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Careful what you wish for: Town Hall deadlock would be chaos

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CROYDON COMMENTARY: With four months until the local elections and first-ever Mayoral election in Croydon, here local Conservative Party member BEN GADSBY says that the voting outcome is not a foregone conclusion

Campaign slogans: May’s local elections could be slipping out of the reach of Croydon’s Conservatives

In 16 weeks, Croydon will have its first-ever directly elected Mayor.

People have stopped celebrating the referendum result (was there a party? If so, I wasn’t invited. No idea why), and started thinking about what it will all mean in practice.

Some people aren’t just imagining chaos, they seem to be hoping for it – or at least, Geoff James from Kenley seems to be. His article this week says that, “An elected Mayor who is not aligned to the majority party could be the best result for Croydon.”

The “could” in that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Imagine. Croydon enjoys the best possible result as Conservative Mayor Perry, elected on a promise to stop overdevelopment in the south of the borough, is repeatedly stuck with whatever the Labour majority planning committee approves.

Or maybe Croydon rejoices as Labour Mayor Shawcross grapples with the finances, comes up with a painful but pragmatic proposal to tackle the challenges, and then has to deal with Conservative councillors deciding they don’t like some of those cuts, actually, thank you very much.

Split vote: could Val Shawcross as a Labour Mayor manage a Tory majority of councillors?

I’ve seen this in action in Tower Hamlets, where they had an independent Mayor and a Labour majority council from 2010 to 2014, and I can assure you, London’s most chaotic (and corrupt) council is not one we want to copy.

If you want both parties to work together cross-party more (I certainly do), a 35-35 tie where there are opportunities every week for the purest political manoeuvring is probably the worst possible outcome. Although, yeah, I guess it “could” still be the best result for Croydon…

Fortunately, all this talk of a split decision is probably moot as we seem to be on course for a clear result. I know the Inside Croydon editorial line is that Labour’s mismanagement means they are screwed in May, but generally national politics plays a much bigger part than local issues in the outcome, and I think many people are underestimating the odds that Labour actually goes forwards in this election. National opinion polls in the last couple of days have had Labour 10 or 11 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives.

It’s never sensible to assume that January opinion polling will reflect the outcome in May, especially as this must surely be the nadir of the Johnson government (though I said that on Monday… and several times before Christmas…).

But as a straw in the wind, Electoral Calculus thinks that based on recent polling Labour would take Chris Philp’s Croydon South parliamentary seat handsomely and be about 20 votes behind in a Purley Oaks and Riddlesdownward vote. You’d have to imagine this represents a near-impossible ceiling for Labour, but with the Conservatives defending a wafer-thin eight-vote majority for the seat they hold in the split Addiscombe East ward, Labour gains are more than possible.

Geoff also said “something has to change”.

And here was me thinking the whole point of the DEMOC vote was that things had changed, Hallelujah?

Inside Croydon’s hashtag #ABitLessShit might be optimistic.

Sixteen weeks to go!

Croydon Commentary is a platform for all our readers to offer their personal views about what matters to them in and around the borough. To submit an article for publication, just email us at inside.croydon@btinternet.com, or post your comment to an Inside Croydon article that has caught your attention

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