Rehman Chishti is the sitting tenant MP for Gillingham and Rainham. Having been a school prefect, his career has been a textbook case in ‘follow the head boy’. Rehman gives head to the Government on almost every issue and even switched parties from red to blue in order to further his career. He had one day of principled behaviour recently, when he resigned from a position when the Government decided to break international law. The following day he backed the Government. This was even more surprising, given that Mr Chishti was himself a solicitor. In the warped words of Meatloaf “I would do anything for Gove”. In 2023, Rebel Rehman also rebelled against Suella Braverman in the local elections in a thinly disguised attempt to secure the Pakistani vote in Medway. But it was short-lived, See Rehman Chishti.
If this project works, we will, at best, remove the sitting Tory from office in my constituency. At worst, we expect to inflict sufficient damage on the Tory candidate to ensure that the Labour party or Lib Dems win the seat through micro-targeting of voters. Either way it’s a win-win. A few quid from a lot of people will see us on our way and Rehman Chishti out of our way.
My name is Peter Cook. In 2019, I stood a cat for election in Gillingham and Rainham to bring the Tory vote down and allow other parties to put their best feet forward. Yes, a cat, you got that right! Despite my insistence that nobody should vote for ‘Stan the cat’, and with no budget or campaign team, the UCAT party did not come last. We beat the Christian People’s Alliance with 229 votes and were not so far away from defeating UKIP (happy face) and the Green party (sad face) in Medway. The long-term Tory party agent told me at the hustings “If it hadn’t been for your stupid fucking cat, you were easily the best candidate on the stage”. The Lib Dem Chair in Medway said that “my cat was an existential threat to the Lib Dems”. I found this utterly ridiculous but never mind. In between things, I helped the local Lib Dem candidate retain their deposit (the first time this had happened in more than a decade), by taking him out on pub visits and so on, but the Chair was of course oblivious to that.
It occurred to me that (a) if I had campaigned across the long-term with a campaign team rather than a couple of weeks, I could easily have done much better (b) certainly if I had asked for people’s votes (I got 229 votes, in spite of begging people to vote for the other candidates) I would have done a lot better (c) with a budget, we could have done several leaflet campaigns, town hall meetings and media coverage and (d) the cat had much better policies than the established parties. We had a full manifesto but sadly, more people were impressed by the more fanciful policies of repurposing the Medway tunnel as a giant cat flap and so on !! 🙂
Specifically a vote for any other candidate in local elections will help by:
