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Medway is one of Britain’s most important, and unnoticed, election battlegrounds. Or at least it was until Mark Reckless politically pupated from card-carrying Conservative to born-again Ukipper. Suddenly, the politic Medway is all the rage.

Rochester, one of Medway’s five towns, is historic but has been ignored for years. King John fought the Barons there, one of the greatest challenges that the nascent Magna Carta faced. The bedrock of anglosphere Common Law survived – the South-East tower of the castle, several dozen men, and a clutch of pigs, did not.

John had a memorial built for the pigs.

Besides Charles Dickens’ love affair with the once-a-city (the only city in Britain to forget that it was one and then lose the paperwork), and the military exploits of its sisters Chatham and Gillingham, recent history has been quiet for Rochester and the wider area. The by-election changed that.

Medway itself is a bundle of contradictions. Its military might made it the engine of the largest empire the world has ever seen, yet it is largely anonymous. It is the “hat” of a county that rides the English consciousness as a by-word for affluence, yet one of the most deprived areas not only in England, but in the entire OECD.

Its military might made it the engine of the largest empire the world has ever seen.

Under Purchasing Power Parity, the average Medway resident is $7,000 worse off per year than Mississippians, and neck and neck with the more deprived areas of Greater Manchester. It is perched amidst the great beauty of the North Downs yet is decidedly brutalist, oily, clammy and austere.

It was one of the world’s first conurbations, yet its towns are aggressively and persistently clinging to their separate identities two centuries later. It was a home to not only Dickens but Billy Childish, yet one in six of its children finish primary school unable to read or write. It was the builder of the HMS Victory, and progenitor of chav culture.

Most of the time, despite their proximity to London, its five towns sit at least as removed in the backwaters of government thought as places like Blackpool and Glasgow. However, when the traps are opened and the parties campaign, they are now heading for Medway first. Why?

Gillingham was a solid Conservative blue for nearly half a century: Sir Frederick Burnden and James Couchman were the area’s only two MPs across a 47-year period. Half of Chatham Naval Dockyard sat within the borough, pumping ships into the Wooden, and later Iron, Wall. Brompton, originally the senior town but later absorbed into the faster growing Gillingham, was and remains the home of the Royal School of Military Engineering and the Royal Engineers. Billeted between both Gillingham and Chatham, the army retains a significant if reduced presence in “the Towns”.

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In 1983, following the longest suicide note in history and Britain’s triumph over Argentina’s Junta in the Falklands, Labour languished in Gillingham on an incredible 17 per cent of the vote – a record low it matched four years later. This proved to be their nadir. They held up better in the neighbouring Medway constituency, consisting at that time of Chatham and Rochester. However, after holding the seat for the majority of its history, Labour’s 30 per cent showing in 1987 was still catastrophic.

In 1981 Thatcher had ordered the closure of Chatham Dockyard in the face of considerable local protest. Although the Falklands War handed the yard a reprieve, the gates closed for the final time on 31 March 1984. Unemployment rocketed to 20 per cent of the working age population, sending all four of the major towns into a generational slump. Yet Labour remained unelectable and the Conservatives ascendant.

In the mid-1980s unemployment rocketed to 20 per cent, but the Tories held on.

But gradually, an ambivalence and antipathy towards politics emerged. Although passionate activists remain, there is little sense of the community action that has survived in some other post-industrial regions of the UK, such as Liverpool.

Much of this is due to the recalibration of the local economy as it entered the London orbit. Medway has the largest population outflow from London, which changed the character of the Towns and created isolated extra-London oblasts.

It is telling that Gillingham Football Club, the only league team not only in 300,000-strong Medway but 2-million strong Kent, can barely average 6,000 home fans at its league matches. Football fans identify with London clubs; the white van man that did for Emily Thornberry hung a West Ham flag from his home. This perceived civic death of a thousand cuts is one reason why, amongst many longer-term residents of a certain vintage, the names Margaret Thatcher and John Nott remain synonyms for shit.

The advent of New Labour set the cat amongst the pigeons. An area that has drifted to the right politically, despite having once hosted strong left-wing counter-cultural and workers movements, had found a centre-right alternative to the Conservatives. Much like the rest of the country, each of the Medway Towns, and Gillingham in particular, put the boot in. An incredible 16 per cent swing ushered in Paul Clark, and Gillingham became one of the most closely fought constituencies in Britain.

Mr Clark held on for two more elections as defections from local Lib Dems compensated for a slow puncturing of his 1997 support. He hung on by 254 votes in 2005, with neither Labour nor the Tories gaining any real momentum. The boundaries were re-jiggled: the constituency formerly known as Gillingham was re-christened Gillingham and Rainham. The demographics were marginally changed in the Conservatives’ favour, with a handful more votes picked up in Rainham, Hempstead and Wigmore – by some distance the most affluent pockets of Medway.

Football fans here identify with London clubs, like the white van man that did for Emily Thornberry.

The Tories sensed an opportunity ahead of 2010.

If their candidate, Rehman Chishti, could convince a brace of Mondeo Men to switch allegiance back to the Conservatives, he would take the seat. In an exemplary effort, he himself had defected from being a Labour councilor.

Two hours after Gordon Brown begun the national 2010 campaign he was in the seat, picking a fight with a baby in the Strood Morrison’s (he never had much luck in Medway, having fought with Tony Blair over an ice cream at The Strand leisure pier five years earlier). David Cameron wandered around uncomfortably. Medway – and Gillingham and Rainham in particular – felt like the prettiest girl in the year. It didn’t last.

But now, once again, Medway finds itself at the centre of an electoral maelstrom. Medway has rediscovered its status as a national bell-weather.

The fact that it is now the home of Ukip’s second MP should turn attention to the other two Medway seats: Gillingham and Rainham, and Chatham and Aylesford. They are safe Tory seats, but the Medway is inextricably linked: what has happened in Rochester could easily spread.

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As anybody who is from, has lived in, or has visited Medway will testify, Medway is weird.

The Towns truly are their own unique corner of Eden, your correspondent’s Gillingham-background aside. Dickens’ Mr Pickwick sums up the Medway resident’s ambivalence best: “A superficial traveller might object to the dirt, which is [the Towns’] leading characteristic; but to those who view it as an indication of traffic and commercial prosperity, it is truly gratifying.”

He goes on to make smirking reference to a soldier bayonetting a busty bargirl. People from Medway love to knock the place, but it’s largely because they love talking about it, and where some places have a bombastic civic pride, Medway has civic masochism. It’s a culture that marches to its own beat.

Dickens’ Mr Pickwick sums up the Medway resident’s ambivalence best.

After Dickens and Will Adams – the man who opened up Japan to the West, in the process becoming the first foreign samurai – Tracey Emin learnt her trade at the now defunct Kent Institute of Art and Design, Sir David Frost was a local schoolboy and Zandra Rhodes a Chatham girl.

Other cultural titans range from Rik Waller and Gary Rhodes to Kelly Brook. Its musical heritage is significant, with Billy Childish leading arguably the most important, and certainly resilient, garage rock scene in music. Acts like The Prisoners, Buff Medways, Thee Headcoats, Thee Milkshakes, Graham Day and the Gaolers, The Len Price 3 and, in a past age, Wreckless Eric, have fought the good fight for forty years to prove that three chords and a torn speaker cone is not dead. Bowie honed much of his craft in Chatham and Maidstone, a short hop away.

A wander down any of the high streets provides visitors with good television. On my recent return, a man offered an apology at the railway’s taxi rank for taking my bicycle. I didn’t own a bicycle, but he wanted me to have his used train ticket in exchange.

Nothing would convince him, so I duly accepted. Nevertheless in need of transport, I ended up in a ten minute discussion with my taxi driver, who had apparently studied for a Masters in Pure Maths before belatedly realising that he found the whole numbers schtick “boring”.

On exiting the taxi I was asked by a stranger if I wanted a gas oven. When I declined, I was left in the darkening street with the oven. In the nooks of Medway this is known as a “Saturday afternoon”.

Like many places that exhibit a dysfunctional charm, there is an underlying and not always so winsome undercurrent – one which relates to how Medway will swing in May 2015. The quality of healthcare – and mental healthcare – here is amongst the worst in the UK, with Medway Maritime Hospital having been in special measures for some time. The fact that the first question Mark Reckless raised at PMQ’s since his defection to UKIP was about the Department for Health’s administration of the hospital was no accident – it is a headline issue for local voters.

A man offered an apology at the railway’s taxi rank as he took my bicycle.

Education is also a concern. Medway’s primary schools have been ranked last in England several times in the last few years. In some areas child poverty is extreme, with a rate of 37 per cent in Gillingham North in 2007 – a pre-crash figure that is only likely to have worsened.

Some positive trends exist: child poverty has fallen in Twydall, a ward within Gillingham, taking it from the 97th percentile of most deprived areas in the UK to the 80th – not perfect, but an improvement. As to whether effective policy, or simply social factors, have helped is unclear.

I grew up in Twydall. As I returned I hovered near the “Twydall Discount Store”, once the site of England’s most incongruous Woolworths – perched in the middle of a council estate between an unpopular newsagent and a funeral parlour – and quizzed passers-by on how they are likely to vote. “Go forth and multiply” was the first response offered to me, albeit in fewer words. Granted, few people anywhere want to talk to a tired-looking man clasping a pukka pad with the fate of a gas oven riding on his conscience.

The smattering of opinions I was offered did, however, explain Ukip’s local successes fairly succinctly. Those that knew of him felt that the local MP – the Tories’ 2010 victor, Rehman Chishti – was only concerned with his own career, and ignored key local issues. The same was true of the former MP and current challenger, Labour’s Paul Clark.

A couple ventured that they wouldn’t be surprised to see Chishti follow Reckless to Ukip, given his voting record closely tracks the interests of his core local voters (church groups and social conservatives), and his rebellion against Tory leadership on equal marriage. He has form, having defected from Labour in 2006, but such plans seem to be limited to the pavements of Twydall so far.

When I noted that Mark Reckless was the same man as before, just under a new banner, “Let’sSayPhil” paused.

Most felt that nobody in either major party understood or had any interest in their lives. One local resident was concerned about “outsiders” (not from overseas, but other parts of Medway and London) buying up the council housing for cheap and eroding any previous sense of community. They thought this commuter gentrification explained the supposed economic changes in the ward.

The hospital and a lack of local GPs was of more particular concern. Immigration and access to services came up as a universal, but abstract and general, afterthought. Another local, who suspiciously offered the name “Let’s say Phil”, explained why he was planning on voting Ukip.

“The other parties just swap around but it’s always the same people again. … We need someone different. I’m not saying they’re good either, but the others just do what they want, they don’t listen, and things just get harder for people all the time, and they say it’s getting better. Better for them, maybe.”

When I noted that Mark Reckless was the same man as before, just under a new banner, “Let’sSayPhil” paused. “Maybe you’re right. But what else do we do? They say it’s getting better but I’m not seeing it.”

Maybe Sir John Major is right when he predicts that more economic growth before May could deliver a Conservative victory, as long as the money starts finding its way into the wider economy (namely, wages).

But the disenchantment and despair with politics runs deep here, and that question, “What else do we do?” is the nitrous oxide in Ukip’s engine not only in Medway, but Clacton, the Isle of Thanet, and some of Labour’s northern seats.

There are certainly better answers to it than than “vote UKIP”, but with such a disengaged electorate the onus is on the parties – be they of the established order, or other smaller groupings – to win over a jaundiced public. Until they can, Mark Reckless may soon find he has company in Ukip’s new Medway base.