Paul Godwin steps down

It is with great sadness to note that the Labour Leader for my group on the Council is to step down after 13 years of dedicated and strong leadership. 

As I tweeted yesterday; Paul always put principles and people first in his role as leader and was able to build bridges and alliances through logical and reasoned debate. A strong and diplomatic leader he always sought others views and was a truly consensual individual; his work on the Kent Police Authorty and his command of matters relating to law-and-order was second to none; and having been a leader of the Council was able to understand how the structures of the organisation work. 

A success of his leadership has been to retain Labour as the main and only party of legitimate opposition in Medway. Everyone accepts that during the Labour Government an area like Medway, with a larger Tory block vote, will struggle to elect a Labour majority administration, but he has successfully kept us as the only effective representative of opposing views in Medway.

Over the last 13 years the Labour Group has had difficult periods; as a party we lost control of Medway Council that we created in the early 2000s and have seen a number of issues around candidate selection resulting in a poor period from 2009-2011. The party opened up its selection in 2011 selecting a candidate under 35 in every target seat and is now very much looking to the next generation of activists to step up; it is becoming increasingly outward facing. It is talking about train fares, about water bills, about buses, about improved community safety. It has the right structures in place; its now about getting and training the next generation... 

Labour can now look to new future and leadership; a leadership that will continue, as Paul did, to reflect the fact that Council leaders and cabinet members can not continue to be divorced from campaigning and engaging with the public; a party that will work with people and groups on issues across all of our towns, involved in every argument for our future and most importantly challenging the record of lamentable fiscal management from our current administration in Gun Wharf.

Labour;  challenging power aggressively and robustly