The Week in Medway Politics: Momentum, refugees, rubbish

Medway MPs in Parliament

“This government is doing enough”
A remarkable speech from Rochester and Strood MP Kelly Tolhurst in parliament during a debate on immigration this week. Sticking solidly by her commitment to refuse to help unaccompanied child refugees, and that anyone arguing for the opposite is using “simplistic arguments”. After that, she managed to go off on a UKIP type rant about how we aren’t doing enough to help our own children before foreign ones, before concluding that the government is doing enough to help refugees. Her constituents can make up their mind on that. The following day, she demanded assurances that Medway wouldn’t have to take any more refugees, even if the government agreed to accept more into the country.

Chishti cleared
Following the revelations that Gillingham and Rainham MP Rehman Chishti broke parliamentary rules by not declaring hospitality from Gillingham Football Club, he has now been cleared by parliamentary authorities. The authorities accepted that a genuine error was made, and no further action will be taken.

Elsewhere in Parliament
This week, Kelly Tolhurst seemed to be in favour of all schools becoming academies once again, just in time for the government to do a u-turn on it.

Medway Council

What the Dickens?
A huge tourism push from Medway Council this week for their highly original programme of Dickens based events this summer, as part of the imaginatively named Summer of Dickens. Because this is Dickens Country damnit, and Medway Council won’t stop until everything in these towns is connected to the bloody guy in some way.

Housebuilding horrors
In a fantastic example of getting their excuses in early, Medway Council are already preemptively blaming developers for the council’s housing needs being met. This is after the council has refused thousands of new build housing starts within Medway under pressure from local NIMBYs.

Political Parties

Medway Conservatives
Missing, because after winning the Police and Crime Commissioner election, there’s not much for them to do until 2019.

Medway Labour
Utterly incredibly, it’s now been eleven weeks since the Medway Labour website was hacked, proving a security risk to user’s visiting, and they still haven’t managed to fix it. Yet they’d like the voters to hand them the keys to Gun Wharf.
After being quiet on the issue for a while, the party are now once again moaning about bulky waste collection, because it’s an issue that really resonates with voters.

Medway UKIP
Missing, because there’s nothing coming up that UKIP might be interested in, is there?

Medway Liberal Democrats
A rare public sighting of the Medway Lib Dems in the wild this weekend, with them campaigning in Strood. Want to catch up with them yourself? They’ll be in Chatham High Street from 10am on Saturday.

Medway Green Party
The Medway Greens have no opinion on Rehman Chishti being cleared about his parliamentary expenses. None at all.

Other News

No We Khan’t (or won’t)
Former Rochester and Strood Labour parliamentary candidate Naushabah Khan put herself forward to replace Sadiq Khan in Tooting, making it to the final stage of selection, before ultimately losing out. She was well regarded through the short campaign, and it’s a clear signal of her ambitions for the future that will likely see her go far within the party. Unless Medway Momentum have their way at least, who made it very clear that they would not support her as a candidate, before another activist threatened to have her deselected from her Medway Council seat. Between this, open warfare between an activist and a sitting councillor, and a day spent posting conspiracy theories about the media, the original, rather restrained, iteration of Medway Momentum seems to be very quickly falling by the wayside.

..and due to popular demand, a return of Rehman about town
This week, Rehman Chishti managed to have his photo taken with several sets of constituents, a set of Medway Council officers, in the living room of some homeowners, some children, headteacher Colin, some soccerball man, a single resident in Rainham, and a bouncy castle.

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