Green councillors in Kent turned the tables on Reform UK's patriotic gesture by singing extra verses of the national anthem, causing a stir at a council meeting.
After Reform won the most seats in May's local elections, they voted to end every Kent County Council meeting with the singing of God Save the King. But at the end of a five-hour meeting on July 16, Green councillor Mark Hood and his colleague Stuart Jeffery surprised colleagues by continuing past the first verse.
Anthem sing-off
Most councillors sang only the familiar first verse and sat down. Hood and Jeffery then handed out lyric sheets to Labour and Lib Dem members and launched into the next verse. Even after the pre-recorded backing music stopped, they kept reciting until Reform council chair Jeremy Eustace demanded they stop.
Hood said: 'We got to the start of the fourth verse, and the chairman of the council started banging his gavel. I remarked, “But I’ve got another three verses”. He told us both to sit down immediately and that I would be receiving a letter. I haven’t had a letter yet.'
He added: 'When we got to verse six there’s a reference to keeping down the Scots – obviously we would have had to apologise to Cllr Thomas Mallon, who’s one of our Scottish members.'
Reaction and criticism
Council leader Linda Kemkaran called the incident 'attention-seeking behaviour' and added in a post on X: 'Embarrassing for them.'
Hood criticised Reform's new musical mandate as 'plastic patriotism', saying: 'We thought if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it properly.'
The national anthem has six verses in total, with the sixth containing violent imagery against Scottish people and rarely sung in the past century. Typically, only the first verse is sung, though the fifth is sometimes added on formal occasions.
