A complaint has been filed with Croydon Council over the conduct of Coulsdon resident Peter Morgan, accusing him of using multiple aliases and bogus addresses to register a greater volume of opposition to the recently conducted 20mph zone consultation.
Peter Morgan: kicked out of UKIP
Morgan is a member of the road lobby group the Alliance of British Drivers. He had his party membership of UKIP suspended – and eventually revoked – in part, at least, for running a string of Twitter accounts under multiple aliases, some ostensibly official party accounts, but without approval or sanction.
Previously, Morgan was kicked out of the Croydon Conservatives when he was discovered to be a member of UKIP, without declaring this split loyalty, breaking party rules.
Now Morgan has been accused of acting anti-democratically, by submitting multiple objections to the 20mph zone consultation using false identities or by impersonating individuals without their permission.
The complaint was filed with council officials by activists from the Croydon Cycling Campaign, strong advocates for better-policed speed limits on London’s roads.
“It’s not that anyone wants to deny Peter Morgan his say and opinion,” a source familiar with the situation told Inside Croydon. “But it is anti-democratic for one or two individuals to try to influence public policy decisions by lodging serial statements under bogus identities. It is simply dishonest.”
Morgan’s multiple identities have been unearthed by some patient digital detective work around the publicly available information on the 20mph zone consultation, related online petitions, Freedom of Information requests and message boards relating to the recent closure to motor traffic of Norbury Avenue.
Forssell? An elusive striker, but not Peter Morgan
One individual to have lodged multiple comments on Croydon road schemes is called Mark Black, giving an address in Norbury. A check of the electoral roll online shows that there is a Mark Black who has lived at an address on Newlands Road, Norbury, for seven years. So Mark Black may actually exist. Whether Mark Black of Newlands Road has posted comments on the Croydon road schemes knowingly, though, is less easy to determine.
The contact email address given by Mark Black is norburyave@qxad.info.
The qxad.info suffix takes you to a web presence PJM2.net. PJM are Peter J Morgan’s initials.
Using the web tool whois reveals that PJM2.net is owned by someone called Dwayne Forsell. The address given for Forsell is exactly the same Newlands Road address in Norbury where Mark Black is registered as living. But a check of electoral roll information for Dwayne Forsell finds no one of that name registered at that address. Indeed, there is no one called Dwayne Forsell on the register.
The Dwayne Forsell recorded as the owner of PJM2.net may exist in virtual reality, however, since they provide a contact email address of dw@swr-uk.net.
The swr-uk.net domain is owned by Sense with Roads. Sense with Roads is well-known as Morgan’s anti-bus, anti-cyclists, anti-pedestrian organisation. The layout of the sensewithroads website is remarkably similar to that used at pjm2.net.
Google “Dwayne Forsell” and you get some interesting returns, including discovering that five years ago he was campaigning for a bypass in Boston, Lincolnshire, some 150 miles north of Norbury. A blogger there picked up the connections with the Association of British Drivers, Sense with Roads and Peter Morgan, and the odd interest of south Londoners in a road-building scheme hours away up the A1.
Stephen Ward: “scandalous”, but not Peter Morgan
There are other names on the Boston blog page which crop up in recent Croydon road consultations, the likes of Femi Owusu, James Mason, Paul Morgan and Ishmael Bangura – all of whom claim to be members of Sense With Roads – as well as Peter Morgan, plus Stephen Ward, Mark Bristow, Kathleen Betts and Storm Dinsey.
The coincidences mount up: Morgan is known to operate a Twitter account and website supporting his campaign, under the slogan SayNoTo20. So far, so lawful.
The saynoto20.org.uk website address was included on stickers fly-posted – without permission and therefore unlawfully – around Croydon. The web address links to an electronic copy of the poster, at a pjm2.net-hosted location. The graphic design of the posters and that on the SayNoTo20 website run by Morgan are identical.
The fly-poster efforts drew a public reaction from Morgan, who in a round-robin letter to councillors and local media, including Inside Croydon, accused the council of sending out “stormtroopers” to remove the unlawfully posted stickers – which were cleaned up at considerable public expense.
Peter Morgan and Dwayne Forsell appear together supporting other road campaigns, too, their names listed along with others purporting to be Sense with Roads members. And James Mason.
Of course, there may be a real James Mason living in Croydon who backs Sense with Roads’ policies. The name of the late Hollywood actor also occurs on the petition against 20mph zones in Croydon that was raised by Vidhi Mohan, a Tory councillor in Fairfield ward – another ward unaffected by the proposals in the council consultation.
Also signed up to that petition is Janet Stollery (“Slow speeds cause pollution, wreck transport schedules and damage the economy,” is Stollery’s inexpert opinion). Stollery does actually exist, and her recent public actions have seen her regularly line-up behind her chum Morgan.
Like Morgan, Stollery was a member of UKIP but has recently parted company with that political party. She remains an official of the controversial Croydon Communities [sic] Consortium, where Morgan has been an active member involved with the organisation of some meetings. CCC claims to be an “apolitical” and “community” organisation, and it has provided a platform for Morgan’s SayNoTo20 campaign. In the meantime, CCC has refused to repay the unspent balance of a £5,000 council grant given to it in 2013.
Like Morgan, CCC’s Stollery lives in Coulsdon, well away from the proposed 20mph zones in the north of the borough; there are roads in Coulsdon which have operated 20mph speed limits successfully for many years, apparently without hindering the human rights of Stollery or Morgan.
James Mason: a bit Hollywood, but not Peter Morgan
Earlier this year, Stollery teamed up with Morgan to demand the prompt staging of a council by-election in another ward in the north of the borough – Selhurst – which as a result of their actions saw the poll staged at additional cost to Croydon’s Council Tax-payers, estimated to amount to at least £15,000. Stollery and Morgan’s UKIP candidate polled fewer than 150 votes.
Stollery is now the chairman of the previously well-respected Old Coulsdon Residents’ Association.
Although Stollery does exist, she appears to be less active on the road campaigns than Peter Morgan, Dwayne Forsell, or Mark Black.
Mark Black has most recently appeared lodging a Freedom of Information request with Croydon Council asking about the conduct of the 20mph zone consultation. If it can be proven that Morgan has placed this FoI request using someone elses’s identity without permission, he may have been acting unlawfully.
In its advice to local authorities, the Information Commissioners’ Office states, “To be valid under the Act, [a FoI] request must include the requester’s real name… You may decide to check their identity if it is clear they are using a pseudonym or if there are legitimate grounds for refusing their request and you suspect they are trying to avoid this happening, for example because their request is vexatious or repeated.”
Inside Croydon is keen to hear from Mark Black of Newlands Road, Norbury, to confirm whether the FoI request was submitted by him or with his full knowledge and authorisation.
Because Peter Morgan has been discovered to have used other addresses and identities without permission. One home address given by an apparent objector to a local road scheme has been discovered to be that of someone who describes themselves as a former family friend of Morgan. They say that they are “absolutely livid” that personal details have been abused in this manner without permission.
As a result of the mounting suspicions surrounding Peter Morgan and the digital identities which lead back to his websites, cycling campaigners have written to Croydon Council officials asking that a thorough check of the electoral roll is conducted against the identities and addresses used by those who responded to the 20mph zone consultation.
All of which will take additional time, and additional costs for Croydon’s Council Tax-payers. Much of that will be thanks, once again, to Peter Morgan.
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If he is using the identity of a former family friend to misrepresent their views, I’d call that “identitiy theft”.
Councillors local to the Norbury Avenue area must take care when collecting feedback on the trial to ensure that it isn’t coming from one of Peter Morgan’s many aliases.
ABD are barking. Try this gem from their latest London region newsletter.
“Before 1930, the UK had a nationwide 20mph speed limit and the death toll on British roads was appalling —
about 7,300 per year. It’s now only about 1,900 each year. The 30mph and higher limits were introduced in 1930 and the death toll then started to fall when it had been rising before.”
Yep, couldn’t have had anything to do with compulsory driver testing introduced in 1934, or the introduction of seatbelts in cars introduced from around 1950 or drink drive laws in 1966. It was raising the speed limit wot done it.
The thing is there is no single direct causal factor for road deaths. You can keep saying “Speed Kills” as often as you like but in pure physics terms it isn’t true. In terms of pure physics what actually kills people is sudden changes in momentum.
This is why 20 zones have done nothing to stop people being killed by HGVs or injured on Brighton Busses… the momentum is mass X velocity.
If the masses are very large the change in momentum is very big even if the velocities are very small. There are clearer examples of a change in velocity not making much change to the KSI rate … for example when the USA started to abolish its 55mph limit the number of road deaths decreased rather than increased … so it doesn’t follow that lowering or increasing the speed limit of its self will reduce road deaths. It depends on many other factors.
Of course if you reduce all velocities you will reduce the potential momentums involved but you are doing this by smaller momentums to exist for a longer period of time by increasing the the travel time… even if this works it’s not a highly imaginative method of reducing road deaths, is it? And it’s not a whole solution either. 600 cyclists a year injured after being knocked off by open car doors … a classic example of the mass of an object being a more important factor than the velocity. If you could get people to buy smaller cars less people would be killed by cars …many cars are much bigger than they are needed to be. This is silly …and …well, anti-social.
You need to brush up your physics Anthony. It is energy that causes damage, not momentum. The kinetic energy of a moving object is described as ½mv² – the energy increases with the square of the velocity. An car moving at 40mph has four times the energy of of one moving at 20mph, and any object it collides with has to deal with four times the energy. If the object is a human being they’ve a good chance of being pushed away and suffering bumps and bruises at 20mph. At 40 mph the impact is likely to be devastating. Your ‘classic’ bicycle example is absolute nonsense. It’s the speed of the bike and person on it that causes most damage, not their weight.
You might remember studying the Highway Code when you did your driving tests, and that stopping distances increase with the square of the velocity. That’s because you are dissipating that kinetic energy through the brakes. And another reason why slower streets are safer: drivers have a much greater chance of stopping.
Yes you can use Newton’s 2nd law but it assumes an elastic collision (that is that all Kinetic Energy is preserved within the system). Collisions may also be inelastic (KE is lost in various ways – through deformation of both the objects or through heat). In the real world most collisions are partially inelastic. The cyclist hitting the car door is a good example of a completely elastic collision. The door doesn’t deform, the cycle doesn’t deform …so all the momentum is transferred to the cyclist who goes flying instead. Of course you don’t have to be too bright to work out in an inelastic collision between a car and a pedestrian which of them is most likely to be the inelastic one.
Strange that. Maybe people started to learn how to cross a road!
1) It is possible to live in Croydon and not be on the public version of the electoral register. So the fact someone’s not on the list doesn’t mean they don’t exist …although of course they may not.
2) While online forms of the kind used by the Council are open to abuse I fail to see what possible purpose it would serve to put in an FOI request under an alias?
3) “The name of the late Hollywood actor also occurs on the petition against 20mph zones in Croydon that was raised by Vidhi Mohan, a Tory councillor in Fairfield ward – another ward unaffected by the proposals in the council consultation”
I signed Vidhi’s petition and I replied to the Council’s consultation. I regularly drive through the area that will become 20mph regularly so I fail to see how I will be “unaffected by the proposals”? As far as I am aware so long as I don’t decieve the council or anyone else about where I live (I’m not on the public electoral register but here’s a clue – Vidhi is one of my local councillors) I can’t see anything wrong with replying to the consultation. Legally the Council is supposed to consult with the whole of Croydon as far as I am aware… the fact that the Council has only put signs up on the roads doesn’t mean as far as I know that drivers can’t respond to the consultation. It is open to everyone who uses those roads.
The CCC is a load of nonsense. It is not possible to run any large organsiation and for it not to take on the political identity of the people who run it. If it really had no political dimension at all what is it for?
There’s big difference between a statutory consultation and the 20mph “local referendum” that the Labour administration have been undertaking.
A statutory consultation has to be open to all sorts of parties, and has to be able to show that certain views have been taken in to account, but is in no way a popularity contest. Quality of response (and who’s responding, such as emergency services, bus operators & various other statutory bodies) counts for more than quantity. In the case of a 20mph zone, a council can pretty much impose these at will should it wish to, because from a statutory point of view, there are few objections likely to hold water. That’s pretty much what Southwark and Lambeth did – get democratic consent, of a sort, via electoral manifesto, and then go right on ahead and implement.
The zone-by-zone 20mph vote then, isn’t a statutory matter at all, but rather something Croydon Labour made a commitment to in their 2014 electoral manifesto and are now making good on. There will presumably be a statutory consultation later, but as in a planning application, individual responses don’t tend to count for a whole lot there.
I seem to remember “Mark Black” being suspected of being associated with Peter before 2010. Croydon seems to suffer from impersonation as your report on letters circulating during the General Election campaign detailed. Those letters may have influenced a very close election result but I don’t suppose there has been any formal complaint made.
Can you remember, David: what were Peter Morgan’s views on the tram system for Croydon?
Sorry cannot remember but I would suspect they were negative as Peter is consistently pro car and against anything he sees as favouring other forms of transport. I do remember explaining to him that children have a much greater chance of surviving impacts with cars if speeds are under 30mph and 20mph zones can help in this respect.
Why all this furore over Peter Morgan? Let’s face it, he is to Croydon’s political scene what “Eddie The Eagle” was to Great Britain’s chances of winning a medal in the Winter Olympics in 1988. Think more carefully instead about the consequence of the Westfield construction, and the implication of thousands upon thousands of cars descending upon Croydon containing people who want to shop there. And roads that just wont be able to accommodate them. Then we really will be travelling at 20 mph……..everywhere.
There’s not much hope of stopping Westfield now, but there’s still hope that we can influence the way people travel there significantly enough to prevent the carmageddon you describe.
Peter Morgan is using underhand tactics to create the impression of a strong body of residents in favour of this petrol-head vision of the future, where no such body exists.
He is fabricating residents and stealing identities to achieve this. If he succeeds in convincing local politicians that residents want more cars and less of everything else, then that’s what will happen. He’s been practising his dark arts for long enough to be getting quite good at it, and only by exposing him can it be combated. This article may only be scratching the surface of what he’s been up to over the past decade.
Whereas of course Steve Reed’s solution of having a consultation where only residents in the selected area are enouraged to reply isn’t dodgy at all!
“Consultation on 20mph zones, deadline 24th June. Have your say on Croydon Council’s 20mph proposal for residential roads in Croydon North. The consultation is open to residents and businesses within the proposal area”
So anyone else who uses the street can get lost? This is a blatantly gerrymandered consultation in which the opinions of drivers are going to be totally excluded by definition. I don’t know why he doesn’t go down to an even more micro scale and do one street/house at a time.
The only person shown to have been gerrymandering on this consultation has been Peter Morgan, of ABD.
Are you a member of ABD, Tony?
Yes, … I thought there must be a lobby group for motorists … as I am a motorist who does long distances sometimes I should join one … they may be full of bonkers petrolheads and UKIPpers who believe that there should be no speed cameras or traffic calming at all and that all cycle lanes should be abolished etc … but sane motoring lobby groups are few and far between …for some reason…. so for the mean time the ABD will have to do. I’m open to offers if someone can find a motoring lobby group that isn’t totally insane. Also I would prefer you to use all three syllables as “Tony” makes me sound like a war criminal.
Given that you’re an unapologetic liar and given your regular abusiveness, you should be grateful that you’re still allowed to comment on these pages at all, and that you’re not referred to by the four-letter word you’re better known as.
Well I suppose they could have had a borough-wide consultation but then they were under a lot of pressure from the Conservatives to have smaller voting areas, rather than larger. Conservatives launched a petition to have the votes done on a street-by-street basis. Now you’ll get to have your say on an area making up a fifth of the borough, whereas under Conservative plans you would only have got a say on your own street. Maybe take it up your complaint with them?
Nothing whatsoever to do with Steve Reed. He is the MP & has had little or no involvement in this one. This is a council policy which was in the manifesto for the Labour council administration. Like it or not, they won the last council election and are making good on their promise.
The majority of households in Croydon North own cars (2011 census data had it around 60% of households with 1 or more cars or vans, 40% with none), so plenty of drivers’ opinions have surely been taken in to account.
“Nothing whatsoever to do with Steve Reed. He is the MP & has had little or no involvement in this one”
Yes, it is. I quote the words from his website deliberately because they say that us drivers cannot respond to the Council online consultation if we do not live or have a business in the area whereas the Council website says nothing of the kind. Mixed messages… one for Tony Soprano down the town hall I think. Do I count as a “business in the area” if I’m driving through the area on business or …do I actually have to physically own or rent a property for business in the area? This is unclear?
“Nothing whatsoever to do with Steve Reed.” And therefore Reed, as with so many other things, gets it wrong.
You’re citing an unreliable source to suit your own case.
For God’s sake forget Peter Morgan and focus on the real issues here. You at least acknowledge my point, so just let Morgan disappear up his own….. well you know what. Get real, and instead of concentrating on this ridiculous one man vendetta use your influence sensibly against the collective force. One thing is assured, that the collective forces wont take any notice of Morgan’s views when the decision is taken. Morgan’s influence on Croydon’s politics is less than Bernard Manning’s contribution was to ballroom dancing.
“The Collective Force” ? Who is that?
You might have voted for one of them last year. Not many people in Croydon bothered.
Mr AE Miller may wish to take up his concerns about consultation with the Conservatives (through one of his local councillors, Vidhi Mohan) and the ABD (in the person of his new best friend, Peter Morgan).
Both have petitions running against 20mph and want people to be consulted on the basis of the roads where they live, rather than in “zones”. However, since Mr Miller lives in Fairfield – i.e. not on a road in “Croydon North” – his pleas might fall on deaf ears (despite recent indications that Peter has more than one pair) .