I attended the recent Sussex Police and Crime Panel primarily to talk about the budget for Sussex Police, but I did also want to question the Police and Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne on her recent actions and statements relating to the protests in Crowborough. While the budget was agreed, little did I know before I arrived that the meeting was going to subsequently explode into a row about that conduct with a motion expressing no confidence supported by a large majority of the Panel.
Until she announced that she was standing to become the Mayor of Sussex last year, I can honestly never remember Mrs Bourne attending any demonstration, let alone the recent one at Crowborough – and for good reason. Given her existing role, she is meant to be holding the Police to account, both in how they police those who will be living there and demonstrations against their presence, like this.
It needs an objectivity that she will find it difficult now to demonstrate, and there is no Deputy Commissioner that she can pass such matters to in the event of such concerns of any conflict of interest.
My questions at the meeting on whether she has received any guidance from officials on taking part in such demonstrations and its compatibility with that role, and what the Sussex Police’s commanding officers’ view of the Commissioner supporting these demonstrations, were left unanswered.
Whatever your views on the issue itself, the blatant electioneering and the Commissioner’s intemperate, in my view, use of language that was displayed are incompatible with the role. Yes, that creates a barrier for her that other candidates for the Sussex Mayor will not have, but she has the thirteen plus years of public exposure in her current role to help compensate for it.
If the PCC is held accountable for it by the Panel which is meant to do so, which she has, this isn’t ‘woke nonsense’ gone mad. Mrs Bourne is not some martyr in the culture wars, she is someone in a responsible position with her eye on another elected position as Mayor, who is courting Reform voters by trying to ‘out-Reform’ the Reform Party.
And that has become even more important to the Sussex Conservatives with the implication of the delay of the Sussex Mayoral election, as they will be more reliant on transfers from other parties’ supporters with the change in the voting system that will accompany it.
But here is the fatal flaw, I think, to their approach. Conservative voters do not, even now, all adhere to these Reform-imitating tactics and by the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Katy Bourne pushing it, they further threaten to fracture the already fragile Tory voter base for little additional electoral benefit. The opportunists like Suella Braverman have already jumped ship. The public have stopped listening to them because they know the Tories are responsible for the situation in the first place.
Cllr Michael Jones
Leader, Crawley Borough Council