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Mayor acts on a wing and a prayer to give Bishop council role

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WALTER CRONXITE, political editor, suggests that the ceremonial Mayor may have created an unfortunate precedent when she exceeded her Town Hall powers last week

Diversity: Labour councillor Alisa Flemming, the council’s ceremonial Mayor

It wasn’t just the unreformed Newman numpty Karen Jewitt who lacked disciplined self-control at last week’s meeting of the full council.

Entirely out of the blue, Labour councillor Alisa Flemming, the borough’s ceremonial Mayor who chairs council meetings, made an announcement in which she assumed powers that simply do not exist.

Perhaps there was a higher power involved…

Senior councillors relate being surprised when they arrived in the Town Hall Chamber to see the Rt Rev Dr Rosemarie Mallett, the Anglican Bishop of Croydon, present.

Without any advance notice or discussion, the ceremonial Mayor had created a council “chaplaincy”.

Bishop Mallett said that the new chaplaincy recognises that there are “challenging circumstances and issues that quite often need just a word spoken into the situation that may be part of the atmosphere of spirituality or calm”.

Hearing all this for the first time, there were some councillors who were less than calm. The ceremonial Mayor has no powers to establish a role for faith and spirituality to intervene in the council’s affairs.

Chaplaincy: Bishop Rosemarie Mallett

The Bishop did say that a group of volunteers “of all faiths and none” would be invited to join the chaplaincy.

But there was no written report from council officials on the implications and costs of establishing such a role for faith at the Town Hall.

Thus, it was also unclear whether the ceremonial Mayor, or Jason Perry, as the executive Mayor, or the Bishop, or the Church of England or different faith organisations would be deciding who these appointed volunteers would be.

This has left the council with some disentangling to do.  This embarrassment arises directly from the civic Mayor acting without consultation or approval of the council that actually holds the power in the matters Flemming strayed into.

And it may have created an unhappy precedent that could expose the council to some jeopardy as soon as next month. That’s when Flemming discards her Trumptonesque mayoral robes for a final time and is replaced in the Chamber chair by power-crazed right-winger Tony Pearson.

Given Conservative councillor Pearson’s recent dalliances with the far-right Democrats and Veterans Party, appointments issued by mayoral edict risk making Croydon notorious once again, and not in a good way.

Jewitt and Flemming were both Newman loyalists to the bitter end, and beyond. Their conduct in the Town Hall Chamber has exposed, once again, Croydon Labour’s lack of credibility after bankrupting the borough. Labour’s standing is further weakened as the Newman faction has begun to regain control of positions in the local party’s powerful Local Campaign Forum.

Flemming, at least, had the possible excuse last week that she might have been in a state of shock after being bitten by a dog just before the meeting.

So as well as creating the chaplaincy, she also claimed that it is the civic mayoralty which presents the Freedom of the Borough. This is not the case.

Freeman: but will Stormzy even turn up for the council meeting next month?

“Hey, it’s my penultimate council, so so what?” she said as she announced she was nominating Stormzy and 110-year-old Louise Smith for the Freedom of the Borough.

Flemming, rambling on for 25 minutes for a part of the agenda that should have taken just one-fifth of that time, said that she wanted to put on the record that “not the only reason” for her nominating Smith and Stormzy was that she could see “only two people of colour” on the honours plaques of freeman in the Town Hall.

As a Mayor with “communities together theme”, she saw her nominations as marking “the contributions of the generations” in the context of “the diversity of this borough”.

The facts are that, since 1964, the London Borough of Croydon has created 19 freemen and one freewoman in its history. There have been no Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh freemen. That situation is unaltered by Flemming’s nominations. So not that diverse at all, then.

It is still not known whether Stormzy will even make an appearance at the special “Mayor-making” annual meeting at the Town Hall, and so provide Councillor Flemming with her photo-op to assist her bid to be selected as a Labour candidate in a parliamentary seat.

That meeting is due to be held on May 17, when tickets for the public gallery are likely to be in great demand. Those attending had better make the most of it, because that will be one of only four more meetings of the full council that will be held in 2023.

The others are on July 12, October 11 and December 13. Hardly a demanding schedule.

So much for the all-important improved accountability that Croydon’s part-time Mayor, Jason Perry, on £82,000 per year allowances, likes to talk about.

Read more: Councillors agree to chase Negrini for golden handshake cash
Read more: Ex-councillor Hall says: ‘Sorry to be direct, but this is a lie’
Read more: Newman’s defence slips: there’s ‘no evidence’ of wrongdoing


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