When you look beyond the ballot paper, all becomes clear: only the Conservatives are acting in the interests of local people here in Medway

Picture the scene. It’s a cold Saturday morning in mid-February. It’s raining. And you have, for whatever insane reason you choose to justify yourself with, volunteered to stand in the middle of a busy High Street on market day, handing out newsletters full of the positive things your Council (under your Party’s control) has done for you and your community and trying to get people to sign a petition to cut train fares.

Enter, then, the Liberals (ten, to be precise, over twice as many as your four), preaching their negativity and trying to disguise their lack of ideas for the local area by instead focusing on what you want to do, and try to make it seem like a bad move for the local area. Fast-forward a week or so, and their highly unconvincing spin machine has somehow turned a campaign to cut train fares into a ‘Strategy for Gillingham’.

Having had two Liberal Democrats in school last Thursday as part of our series of visits, I should have asked the glaringly obvious question: ‘do you also turn water into wine?’ The answer, undoubtedly would have been ‘yes’, under the premise that we are up against the Liberals, who try to claim credit for everything since the parting of the Red Sea, and Labour, whose leader implied that they were behind the slave trade (otherwise, why apologise?) and whose MP for Gillingham used a Conservative controlled Medway Council success story, and turned it into his idea in the run up to the 2005 election.

So where did this all begin? A couple of weeks ago, I started to help Cllr Chishti’s campaign in the run-up to the local elections. I started off with what I thought would be an easy task: a street stall in the middle of Gillingham High Street, promoting Cllr Chishti’s petition to cut train fares. So I got on the bus (the big fan of public transport that I am, but the extortionate prices which put people of make me prefer walking – when it is not raining) and fifteen minutes later I am walking through Gillingham High Street. What do I see first? A man that I now know as Herbert Crack, standing in the middle of the rain, wearing something yellow.

Once the expletives had cleared from my mind, I saw Cllr Chishti and another young member, Joe (12), stood at a stall blowing up balloons (blue with the Party logo in white), bearing badges and clipboards with the petition on. They were also handing out a leaflet detailing what the Council is doing for Medway. There were three of us. Hardly “the Tory Council” with “a market stall to promote their so-called ‘Strategy for Gillingham’”, as Cllr Kearney commented on the Gillingham Lib Dem website. I would be more inclined to call it “concerned activists helping their Councillor do what’s best for Medway and its citizens”, in particular the large number of those which commute.

The fact is that the Liberals are using futile tactics to attempt to gain popularity in the looming eyes of the local elections. The reality is that not everyone likes the “slag off the opposition and forget the idea that we don’t actually have any originality” approach. They don’t want to know what one party is doing wrong, they can figure that out themselves, they want to know what the other party would do. That is why the Conservatives are focussing on what they are going to do to further improve the area (the proposals to regenerate Gillingham High Street for example).

I should also say that not all Liberals know what the Liberals, or even they, want. Bob Collinson and Roger Shade visited our school with their unenthusiastic drone about various aspects of their Party, faithfully reciting their procedures for candidate selection amongst other things (I am not going into detail, as one of the emails I received when arranging the visit included Roger Shade voicing his concerns over people from other Parties getting too much of an insight into their workings, shame then that, despite the Conservative badge on my chest, they failed to recognise me as a potential threat and continued unperturbed) and saying unspeakable things about their Party’s MEPs and others.

Yes that is correct, not only was Roger Shade unsure of whether or not he should be opposing the Council’s plans for Gillingham High Street, as they include adding more valuable housing, because he was clueless as to what is right for the area, but he and fellow Rainham Central Ward candidate Bob Collinson had good fun in slagging off a pair of female Liberal Democrat MEPs. They also (both being pensioners) displayed somewhat of a frailty about them, that they could not be strong when necessary.

I was speaking to Bob Collinson after the lesson (he still hadn’t realised that I was a Conservative) when he admitted to me that he recognised me, but couldn’t be sure where from. A bit worrying when someone who wants to represent you cannot remember what had happened less than two weeks before. Well, just for Bob Collinson: I was stood in the middle of Gillingham High Street, encouraging people to sign a petition to cut train fares after a murderous 17.5% rise, while you were stood just yards away, somehow gaining satisfaction complaining and using smoke-and-mirrors tactics on the public.

The truth is out there, and if the Liberals are going to twist it and enshroud it behind a cloud of deceitful fog, if Labour are going to turn it and make their opposition’s successes their own, it is up to the Conservatives to rise above the bitter fighting, to refuse to give in to these provocations, and to continue to honestly and tirelessly work hard for the people of Medway, as they have done up until now.

Click the photograph for full-size image.