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Councillor Woodley misses out in Thornton Heath selection

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The members of the local Labour party made their voices heard again last night, when Louisa Woodley was not re-selected in Thornton Heath ward to stand in next May’s Town Hall elections.

Louisa Woodley: not selected in Thornton Heath

Woodley is the latest sitting councillor to come up short in Labour’s selection process, following the likes of Paul Smith in West Thornton.

From five current Croydon councillors on the Thornton Heath short-list, selected at a meeting open to all 60 Labour members in the ward were councillors Pat Clouder and Matthew Kyeremeh, plus Karen Jewitt, at present councillor in Woodside ward, but who was not re-selected there.

Donna Gray, currently a councillor in Bensham Manor but not selected there, was on the Thornton Heath short-list but withdrew ahead of the meeting. 

Woodley’s rejection by the membership is doubly embarrassing, for her party as much as the language teacher personally. Last year, Woodley ran a successful, if losing, London Assembly campaign in which she out-polled the Tories in Croydon.

And this weekend, Woodley is one of four short-listed candidates when Croydon Central members select their candidate for the 2015 parliamentary election. In her lobbying for members’ votes here, Woodley has tried to make a positive out her lack of support from any trades unions.

The ward selections have also presented the local Labour leadership with an unintended difficulty, with fewer black and minority ethnic candidates being chosen in wards in the north of the borough – which has one of the UK’s highest proportion of BME populations – than in 2010.


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