By STEVEN DOWNES, Editor, Inside Croydon
Betrayed: workers, residents associations and unions all say they were badly let down by Labour last night
In the end, it was all so sadly predictable. Yet even old cynics didn’t believe it was really going to happen in such a swift and shabby manner until they actually saw it all unfolding before their eyes at Wednesday night’s council budget-setting meeting.
But there we had it: red and blue, playing at being parliamentarians with their little set-piece speeches for a couple of hours, while Katherine Kerswell and her six-figure-salaried council execs sat back and let them have their fun. And when the council chief exec called the tune, the elected representatives (most of them, anyway) did exactly as they were told.
It’s been evident for many years, but the latest Punch and Judy show in the Town Hall Chamber underlined how little real influence our elected representatives hold, even Mayor Jason Perry.
The real power lies in the hands of people who never stand for election.
These are the people who like to call themselves “council officers”, many of whom were behind the borough’s financial crash, their mismanagement and ineptitude contributing to poorly negotiated outsourced contracts, a bullying culture and massive borrowing to fund ill-considered projects like Brick by Brick. The Penn Report confirmed all this.
And it was the same corps of civic servants, overseen by Kerswell and some shadowy Whitehall-appointed over-seers, who drafted up the latest council budget. Just like they’d drawn up the previous two budgets which were passed, but budgets which we are now told were full of errors and financial black holes.
This year’s budget has been months in the planning, mostly done in secret, between Kerswell, her finance director Jane West, and officials at the Department for Levelling Up. When Whitehall whistled, Mayor Perry danced their tune and requested the 15per cent Council Tax hike like the good Tory boy that he is.
Go West: Jane West, the council’s finance director had been conniving at this coup for several months
We got the first glimpse of the coordination of that plan when West issued the Section 114 notice in November – the third time in two years that Croydon had declared itself bankrupt.
Except this S114 was different, unique, in that it predicted that the council would not be able to balance its books in the coming financial year, 2023-2024.
It was in West’s S114 notice that she revealed that Croydon needed a massive debt write-off from the government. A council finance director would not mention such an unprecedented, unthinkable move as a local authority debt write-off unless she knew there was a very strong chance one could be achieved.
And then there was that front-loading of Council Tax rises, a political punishment beating for the borough’s residents, to give Croydon Tories’ banausic Perry a glimmer of a chance of being more than a one-term Mayor. The Tories are planning a zero increase just for the year before the next elections.
Mayor Perry had made it clear a week earlier that his motto of “listening to Croydon” is just a blatant lie.
When Ken Towl and Rachael Baylis stood up to speak in the Town Hall Chamber when presenting the people’s petition on behalf of (then) 25,000 members of the public, Perry didn’t even have the common decency, good manners, or guts, to look them in the eye.
And when, late on Tuesday evening, less than 24 hours before the second budget-setting meeting was due to begin, he revealed that, despite the petitions, despite the democratic defeat he’d suffered the week before, he would make no changes, no concessions, to his budget, Perry simply emphasised that he really has no interest in listening to the people of Croydon. Or democracy.
Banausic: Mayor Jason Perry
And yesterday, after delivering to his political masters at Westminster just what they had required, he lied again. More than once.
“This is not a budget that I wanted to set,” said Perry after setting it, “but it is a budget that will help us to protect vital services for our residents.”
This is more routine disingenuousness from the man who is stripping another £36million from the council’s services in the next year, taking away all funding from the local voluntary sector while handing out more redundancy notices to council workers.
What was really surprising on Wednesday night, though, was quite how swift and abject was the complete capitulation of the Labour group of councillors.
Labour held the line on the first vote. “If the budget isn’t changed, Labour’s opposition to it won’t change,” was a key line from a good speech by Labour leader Stuart King. King called the Kerswell-Perry budget, “Unfair, unjust and unsupportable.”
The first vote saw a near-repeat of the previous week’s outcome: all the Tories – 34 – voting in favour of a 15per cent Council Tax hike, everyone else present – 36 – voting against.
There was still no budget, and the clock was ticking.
Yet less than two hours later, as the councillors emerged after a 40minute recess before a second vote, Callton Young, King’s deputy, was telling someone in a Town Hall corridor, “We’ll do what we can.” It was hardly a convincing call to fight on.
Young knew what Labour’s plan was. It amounted to running up the white flag, despite having a majority in the chamber and, in the 40,000 signatures from two public petitions, the kind of public mandate that Jason Perry has never had.
Croydon’s Labour councillors all opted to abstain on the second round of voting for the budget, allowing Perry’s 15per cent Council Tax hike to pass. “You can always depend on Croydon Labour… to let you down,” one serially disappointed party member told Inside Croydon as they watched the charade.
Croydon will now have the second-highest Council Tax in all of Greater London, with some of the worst services.
‘No to 15%’… for now: Labour councillor Callton Young (second left) marched on Saturday and capitulated on Wednesday
Unlike her two predecessors, CEO Kerswell avoids taking a starring role at these meetings, eschewing the wearing of strange robes and wing collars and waving a gavel about as the pompous Elvery and vain Negrini once did. For that small mercy, we should be grateful.
But because of the procedural demands of civic budget-setting, the council chief executive is obliged to conduct a poll vote on these occasions. It is here that we see Kerswell at her most school ma’am-ish, as if she is reading the register of the Lower IVth from the front of the classroom at a prim girls’ prep.
As she called the councillors by name to vote, one-by-one, Kerswell’s utter contempt for the people elected to be in the chamber was evident.
Kerswell issued an apology, dripping in insincerity, to one councillor after carelessly misreading their name.
Some of the Labour cadre did not attempt to disguise their anger that they were being compelled to abstain, leaving the way open for Perry’s budget to pass. Some sounded quite emotional. “A disgrace,” Karen Jewitt said.
Patricia Hay-Justice appeared furious. Janet Campell, one of Labour’s deputy leaders, also looked to be seething as she abstained.
School ma’am: council CEO Katherine Kerswell (second left, front row) called the tune that Mayor Perry (third left) danced to
Others sounded like they were trying to cover their arses for their spineless climbdown. “Under protest, I abstain,” said the always-thirsty Chris Clark.
When Kerswell came to Tamar Barrett, the young black councillor for Thornton Heath genuinely appeared to be in tears. Her word “Abstain” was heard in the chamber clearly enough.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear that,” said school ma’am Kerswell. “Can you say it again?” Kerswell said.
It seemed a deliberate attempt to be cruel. Barrett choked back her tears and repeated her vote.
Over the previous fortnight, Croydon Labour had piggy-backed on the Public Petition campaign and protests, even putting pressure on the local union branches to stage a march through the town centre last Saturday so that Councillor Young could have a favourable photo-op showing him as some kind of champion of the people.
Yet less than two hours after Labour leader King had told the Chamber, “If the budget hasn’t changed then neither has our opposition to it,” the councillor and his party colleagues withdrew their opposition and instead all abstained, letting the Tories vote through their unpopular, and anti-democratic, measures.
Craven collapse: Stuart King
Perhaps Labour had come to share Jane West’s anxiety that the printing slot for Council Tax notices, booked for the early hours of Thursday morning, might be missed? And then where would we be, eh?
Even the Conservatives were surprised that King and his colleagues folded as soon as they did, expecting that the deadlock would have lasted longer.
“We were expecting them to go through three or four rounds of voting,” one councillor told Inside Croydon. “Take us up towards midnight at least.
“We were a bit taken aback when they caved in as soon as the second vote. Maybe they wanted to get down the pub?”
If that was Labour’s plan, then even that didn’t work. The second round of voting finished at 9.55pm. The Spread Eagle, the pub next to the Town Hall, recently changed its opening hours. Last orders there are now at 9.45 pm. Green Dragon it is then…
Whatever the motivation for Labour’s craven collapse at that point, it was clear that this was a pre-planned capitulation. They had a statement ready to go, appearing on social media barely two minutes after the somewhat world-weary Alisa Flemming, the civic mayor, declared the meeting closed. “It’s been a difficult evening. There isn’t much to say after that,” she said as she turned off her microphone.
In his mea culpa statement, King wrote, “The legal advice from the council’s independent Monitoring Officer makes it absolutely clear that we have a collective and individual responsibility to ensure that we do not act illegally.
“Embroiling the council in a protracted deadlock scenario, with the consequence that a legal budget would not be set is the last thing that residents of Croydon need at this time.
“Whilst Labour wholeheartedly disagrees with the 15per cent Council Tax rise, we could not in good conscience repeatedly block the setting of a legal budget and plunge the borough into a Tory-made financial crisis.”
Other Labour Party members were not so sure. “A wretched result,” said one party official. “Disappointed.”
Another Labour figure was clear that this outcome was entirely the making of the local party’s leadership. “They have sleep-walked into this position and have failed to stand up for the people of Croydon.
“They were happy to appear in photo-ops, but when crunch time came, they went missing in action. Voters will rightly question what the point of voting Labour is.”
Pre-planned capitulation: Labour councillors before the budget vote on Wednesday
And a veteran campaigner told Inside Croydon, “Not for the first time, our elected representatives have let us down.”
The consequence of this budget for both the reds and blues at Croydon Town Hall could be long-lasting. “Labour in Croydon have made themselves even more unelectable, which is some achievement given everything that had gone before.”
Others called for resignations, or cabinet-level sackings, and blamed King and Young, after they’d failed to anticipate Perry’s stick-in-the-mud obduracy and had also failed to come up with any kind of alternative budget or amendments.
In his speech on Wednesday, King had tried to stress how Perry, and the highly paid council officials, had made that impossible, blocking all opposition councillors from trying to find a more consensual way toward an agreed budget. “I wrote to the Mayor immediately after last week’s vote and said I was happy to make myself available to meet him to discuss how to pass a budget that avoided a Council Tax increase that he himself supposedly wants to avoid.
“I got no acknowledgement from the Mayor. No reply from the Mayor. No meeting with the Mayor.” Mayor Perry: not listening to Croydon.
King added that “there’s no desire to find consensus because there is no Conservative political advantage in securing a consensus”.
By Friday morning, there had been no sackings nor resignations from Labour’s front-bench positions, nor any resignations on principle by councillors. But the Council Tax notices are now all safely printed, ready for despatch. Which is nice.
How many residents actually opt not to pay their Council Tax in full, though, could yet disrupt Kerswell and Perry’s plans. “The People’s Petition campaign continues,” one of its organisers told Inside Croydon.
“The people of Croydon can be the opposition to this undemocratic council and the 15per cent Council Tax hike that Labour failed to be.”
Read more: ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’ to start if 15% tax hike goes through
Read more: Here’s the Mayor and 33 Croydon Tory councillors who THREE times voted in favour of hitting you with a 15% Council Tax hike
SIGN THE PETITIONS HERE
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