A Preston councillor has revealed he was almost pushed to the floor by a resident whose door he had knocked on during campaigning for a by-election.
Stephen Thompson – the only Reform UK member of Preston City Council – said he was shoved in the back as he walked away from a householder who had called him a “fascist pig” when he declared which party he was from.
The incident happened in the run-up to the poll in the Ashton ward back in October when Cllr Thompson was canvassing on behalf of the Reform candidate.
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A suspect in the case was dealt with via a ‘community resolution’ brokered by Lancashire Police, which means no formal action was taken against him.
Cllr Thompson, who is 69, said in spite of the verbal vitriol from the prospective voter during their brief exchange, the escalation of the encounter to a physical assault was “totally unexpected” – not least because he had never experienced anything like it in more than 15 years as an elected politician.
He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “I knocked on this door…and I said [to the] guy [who answered], ‘Oh, do you support our Reform candidate for the local election?’
“[And he] shouts, ‘Fascist pig – get off my property.’ So I thought, well, I don’t mind being [shouted] at – that’s not the first time it’s happened.
“But as I turned, I’ve just caught out of the corner of my eye, this guy lunge towards me and hit me with two hands and push me – and because of the position of my feet, I very nearly fell over. I could very well have…banged my head into his brick wall.
“Anyway, I managed to do a bit of dancing and got out of it – so I just walked out of the gate, turned around and looked at him – he was late 40s or early 50s, I think – and said, ‘You’ll be seeing the police.’
Cllr Thompson – who represents the Preston Rural North ward and was first elected to the town hall in 2007 – defected to Reform in August, having previously been a Conservative and speeding the preceding 15 months as leader of the Tory group on the city council.
He said he did not believe that he would have been assaulted had he still been a member of his former party.
“It might have just [been] verbal abuse…[although] they probably wouldn’t have called me a fascist. But I think it was because I was from Reform, at the end of the day,” Cllr Thompson mused.
However, he added that he had become aware of people becoming “a lot more tense about politics” for the past 12 months.
Whereas anybody engaged enough with the issues had previously been willing to debate them on the doorstep, now there was a tendency just to denigrate the opposing view, he suggested.
“I think people are a bit more emotional about politics and, in one way, that’s a good thing. But we don’t want it manifesting itself in violence.
“It’s very polarised and there’s a lot of things on social media from both sides that can be quite extreme,
“I think we’re looking at a country now that is on the edge of social breakdown, if we’re not careful,” Cllr Thompson warned.
It was against that backdrop that he asked the ruling Labour group at a meeting of Preston City Council shortly before Christmas whether it would be willing to organise a local police briefing on councillor “safety”, as part of the nationwide Operation Ford initiative – which is designed to protect elected representatives from harassment and intimidation “in connection with their official position”.
Community safety cabinet member Freddie Bailey said the police would usually be present at the routine briefing for candidates held ahead of local elections – the next set of which, in Preston, are currently scheduled for May 2026.
However, he said he would happily contact the constabulary before that point to arrange an event to ensure members were aware of the “the projections that they have” and the police understood the issues facing canvassers.
City council leader Matthew Brown supported that move, but also stressed that all councilors “have a responsibility to tone down the debate”.
While acknowledging Cllr Thompson’s own “good” behaviour, he highlighted concerns about the “aggressive” level of debate that he claimed was occurring at Reform-controlled Lancashire County Council, an authority on which he also sits.
“It’s very personalised and I think we’ve got to move beyond that, because we don’t have that habit in this [city council] chamber that much.
“There’s a responsibility from all of us as leaders to make sure that the kind of debate we have, including with each other, is done in a way that doesn’t personalise things [and] isn’t aggressive,” Cllr Brown said.
Last month, the police met with political group leaders at County Hall – under the Operation Ford umbrella – in the wake of opposition claims that some members of the ruling Reform UK group had engaged in “personal” and intimidatory online attacks against their opponents.
At the time, county council leader Stephen Atkinson said he was “disappointed” that that “informal” gathering had been “politicised”.
County Cllr Atkinson has also committed the authority’s political governance working group to discussing the Local Government Association’s (LGA) ‘Debate not Hate’ campaign in the new year.
A spokesperson for Lancashire Constabulary said of the incident involving Cllr Thomspon: “On 10th October, 2025, we received a report of an assault in Powis Road, Ashton. The victim was…thankfully was not injured.
“A suspect was identified and spoken to. Having considered a number of factors, including the level of injury and that the offender made full admission at the earliest opportunity, it was decided the correct outcome was for the matter to be dealt with by way of community resolution.”
Community resolutions do not result in a criminal record, but they are filed on local police information systems. They can also be disclosed as part of some enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks conducted in relation to job applications.
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