Site icon Inside Croydon

UKIP candidate given job by council-backed ‘talking shop’

insidecroydon

The Croydon Communities [sic] Consortium, which received a £5,000 grant from the then Tory-run Croydon Council to stage “apolitical” meetings, has appointed the leader of a local branch of UKIP as its new deputy chairman.

Elizabeth Ash presiding over the sparsely attended and deeply unrepresentative annual meeting of her CCC in the council chamber of Croydon Town Hall

This appointment follows the previous deputy chairman being forced to resign in October after he sent racist and UKIP-sympathising messages on Twitter.

CCC held a very poorly attended annual meeting at the Town Hall last week. CCC’s chairwoman, Elizabeth Ash, refused to answer questions about the organisation’s lack of action over the conduct of her former deputy, Clive Locke.

It has been suggested that CCC spent around £500 of its council grant on publicising its annual meeting, which was attended by fewer than 40 residents.

All the positions on the committee were proposed by Ash, as CCC chair, and were elected unopposed.

The controversial tweet, sent by CCC’s Clive Locke, or @Drakeknight, in August

It took Ash, a Sanderstead housewife, four days to confirm the appointment of the CCC’s 2014-2015 committee in a post on their website.

For some reason the news of the CCC’s “election” of Peter Staveley, who is also the chairman of UKIP Croydon Central and South, is buried below older news on the talking shop’s website. Perhaps Ash doesn’t want anyone – especially the funding body, the council – to notice?

Roger Clark, the partner of Ash’s close friend, Janet Stollery, continues as CCC treasurer. Coulsdon resident Stollery also remains on the committee, which saw the election of Mark Johnson, who in May stood as a candidate for the Conservative party in Waddon ward in the local election. So that’s at least one “election” in which Johnson has been successful in 2014.

More tweets from CCC’s Clive Locke. Ash denies that her organisation is aligned with UKIP

The CCC treasurer’s task will surely be to spend as little of the £4,000 or so of council grant which remains. While it seems unlikely that Croydon Council will demand a refund of the public money – as well as being run by people who think nothing of putting racist material out on the internet, CCC also failed to deliver the 20 public meetings in the year which its grant conditions required – any additional funds from the council may be a long time coming while Ash and her cohorts remain in post.

Ash has refused to apologise for the Islamaphobic tweets of her now former colleague, who took two months after issuing the racist messages to stand down from CCC.

“How can you continue to claim to be non-political and say it is a group for all communities?” Bushra Ahmed, a West Croydon resident, has asked CCC on its website. Neither Ash nor any other CCC officers have provided an answer, preferring instead to distract with repeated claims of “harassment”, as if they are in some way the victims.

Staveley is UKIP’s parliamentary candidate in Croydon Central at the General Election in May. “Many communities will not attend a meeting with a UKIP vice-chair who will be standing for UKIP at the next elections,” Ahmed said.

CCC may not be organising many meetings in Shirley any time soon, either.

This morning, Ash was re-united with Clive Locke, as they both attended a small claims court hearing, after CCC failed to pay a local community hall in Shirley a hire fee of less than £90.

The judge ruled that, in the absence of a written contract, CCC would have to pay just £30 for the hire, while Marzia Nicodemi, of Shirley Community Centre, would need to meet the £50 court costs. Nicodemi had been CCC’s secretary for less than one month last year, resigning when she said she could not work with Ash.

 

Coming to Croydon


Exit mobile version