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00:00Welcome to the Kent Politics Show, live here on KMTV, the show that gets Kent's politicians
00:26talking. I'm Oli Leder and as conflict rages in the Middle East, MPs are diving into the details
00:34of Labour's Police and Crime Bill, with dozens of parliamentarians backing Mike Martin's amendment
00:40to end sex-based harassment. I spoke to the MP earlier. Obviously, you've been tabling an amendment
00:48around sex-based harassment to the Police and Crime Bill, something which was shot down by the
00:54government yesterday. Talk us through what happened, what this amendment was trying to do and why there
01:01was so much backlash. Thanks, Oliver. I mean, it's really simple. Actually, what the amendment that
01:06I laid down that had cross-party support, everyone from Nigel Farage to Carla Denya and everyone in
01:11between supported this, so right across the political spectrum, it very simply just criminalised the
01:17harassment of women and girls in public. So, obscene comments, gestures. I mean, it's actually, you think
01:24that that would actually be illegal, but it's a gap in our law. And all the amendment did was brought
01:29into effect a law that's already been passed onto the statute books in 2023 by my predecessor, in fact,
01:36Greg Clark in Tunbridge Wells. And the government needs to what's called give effect to that legislation,
01:43that 2023 legislation, and they failed to do so. And I've been pressing them over the last nine or ten
01:48months and I've just been fobbed off. And so we laid this amendment and then the government voted it down,
01:53which is very, very disappointing.
01:55Because you've been working on this for quite a while. We actually had you on the Camp Politics Show
02:00talking about this not long ago. And you've talked to the government minister numerous times about this.
02:08Why is the government dragging its heels so much on what seems like pretty common sense legislation?
02:16It's really common sense. I think that reflects the sort of cross-party support that it had, including loads of people in the Labour Party.
02:23And a number of Labour MPs actually abstained and didn't vote against it yesterday.
02:28What the government says is that they have a plan, a strategy to deal with violence against women and girls.
02:37Your viewers might remember that it's part of the Labour Party's manifesto is to halve violence against women and girls.
02:43So harassment is part of that, obviously. But they say the strategy is coming.
02:47Don't worry. We'll let you know when we're going to commence these provisions then.
02:53And so it's a bit of a brush off. And our argument is, well, this is already on the statute books.
02:59And so actually we can just give it effect now and get the ball rolling.
03:02We don't need to wait for the whole strategy to come out.
03:06And I think there is a broader question as well, Oliver, which is why does it take 12 months to write
03:11and produce a strategy on violence against women and girls?
03:14You know, in this first year, the government's done, it's changed the planning laws.
03:19It's had a strategic defence review. They've done a huge spending review, all these big things.
03:24Yet on this really important thing, which affects half of our population, there's nothing.
03:30There's no strategy. There's no documents. And it has been pretty slow, to be honest.
03:34I'm curious to think, from your perspective, why that might be.
03:38Because Jess Phillips, she's been an advocate on these issues for a long time.
03:42She supported the private member's bill when in opposition.
03:47She's respected across the House for her stance on these issues.
03:52So is it really a problem with government or are there external factors that are causing this legislation
03:59to be dragged out and not be implemented in a timely manner?
04:05It's very hard to say. Government can be quite opaque.
04:08Sometimes. And if I think about the letters and the conversations I've had from government on this issue
04:13and from Jess Phillips, in fact, they use phrase like in due course
04:18and at the earliest available opportunity, which is sort of quite opaque.
04:23I think that, you know, what it looks like to me is a question of priorities.
04:28The government is doing some things and not other things.
04:32There's only a certain amount of bandwidth.
04:33I would argue that violence against women and girls, which I think is endemic.
04:39You know, if I look at my casework inbox, I think any constituency MP would look at their inbox
04:43and realise that there are real issues that need to be tackled.
04:48I think that it's endemic and I think that actually it's something that is difficult
04:53because it's about culture change in that it takes a long period of time.
04:56But actually, you can set out what your plan is quite early.
05:00And obviously, the earlier you set it out, the sooner you can get on with trying to change the culture of men
05:06in how they treat women and girls.
05:09But I think that the government's bandwidth is taken up with lots of other things.
05:13And this seems to have been put on the back burner.
05:15So part of the thing with the amendment yesterday was about putting it back up the agenda
05:20and forcing the government to reprioritise it.
05:24Obviously, it had support from some Labour MPs, such as Kevin McKenna here in Kent,
05:29Stella Creasy, a big advocate as well.
05:32And while we did see some abstentions, there was no full-on rebellion yesterday.
05:39Are you disappointed in your Labour colleagues across the floor in Parliament
05:43for not going against the government on this?
05:45Or do you kind of understand that they were bound by the government whip here?
05:50I think all MPs have to, you know, make their own decisions and have to answer for them.
05:58And it's not really for me to comment on their voting decisions.
06:01I think what we're going to do now, though, is take this to the House of Lords.
06:06And I've already started conversations with colleagues in the Lords,
06:09because as this bill passes through the Lords, we're going to seek to re-amend it.
06:13And the government doesn't have a majority in the House of Lords.
06:16So we have a much greater chance of successfully laying that amendment
06:21and criminalising the harassment of women and girls in public.
06:25And then that, you know, puts even more pressure on the government
06:28to start to get the ball rolling on this.
06:32How confident are you that the Lords are going to take up this amendment?
06:36And what have some of the members you've been speaking to in the Lords been saying about this?
06:42It's very, very early days, Oliver, so I wouldn't like to say.
06:45But come back to me in a month or so,
06:48and I'll be able to give you a better approximation of the chances.
06:53But while I have you here, I'll ask you about a few other things.
06:56Obviously, you do sit on the Defence Select Committee,
06:58and we are in quite turbulent times with what's recently happened in Iran,
07:04which has probably caught the government's attention primarily this week.
07:08We've obviously seen it at the G7 and everything.
07:10What do you make of this from your perspective as a defence expert here?
07:16Because this looks like quite an escalation in the Middle East
07:20that's already been beset by turmoil over the last few months.
07:24Yeah, I think we're at quite a dangerous moment in international affairs.
07:33We have a situation that appears to be escalating rather than de-escalating,
07:38which is what we want.
07:39And I think we need to take a pause and take some steps back from the precipice here.
07:47You know, to be clear, what we're dealing with here is Iran's nuclear ambitions,
07:52and nobody wants Iran to get nuclear weapons, apart from Iran.
07:57And the question is how you set about doing that.
08:00And the UK has had a settled policy position on this,
08:04along with the rest of the international community, for a very long time,
08:07which is that the best way to contain Iran's ambitions is via negotiation.
08:13And we actually had a successful treaty in place called the JCPOA
08:18that meant that Iran was not enriching its uranium to weapons grade.
08:23It was just what it needed for its civilian reactors,
08:27which is completely allowed, permissible under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
08:32And that deal was ripped up by Trump in his first term.
08:36So that's kind of where we are.
08:38And Israel, by launching a unilateral attack a few days ago on Iran's facilities
08:44and potentially going for regime change, which I think is incredibly destabilizing,
08:50is acting without its allies.
08:53It didn't tell any of its allies.
08:54It acted without its allies.
08:56And it's incredibly destabilizing to, as you say, a region that's already in turmoil.
09:01Is it really self-defense?
09:05That's the word we've been hearing from allies of Israel on its attack.
09:10They were acting in self-defense.
09:12But there wasn't an attack from Iran before this.
09:16Obviously, they've been operating using proxies in the region for quite some time.
09:21But this was one nation state effectively attacking another nation state over a nuclear policy
09:29that is widely condemned by the international community.
09:33But that doesn't really amount to a full-on escalation in many people's minds.
09:39Is Israel really acting in self-defense here?
09:42Yeah, I think so.
09:43Israel said that it was dealing with an imminent threat from Iran,
09:49and it claims that it has intelligence to back up that threat.
09:55I think what's interesting is if you ask the Americans as to whether Iran represented an imminent threat,
10:02i.e. it was about to produce a nuclear bomb, and that's what we're talking about here,
10:06the Americans would say, and the Americans have a huge intelligence apparatus,
10:11said, well, we don't think that that's the case.
10:13And so that's quite telling, I think.
10:17And for me, actually, there are some echoes of what we saw in 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq war,
10:25where there were claims that Iraq represented an imminent threat to Western powers,
10:34in our case, particularly to the UK.
10:37And that was used as a justification, a pretext for the invasion of Iraq.
10:42So I'm very, very, very, very cautious about this,
10:47and I think we need to be very, very careful,
10:50and particularly the UK needs to be extremely careful that it doesn't get involved in this war.
10:53I think that's my last question on this is obviously that's parallels to 2003 and the war in Iraq.
11:03We got drawn into that conflict, a conflict that came to the lives of many UK soldiers and also many Iraqi civilians.
11:13Do you think that this could happen again without careful diplomacy here?
11:18I think rather than us being drawn into Iraq in 2003, I think we rushed headlong into it,
11:25and that was the wrong thing to do.
11:28And I'm very proud to be a Member of Parliament for a party, the Lib Dems, who opposed that.
11:34And we're right, we're proven right, and we oppose any UK involvement in this conflict.
11:41And I hope that we don't have to test that assertion in Parliament.
11:46I hope that the government has got its head screwed on over this
11:50and doesn't get dragged in or, even worse, rush headlong into it.
11:54Mike Martin there. More politics after the break.
11:57Welcome back to the Kent Politics Show, live here on KMTV,
12:07the show that gets Kent's politicians talking.
12:10Now, the Kent Police and Crime Commissioner has weighed in on the alarming number
12:15of catapult attacks circulating online here in the county.
12:19It comes to campaigners calling for a ban, despite concerns that it isn't enforceable.
12:24As a community, we've come together and we're standing up and we're talking out now,
12:29you know, to call for a ban to catapults.
12:31And please, you know, we need to hold the children accountable.
12:35So Matthew Scott joins us down the line now.
12:39Matthew, we've heard lots about these issues with catapults, slingshots,
12:43attacks on animals and wildlife.
12:47What's already been done to tackle this problem here in Kent?
12:50So Kent Police have been looking into individual cases and making sure that they are responding to them.
12:59I think the challenge that we've got at the moment is that not every single case is being reported.
13:04So when I've looked at the numbers and what I'm hearing from parish and town councils and other people
13:09is there's a mismatch between what is happening and what we know.
13:13So Kent Police will respond and investigate and they will target those areas where they're seeing them happen the most.
13:19But we desperately need more people to report them so that we can deal with this blight on our community.
13:25Because data that we obtained shows that the numbers appear to be going down over the last few years,
13:32but residents don't necessarily feel that's the actual case on their doorstep.
13:38What are the next steps to kind of tackle this from that community perspective?
13:42Well, I would encourage anyone who's witnessed an incident to report it to Kent Police.
13:50As I say, I hear the same stories as well, that people don't feel that there has been a reduction.
13:55So we need to get those reports into the police when people are seeing them happening and then they'll be able to respond.
14:01But what I'm also doing is I'm looking at what powers the police would need to deal with these incidents because they are quite harrowing.
14:08These devices can cause quite significant damage to people, to wildlife and to property.
14:14So I've lobbied the government to change the law to make it illegal to carry these in public
14:21and give the police more powers to stop and search people for them.
14:24Because to be perfectly honest, I don't think there's any real legitimate reason to be carrying these catapults around with them.
14:31Because it is something that we are concerned about.
14:35It's something that residents, they see it on social media all the time.
14:39It is often pets.
14:42It is often farm animals are also being targeted.
14:45I'm kind of curious to what you think about why it's become such a prevalent issue here.
14:52Why is this such an increasing trend?
14:56What is causing all of these attacks?
15:01I think these things go in cycles.
15:04And I think there have been some concerns about social media trends which have encouraged people to take part in the use of catapults.
15:12And it's also the consequences of it.
15:14So we need to step up our patrols.
15:16We need to take action against those who are using them.
15:18We need people to report it.
15:20But we also need to make sure that we're dealing with the social media trends which are happening,
15:25where we are seeing people being encouraged to do this and then post clips on TikTok.
15:29Do you think it speaks to a wider issue with social media and how it's portraying violence and sexual graphic content online?
15:38Because it's not just these quite shocking videos of animal abuse, but it's a bunch of other different issues that are seemingly becoming more prevalent.
15:50Is this part of a wider picture?
15:51I think you're absolutely right.
15:55And you see it all too often on these different social media platforms where fights and things are breaking out and people are just standing around and filming them.
16:02We see people when police officers are being arrested and being attacked by criminals and people are just standing around and filming it rather than offering assistance.
16:11And I think that speaks to a wider problem with people's own behaviour and what attitudes they're willing to accept that they would stand around and do that just to post it on social media.
16:22We've got to have a wider conversation around what social media companies are allowing on their platforms and have them taken away.
16:29And I think they need to step up to the plate here to stop encouraging the violence from being shared.
16:35My last question on this, I think, is how can schools, community groups, parents help tackle this from that perspective?
16:45Because obviously we can only do so much with these social media companies, with current regulations, with current rules.
16:51What can we do at home to stop our children, our young people engaging in this quite shocking online behaviour?
16:59Well, to begin with, I've long advocated that children shouldn't have smartphones.
17:05I've been a big supporter of the smartphone-free childhood movement, which says that we shouldn't be giving children smartphones until they're at least 14 years of age.
17:13And they shouldn't be on social media until they are at least 16.
17:17And that's a conversation, a challenging conversation that we need to have with parents.
17:21Schools are stepping up to the plate and more of them are introducing bans on school property.
17:26But what we're seeing is what happens outside of school.
17:28And it's good to see that there are parent-led campaigns like the Parent Pact, encouraging parents to self-regulate here and not buy smartphones for their children in the first place.
17:39Well, thank you for speaking to us about this.
17:42I'm going to ask you a few questions now about something else that's probably dominating your mind and mine this week,
17:48which is, of course, the government's pretty large spending review.
17:53And I want to get your sense of what this actually means for Kent policing and our local authorities.
18:00Was this a good spending review from your perspective?
18:04No, it was a complete disaster.
18:06And anyone who tells you this was a good comprehensive spending review isn't being honest.
18:12We have a chancellor who's trying to claim that this isn't being funded by large tax rises,
18:16when we know that police and crime commissioners and local councillors are going to have to increase taxes somewhere in the region of 5% every single year of this spending review period
18:26in order to raise the money that they say they are giving us.
18:29So it's a real deception.
18:31It's real smoke and mirrors.
18:33And it also doesn't give us what we need in order to balance the books.
18:36So not only are they expecting higher taxes on local people, we're going to have to trim our budget again in order to make sure we can balance the books.
18:45Obviously, the government are putting money into community projects in 350 different deprived communities.
18:52They're tackling things like root causes, such as we know there's lots of links between crime and housing insecurity,
18:59£39 billion for affordable housing.
19:02Do you not think it might balance out in terms of tackling root causes of crime?
19:08Well, there's no real evidence about how they're going to fund these pledges other than extra borrowing and extra taxes,
19:14which mean you and I all pay more.
19:17So, of course, we welcome house building to deal with the problems that we have with a lack of supply of housing in this country.
19:24But let's be honest here.
19:26This was a tax and spend budget where they're going to tax us all in extra council tax.
19:30They're going to borrow more money and we will feel it all in our pockets.
19:34That's going to be the real legacy of this comprehensive spending review, a high tax chancellor who's got no economic credibility.
19:40And how has it changed how you're going to approach managing police budgets here in the county?
19:45Have you had to go back to the drawing board?
19:47Is it changing how policing is going to look like here in Kent for the coming years?
19:51Well, this is the work that I will do with the chief constable over the next six months.
19:58We're not going to know the final totals of our allocation spend until December,
20:01which is really late in the year to be able to plan for something so significant.
20:06But our early indications are that we're going to need to find somewhere in the region of at least seven to eight million pounds of savings next year.
20:13And that's before the government has awarded the police officers their well-deserved pay rise, which, again, we don't think they're going to fund.
20:20So there's going to be substantial pressure on policing next year to find additional savings.
20:26And we are going to look very hard to see what it is we can do.
20:29But the areas in which we can do that are becoming much smaller because we've already been working really hard on efficiency.
20:36We've saved over 100 million pounds over the last nine years.
20:40Bit of a costume change there, wasn't it?
20:42But now it's time to talk about the elephant in the room.
20:47This is Ellie and her adoptive owner from Twiddle wants her back after Medway Council took her to the tip.
20:55The authority says it's unsafe and was never meant to be in the hands of Trevor Robinson.
21:03But the pensioner disagrees, even if his neighbours thought the elephant was nothing more than a monstrous eyesore.
21:10Let's take a look, shall we?
21:11It wasn't your usual garden ornament.
21:15An eight and a half foot fiberglass elephant taken from a Gillingham driveway by Medway Council.
21:25Ellie had been a fixture of the Strand for 30 years.
21:30But when the water slide was found unsafe, one regular convinced the contractors hauling her away to make his home her stomping ground.
21:43That was going to be the crowning glory of all my little toys.
21:47This was going to be the centerpiece.
21:48She was coming here on my lawn and it was going to be.
21:51I was actually going to build a little pond there so you could slide down it into the pond.
21:57But after two months and complaints from neighbours, the council seized the slide, taking Ellie to the Great Elephant Sanctuary in the sky.
22:09Or in other words, a landfill.
22:11I mean, the landfill was bad enough.
22:13Why put a big lump of fiberglass when it could have stayed here with me?
22:18Wasn't a lot to feed it either.
22:19But with children flocking to see the Jubilee-themed oddity, for the neighbours next door, Ellie becoming a dangerous eyesore was the elephant in the room, or rather on the road.
22:36We saw the bits of string tied to bits of old wood, the fact that it was unsafe, the fact that it could have fallen at any time.
22:44In fact, it was dangerous.
22:45I can't believe for a moment that he actually thought that he could leave it there.
22:51I mean, planning.
22:52I mean, you have to have planning permission.
22:54We couldn't put a shed up in our front garden.
22:57So, a six-foot shed.
22:58So, how would he be able to put a ten-foot elephant up?
23:01Medway Council says it's unsure of how the slide ended up on Romani Road.
23:08But while an elephant may never forget, the council and some of the residents probably wish they could.
23:18Ollie Leder in Gillingham.
23:21Well, that's really all from us here at the Kemp Politics Show.
23:25If you see any other wacky animals in people's front gardens or around the streets where you are, just let us know.
23:35Particularly if a council is planning to take them away.
23:39We would love to hear about it.
23:41That's really all from us here on the Kemp Politics Show.
23:45But do stick around for Kent tonight.
23:47See you soon.
23:55We'll see you soon.
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