical care and the psychological care that they should be getting. We can all put our fingers in our ears and moralise about, 'You're going to be making all these drugs available to people,' but that's disingenuous. We're talking about is having controls and having regulation. That is the way ahead, because it's going to mean fewer people dying every year of addiction. The impact it has on families is appalling. It's directly linked to crime and high levels of poverty amongst the communities that use them. For me, it's a no-brainer.