Kent Council – Reform’s flagship local authority – has seen its first eight months in office marked by internal scrapping, suspensions, u-turns, a scandal over erotic books and a leader hiking taxes having vowed to cut them and telling colleagues to “fucking suck it up”.
Now the party which vows to protect England’s historic heritage has waded into the full glare of yet more turmoil – ripping up Canterbury’s historic Victorian lampposts and replacing them with what have been described as “clumsy and crude” alternatives.
Kent’s ruling Reform council is said to be planning to steadily reduce its collection of historic lampposts, many cast in a foundry in the city in the 19th century, with plans to replace the estimated 250 that remain. Only London’s City of Westminster and Edinburgh retain similar sets of bespoke Victorian street lamp standards.
In a letter to the Times, Ptolemy Dean, president of the Canterbury Society, said that the proposed replacements by the council were “clumsy and crude”, claiming it had been decided it was more economical to “throw the old posts away” and replace them with standard steel fixtures with some “heritage features attached”.
He added that their removal in Canterbury was particularly worrying given its World Heritage site status and that there was “no other place that has this full array of marvellous street furniture”.
Reform’s cabinet member for highways and transport Peter Osborne has, however, decried the claims as “fake news”, although from an interview on Talk, the TV station which is no longer on TV, today, it is not entirely clear he knows what he is talking about.
“We’re not tearing down anything,” he said. “I don’t know where they’ve got… I mean, spreading misinformation like this is not helpful to them or to us.
“Never. Never in a million years. You know us better than that,” he told host Jeremy Kyle, rumoured to be standing for the party in the next general election. “So what’s actually happened is that some of these… I mean, this… I read the article that, the Times article, I read it last night, late, about… there was [sic] things in it about ‘if you paint them, they’ll last for donkey’s years’, but the bits that are failing, they’re underground, so unless I get a team of Borrowers in to tunnel underneath with a paintbrush, how can we paint underground?
“We’re gonna replace these things and this has been going on… there’s, there’s, there’s one particular picture that – I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s one that’s been snapped off by [a] road traffic accident which was back in 2019 and we replaced it – not me personally, I’ve only been in post since May last year – but we replaced it with a modern alternative which was a temporary fix while Canterbury City Council got their head around it and told us what they wanted.”
Which rather sounds less like fake news, and exactly what’s happening. Somebody needs to shed some light on this!
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