Glen Hart: trades unions asked to boycott council-funded talking shop
Croydon’s trades unionists are being asked to boycott all future meetings of the “Croham Clux Clan” – what presents itself as a community talking shop sometimes also known as the Croydon Communities [sic] Consortium, or CCC.
This follows an order this week from the Borough Commander, Chief Superintendent Andy Tarrant, to Croydon police to not attend future CCC meetings, while Croydon Council is considering taking legal action to secure the refund of the unspent balance of a £5,000 grant of public money given to the body 18 months ago.
One of the strict conditions for receiving the council grant was for CCC to be “apolitical”. But CCC has been exposed as having several UKIP members holding key committee positions. CCC’s deputy chairman was UKIP’s election candidate in Croydon Central, while his predecessor was forced to stand down after issued UKIP-supporting tweets and Islamophobic messages on Twitter.
Glen Hart, a Thornton Heath-based trades union official, attended the last CCC annual meeting in November, where he says he was shouted down and abused.
A member of Croydon’s Trades Unions and Socialist Coalition, Hart told Inside Croydon, “TUSC will have nothing to do with the CCC while it seems to harbour UKIP members, and it would encourage other residents to do the same.
“Croydon Council should withdraw any financial support.”
Croydon Council wrote to CCC chairwoman Elizabeth Ash in December demanding the refund of an unspent, one-year grant. The council is now considering legal action.
Ash has been briefing anyone who’ll listen (and they’d need to be prepared to listen for a very long time once Ash gets going) that the questions raised about CCC’s – and her own – conduct are all “personal”.
A senior Katharine Street figure dismissed this. They told Inside Croydon, “The CCC committee started off not being honest with the Croydon public, with some of them denying that they were members of UKIP, for instance.
“But now they need to be honest with themselves – it can hardly be a ‘personal’ matter when the Met Police, Croydon Council and local trades unions all agree that they do not want to have anything to do with the organisation or the people behind it. Community inter-action requires a high level of trust.”
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