How could the political landscape of the county change when devolution brings a shake-up for our councils?

Local democracy reporter Dan Esson gives his thoughts…

Few get the chance to choose the method of their execution – but all 14 of Kent’s local authorities will get this rare privilege. Last Friday, the councils wrote to the government to say they accept plans to divide Kent into either three or four.

With the Labour government seeking to simplify the byzantine system created by the 1972 Local Government Act and untold alterations since, some of us speculated that the county would be cleaved in twain, with a unitary authority in the east and another in the west. However, those two councils would be hulking, with the best part of a million people each, so that proposal hasn’t even made it to the list of possibilities.

Instead, Kent will be split in three or even quartered - with the authorities not quite agreeing on which one they prefer yet. The political and governance aspects of these proposals have been discussed at length. The cultural differences reflected in the possible methods of dissection for the county, however, are worth thinking about.

To many outsiders, Kent is monolithic; an undifferentiated expanse of rolling hills, country pubs, Range Rovers, received pronunciation and stern private schools – The Shire but with more landed gentry. Natives, however, know the wide contours and diverse character of our green and pleasant land.

East vs West is a long-standing cultural fault line – and hence seemed a natural assumption for the county’s division. It’s not quite Serbs vs Bosnians, but the division is readily apparent to anyone who spends time in one and then the other.

In my own hometown of Dover, Royal Tunbridge Wells sounds almost as foreign as Calais. Sevenoaks? Basically London as far as Easterners are concerned. Some can even detect subtle differences of accent towards the extremes of either side.

The Ladybird book stereotype of Kent does exist largely in Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells, Tonbridge, Malling, and the secluded villages and hamlets between them. Despite abutting the rural edge of outer London in the form of Bromley, they could not feel more different from Medway, Gravesham and Dartford only miles away.

Starting from Medway, coast becomes estuary, country becomes town, and town becomes a conurbation with scant borders or natural boundaries stretching all the way to central London. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those three northern and most urban councils are likely to be hived off into their own unitary authority, presumably to grow further into each other as did the Medway Towns in decades past.

Unlike many other developed countries, Britain’s poverty tends to be evenly distributed in pockets in nearly every settlement in the land until you go very far out into the sticks. There are relatively deprived areas everywhere, but East Kent and the coastal areas more generally are much poorer than the West and interior. Culture, accent, and eventually habit and regional culture are formed largely by economic forces and opportunities – which only politics can shape.

Will the rending of Kent’s historical unity solidify any of these cultural differences? Will our accents diverge like the Northern and Southern drifting apart of the Korean language? Almost certainly not. But without industrial strategy, gargantuan public investment, and more financial autonomy, reorganisation of local councils risks freezing in place the ailments and advantages of every part of the county.

Poor, post-industrial towns on the coast kept afloat by an ever-growing low-paid service sector, punctuated by affluent villages with no public transport, and dormitory exclaves of London in the North and West where a two-up two-down costs an arm and a leg. What awaits us could be much the same as what we have, only more so.

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