Canvey Island has its own flag, the Canvey crest, featuring a sheep and some oyster shells, and “we fly that,” says Dave Blackwell, “proudly”. Blackwell is leader of the Canvey Island Independent party (CIIP). He set it up in 2004 – “I got a lot of abuse from all the main parties”, he says – but they have proved a serious local political group. Of the 11 town councillors, nine are from CIIP, including Blackwell. Now Blackwell wants Canvey Island, the small area of reclaimed land in the Thames estuary off Essex, to go independent from its mainland borough council, Castle Point.

It might be a mini-independence movement, not exactly on the scale of Brexit or Catalonia, but Blackwell believes it represents a wider, growing desire for independence. “Listening to these politicians, doing U-turns every five minutes, they’ve got no convictions on what they want. People don’t trust them, people think they’re out of touch. We have proven there is an alternative out there – local people are standing up for local issues.”

Castle Point council covers Canvey Island, Benfleet, Thundersley and Hadleigh. “We tend to get a raw deal,” says Grace Watson, a CIIP councillor who sits on the borough council. Canvey Island now has a population of around 40,000, “yet our boundaries have not changed. Because we haven’t got a majority, everything is voted against.”

Things came to a head last week at a meeting about a community hall on Canvey Island, which residents believe the Conservative-run Castle Point council is planning to demolish and replace with houses. “We have hazardous installations on the island,” says Watson of the fuel and chemical storage facilities, “yet they still want to put more houses [and] people. It shouldn’t be happening. Someone has to look and say: ‘Hold on a minute, we’re a flood-risk area, stop right now.’”

Not everyone wants independence, points out Jeffrey Stanley, deputy leader of Castle Point borough council, who has lived on Canvey Island for nearly 60 years. He says: “The view of the Canvey Independents is not universal. Despite mischievous claims to the contrary, we work very hard to ensure all corners of the borough get their fair share of resources. It is going to be interesting to see how they would intend to pay for the extra government in these days of austerity. I’m sure their leader is surprised that his comments on independence have reached the national newspapers, but, like him, I quite like to see Canvey and Catalonia in the same headline. It’s good for tourism.”

The CIIP councillors want to get back to the era before 1974 when the town council had more power (it was only in 2007 that this council was reinstated after a campaign, though it has limited power and resources).

“We had our power taken away and everything was moved to the mainland, and ever since then we’ve been dominated by mainland councilors. People have had enough now,” says Blackwell. “There is no local democracy any more, it’s taken away by the major parties and I think we’ve got to bring localism back into local politics, where people can make a real difference about their future.”