Spot the difference: Croydon Labour’s General Election campaign launch in November 2019, with hundreds of party members and supporters gathered off Surrey Street with then shadow chancellor John McDonnell, MP Sarah Jones and candidate Olga Fitzroy…
It started with a damp squib, but as the days have passed, the campaign has got steadily murkier. ANDREW FISHER assesses the first week of the 2024 General Election
… compared to last Saturday, for the 2024 General Election, when just a subdued couple of dozen turned up at Ruskin House. Steve Reed didn’t bother showing up at all
A week ago, in a wet Downing Street, Rishi Sunak, the Conservative Prime Minister, as he was visibly becoming increasingly bedraggled, confirmed there would be a General Election on July 4.
With the Tories 20% behind in the opinion polls, nearly 80 of Sunak’s Tory MPs have decided to stand down rather than defend their seats. Some have referred to these deserters as rats fleeing a sinking ship. By the end of his 90-second oration outside No10, the drenched Prime Minister looked like the captain who would be going down with his vessel.
Once dried off, “How much do you hate your children and grandchildren?” was effectively the question Sunak posed to kick off his General Election campaign.
More on than off: Tory PM Sunak’s campaign has been plagued with missteps
Currently any 18-year-old can choose to volunteer to join the armed forces or reserves. But our Prime Minister would like to make that volunteering compulsory (seemingly confused over the meaning of the word “volunteering”).
In a pitch to misanthropic older voters, Sunak’s ministers went on to the airwaves describing young people as living “in a bubble” and suggesting that they are “detached” from reality.
Casting my mind back more than a quarter of a century to my late teenaged years, I remember spending my time studying for A-levels, visiting my nan, being the first generation of my family to go to university and working part-time to make ends meet. But apparently I should have been playing soldiers on Salisbury Plain or working for free (compulsory volunteering). Still, if you hate the next generation of young people: vote Tory!
The campaign’s first days weren’t much better on the Labour side. Keir Starmer told us his dad was a toolmaker and his mum was a nurse. There’s something weird about a 61-year-old man who keeps telling us what his parents did for a living decades ago. In the absence of any meaningful policy, a piss-poor self-narrated This Is Your Life segment is all we get.
Meanwhile, Labour has been U-turning like, well, Keir Starmer, as it flip-flops on purging Diane Abbott, Britain’s first black woman MP, who was unanimously reselected by her local members in Hackney North back in August 2022. As I wrote for the i paper back in March, the party was trying to do a deal with Abbott where she had the Labour whip restored, but only in exchange for agreeing to stand down as an MP.
It was too much for John McTernan, once a special adviser to Tony Blair, no less, who took to Times Radio and The Daily Telegraph to condemn the party’s treatment of Abbott.
Victim of racism: Diane Abbott
Crediting Abbott with changing the face of the Labour Party and then the face of the Tory Party (as David Cameron sought to make the Conservatives more like modern Britain), McTernan describes the Hackney heroine’s treatment by Starmer’s Labour as “a deeply misconceived, malevolent and wicked operation” intended to humiliate Abbott.
“And it is virtually impossible to detach that from the fact that she is a black woman,” McTernan wrote.
Starmer has managed to get the party condemned by Britain’s leading anti-racist charity and think-tank, The Runnymede Trust, which tweeted, “The double standards in the treatment of Diane Abbott is abhorrent. Racism against black women in the workplace is rife across society; our political class is no exception.”
Rather than dispel this impression of racism and sexism, Starmer’s Labour then decided to purge its working-class Muslim candidate, Dr Faiza Shaheen, in Chingford and Woodford Green.
And to think we have another five more weeks of this, nationally, and here in Croydon, too.
‘Labour gain’: the FT’s flashy polling graphics (they have one for every seat), with polling by Rallings and Thrasher, show Chris Philp losing his seat to Labour
Here, three becomes four, or at least three-and-a-half, as Croydon voters are now split between the parliamentary constituencies of Streatham and Croydon North, Croydon West, Croydon East and Croydon South.
Of the four, it is only Croydon South that looks like a marginal seat, where Tory incumbent Chris Philp – very careful never to mention on his leaflets, videos or emails, except in the smallest of small print, that he is a Conservative candidate – is being challenged by Labour’s enthusiastic Ben Taylor.
Labour has made Croydon South one of its key target seats – with extra resources and activists being shepherded into the constituency.
The Electoral Calculus website is forecasting a comfortable Labour win, though I suspect it may be a bit closer. If Labour does pull off a win, it would be spectacular – a cleansweep in what was historically long a Tory stronghold, from north to south.
The old Croydon Central constituency is now mostly the new Croydon East, where Natasha Irons is the Labour candidate being challenged by the Conservatives’ Jason Cummings – the same Croydon councillor Cummings who has hiked your Council Tax by 21% since April 2023.
Speaking of Croydon councillors standing for election, there are at least three Labour councillors whose names will be on parliamentary ballot papers on July 4:
- Eunice O’Dame (Bensham Manor) is standing in Kingston and Surbiton, the seat of LibDem Leader Ed Davey
- Jess Rich, only just elected earlier this month in Woodside, has been selected for Surrey Heath, currently held by Michael Gove who is standing down at the election – and a seat which the Lib Dems are challenging for
- Chrishni Reshekaron (West Thornton) has been announced as Labour’s candidate in Sutton and Cheam, where again the Tory incumbent, Paul Scully, is standing down and which is a target for the LibDems
If any of these three pull-off a win on July 4, we could have another council by-election on our hands. More elections!
Other Croydon Labour figures selected as candidates in the General Election include Stuart Brady standing in Reigate, which is predicted to flip to Labour (though it is tight) and former Labour council candidate Tom Bowell standing against current Tory cabinet minister Claire Coutinho in East Surrey (where Keir Starmer’s father once owned a tool-making business…), in what Electoral Calculus projects could be a narrow Labour upset.
Final candidates for every seat have to be confirmed by June 7.
You can find out which constituency you live in, all your local candidates, where to vote and all sorts of other useful information by using the handy Inside Croydon widget…
For more information on where to vote on July 4 and for the full list of who is standing for election in your constituency, use our widget here:
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
Fisher is also a regular, welcomed pundit on The Croydon Insider podcast, and is a guest on our latest episode – Why Vote? – answering a range of questions on the election and politics, and which is free to download now from iC’s Patreon page or Spotify. Click here for more info
Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:
- ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others!’
- The shifts below the waterline that require action from all sides
- How myth of shared ownership has made housing crisis worse
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Jess Rich😂