Party members were told this afternoon: ‘As a result of complaints… that require investigation, the selection process in Croydon East has been paused with immediate effect’. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
On hold: parliamentary selection candidate Joel Bodmer with Labour colleague, and Anonyvoter supplier, Maddie Henson
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has this afternoon been forced to cancel Saturday’s parliamentary selection showdown for the new Croydon East constituency.
According to one veteran Labour Party official, “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
Inside Croydon has been reporting for months serious and mounting concerns about deliberate attempts by some party officials to favour one particular candidate over all others, as Labour’s London Region imposed officers on the new CLP – Constituency Labour Party – without any membership vote, and excluded members from the shortlisting process altogether.
Anyone nominated to be Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Croydon East ahead of the next General Election is likely to become the area’s MP and have a job for life.
This morning, veteran politics journalist Michael Crick tweeted a thread making a series of shocking allegations of “suspected fraud” and “allegations of large-scale tampering with membership lists” in Croydon East’s selection.
“Several complaints already made to Labour national and London region HQs, especially over use of online votes,” Crick revealed.
Inside Croydon has previously reported how one candidate, Joel “Bodger” Bodmer, had been given access to the supposedly confidential CLP membership list even before the selection process was declared open, in a clear breach of the rules.
Croydon East Labour members have meanwhile related suspicious delays and inconsistencies with the way access to the Anonyvoter remote voting system had been handled.
One resident has also told of how their whole family was approached by one of the shortlisted candidates and encouraged to attend the final selection meeting, being assured that their membership fees would be paid to enable them to vote – even though Labour rules dictate that no one can participate in selection votes if they have not been a party member for at least six months.
Card tricks: some former Labour members were approached and encouraged to take part in the Croydon East selection
What’s more, the resident who was approached by the Labour parliamentary hopeful is actually a member of the Conservative Party.
This afternoon, some Croydon East members – though not all – received a brief and blunt note from an anonymous official at Labour’s London region head office.
“Dear Members,” it says.
“We are writing to inform you that as a result of complaints received by the party that require investigation, the selection process in Croydon East has been paused with immediate effect.
“This means that the hustings meeting due to take place on Saturday has been cancelled and any votes already cast have been voided.
“We will be in touch with further information in due course following the conclusion of our investigation.”
“This is what comes of handing the running of a selection to unelected officers who, by definition, are not trusted by members. Any process not subject to scrutiny is liable to corruption,” said one angry Croydon East member, and iC contributor, Ken Towl.
Croydon Momentum tweeted, “If you want to fix something, don’t get the most useless people imaginable on board to help you do it.”
The three CLP officials imposed on Croydon East members by party headquarters, without ever considering having anything as democratic as a membership vote, included Carole Bonner as chair and “procedures secretary” and treasurer Mark Henson.
Under suspicion: Simon Hall has been suspended by Labour for almost three years, pictured here with his former ward colleague Carole Bonner
Bonner is a former Croydon councillor who used to be a ward colleague of Simon Hall.
Hall, together with Tony Newman, is one of the ex-council bosses who have been suspended by the Labour Party since 2021 pending investigation for their part in the financial collapse of Croydon Council.
Henson, meanwhile, is the owner of the small IT business which has supplied the controversial Anonyvoter voting system to the Labour Party. This deal was conducted by the party’s General Secretary, David Evans, without any competitive tendering. Hanson’s wife and business partner, Maddie Henson, is a Croydon councillor and is up for selection as a London Assembly election candidate.
It is Anonyvoter that the Croydon East Labour Party was using to conduct the parliamentary candidate selection, and it is Anonyvoter which has been at the centre of growing complaints to political journalist Crick for more than a year.
Crick has been tweeting from an account @TomorrowsMPs, a mammoth effort to keep tabs on who all the political parties, not just Labour, are looking to inflict on the electorate at the next General Election.
This morning, Crick dropped this bomb on the Twittersphere regarding Croydon East: “Huge problems, including suspected fraud and allegations of large-scale tampering with membership lists in this Labour selection.
“Several complaints already made to Labour national and London region HQs, especially over use of online votes.”
Crick added that he “has also seen evidence the membership list supplied by London office to the four contenders (so they can canvass members) has been tampered with. Dozens of members have had home addresses changed in ways which suggest systematic, not human error”.
He wrote: “The implications of the online voting story in terms of data protection breaches could be huge, and hugely costly for Labour.”
Crick cited an example of a Labour member who has written complaining that a postal or online vote had been requested in her name, but that she didn’t apply for one as she intended to go to Saturday’s selection meeting in person.
Critic: Michael Crick has found much wrong with British politics’ secretive selections
“The application used [an] email address which didn’t belong to her,” Crick wrote.
“The member’s complaint continued: ‘I am also enquiring if I am the only person this has happened to as this has serious implications regarding vote-rigging’.”
And Crick reported: “A successfully selected candidate from a different Labour region (so not London) has texted me to say: ‘The online voting is dodgy as hell.’ And the candidate added that with their selection: ‘There was an unbelievable discrepancy between votes on the day and online votes’.”
Inside Croydon has been told by several sources that in Croydon East, a CLP with around 600 members in total, more than 200 postal/online votes had already been submitted by the start of this week.
Crick’s Twitter thread made some serious suggestions to Keir Starmer, the Labour Party leader, including re-running a number of the selections that have already been completed using Anonyvoter.
Crick called for the suspension of online voting in Labour selections, for a senior lawyer to conduct an urgent inquiry into the handling of the Croydon East selection, and “immediately freeze all online voting data history so that it can’t be destroyed or tampered with”.
Labour has had repeated difficulties in complying with the law on data protection, including failing to act when some of its most senior members in Croydon were implicated in handling data hacked from this website in 2021.
“For more than a year I have been aware of huge concerns with Labour about the online voting system being used fraudulently, usually to benefit ‘favoured’ candidates,” Crick wrote.
“Labour needs to find out who tampered with the local membership list and bring in the police to check if data laws were breached.”
Caught out: the message sent from Labour’s London Region this afternoon, cancelling Saturday’s Croydon East selection meeting
As well as the early release of the Croydon East membership list to candidate Bodmer and the approach to former members to encourage them illicitly to take part in the selection vote, Inside Croydon has also heard repeated complaints from legitimate members about the difficulty in even accessing the postal/online ballot system.
Some members of long-standing have even discovered, by chance, that they have been erased from the Croydon East CLP membership list – with the possibility of being denied any vote in the selection at all.
As one loyal reader put it: “I applied for a postal vote. My wife also applied. Neither of us received the initial email from the procedures secretary, but thankfully we were forwarded it by another member.
“My wife received her ‘postal ballot’ (the online Anonyvoter email) immediately, even though she applied three days after me. I had to chase mine, and only then did it arrive.
“My wife received postal correspondence from all the candidates. I received none. I thought this was odd.
“When a candidate knocked on my door, they recognised me and asked if I had left the party because my name was not on the official membership list they had been given.”
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
Read more: The fix is in: Labour excludes members from Croydon selection
Read more: Croydon Labour’s ‘hidden primary’ will choose a new MP
Read more: Labour’s NEC imposes selection shortlist on Croydon East
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Without a full independent investigation, including a referral to the police and the Information Commissioner’s Office, the person selected by Labour to fight the next General Election for the Croydon East seat will forever be tainted by allegations of sleaze.
For that reason alone, Croydon Labour can’t investigate this latest example of dodgy dealings.
As their record in not progressing the suspension of Newman and Hall demonstrates, along with the quiet retirement of Scott and Butler, and the whole shady business of the Fairfield Halls project and the Brick by Brick fiasco, they can’t be trusted
Croydon Labour’s inability to move on from a culture of corrupted governance is bad news for Croydon.
The local party needs investigating by an independent person to understand and to deal with this problem. Local party corrupted governance was a key factor in taking the council into bankruptcy.
Senior Croydon Labour politicians associating themselves with the hacking of Inside Croydon underlined a party far too comfy with inappropriate practice.
Croydon Labour needs replacing as the progressive choice for Croydon voters. It is not healthy for local democracy to have such a compromised political party as the main opposition, when it is in no place to hold others to account.
I agree. There is a nasty stink arising from Labour in Croydon. The source of it needs to be dealt with. Croydon deserves a better opposition than the one it has at the moment.
Many Labour members must be despairing at all the shenanigans that have happened since the Borough went bust.
A party which doesn’t learn from its past mistakes and reform it ways does not deserve to ask voters for their votes.
Is the London Assembly election also being halted? Even if there is no intended impropriety it is surely a conflict of interest to have Maddie Henson’s votes counted by her husband Mark…?!
I don’t know why expensive online voting is being used for constituency level selections at all. Historically it’s always been done at in person meetings. The reason for this was not just technological but it forced members who wanted to participate to attend the hustings which levelled the playing field for candidates with different levels of financial resources and also encouraged members to use their brains and select the person with the best campaign strategy as well as policies. Added to which the candidate and their footsoldiers have to get on. Doing it in person builds these bonds… Or I think that’s the theory.
With the exception of those with serious health conditions… Everyone should be voting in person and there should be proper hustings with the amount of time given to each candidate to speak equal and closely timed. There used to be very strict rules about these things… What happened to them?
London Assembly election is also halted!
Anyone else reckon Bodger knew he wasn’t going to win the member vote, so has done everything he can to make the vote as dodgy as possible in order that London Labour cancels the vote altogether and imposes him as the candidate?
Feels very “House of Cards”.
Very worrying.
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