It has been slim pickings for surprises in Croydon’s election campaign so far, but tonight’s rally for a Taking The Initiative Party candidate might just cause a stir, reports our political editor, WALTER CRONXITE
Defection: until she declared for TTIP, Donna Murray-Turner was regarded as a potential future Labour candidate
Probably the biggest surprise of the General Election campaign in Croydon so far, possibly the only surprise, was the inclusion on the candidates’ declaration lists of Donna Murray-Turner as running for the Taking The Initiative Party in Croydon West.
In what has so far been a ho-hum, hum-drum election campaign (only 17 days left to go, folks!), Murray-Turner’s defection from the Labour Party caught many by surprise.
It was around that time that Murray-Turner released a highly emotional, very personal and somewhat distressing video which has been widely seen on social media. In her video, recorded in her car, Murray-Turner made serious allegations against a senior figure in TTIP, and accused the party of having inadequate safeguarding policies.
Murray-Turner said that TTIP had shared confidential information with the subject of a complaint. This, she said, “weaponised” the complaint and put the victim at serious risk of further harm.
“They’re not a safe pair of hands,” Donna Murray-Turner said of TTIP just two years ago.
“So hear what I’m telling you lot,” Murray-Turner, clearly agitated, said at one point in her video.
“You see TTIP? And organisations like them? Watch them. Do your research my people. Keep yourselves safe from harm. These people: they like to show up, they like to pimp off of our poverty. I’m not saying that their intentions are not right, but if you don’t have the right framework, you can’t offer people an alternative life.
“We’ve got to scrutinise our own. Just because they are black doesn’t mean they are safe. What qualifications do they have? And I don’t just mean paper qualifications. What is some of their work?
Big event: Anthony KIng is the host of tonight’s election event, organised by TTIP
“A hundred percent I’m not surprised by their hypocrisy. A hundred percent.”
So Donna Murray-Turner now being a high-profile parliamentary candidate for that very same Taking The Initiative Party is quite the U-turn.
Being a candidate for Parliament is a bit of a step up for Murray-Turner, who has never before held any elected, public office.
Yet the former immigration officer has become a high-profile figure locally, often appearing on TV or radio, usually as an interviewee following the latest atrocious knife crime-related tragedy on the borough’s streets.
In September 2018, Murray-Turner was installed by the then-Labour-run council as the chair of the borough’s Safer Neighbourhood Board. The Safer Neighbourhood Board is supposed to bring together councillors, the public, community groups and the police, and offer an opportunity for some open discussion and accountability.
On her own, online profile, Murray-Turner still lists herself as the chair of Croydon’s Safer Neighbourhood Board. According to the council’s own records, with Murray-Turner as chair, Croydon’s Safer Neighbourhood Board has not held any formal meetings since November 2019.
It might be worth considering whether Croydon’s neighbourhoods have become any “safer” over the past five years or so…
“The police are quite happy about not having to attend Town Hall meetings to give an account of themselves,” according to one Katharine Street source.
“Imagine the borough commander, Andy Brittain, having to show up and explain why he is still using Perry Lathwood, the officer convicted of assault of a black woman at a Croydon bus stop last year. Brittain and senior Met officers has been given a free pass while Donna’s ‘chaired’ the Safer Neighbourhood Board.”
Murray-Turner is closely associated with Anthony King, who describes himself as a “community activist”. King’s MyEnds organisation seeks to work with the community to reduce knife crime and the operation of drug gangs. Murray-Turner has been a regular at King’s weekly meetings, taking a lead on dealing with violence against women and girls.
MyEnds: Anthony King’s organisation has received £1.6m in MOPAC grants since 2021. Now King is organising TTIP election events
In 2021, MOPAC, the London Mayor’s office for policing, awarded a £800,000 grant to King’s MyEnds and other organisations to fund efforts to reduce knife crime in Croydon. In April this year, MOPAC made another grant of £800,000 to the Croydon community groups, including King’s MyEnds.
There were 11 violent deaths in Croydon in 2023, more than in any other borough in the capital.
When the news bulletin’s camera is switched on, and Murray-Turner has turned up to express her opinions of what lies behind Croydon’s terrible death toll, it is never made entirely clear on whose behalf she is speaking. In one of her more recent appearances on local television, for example, Murray-Turner said that she was fully supportive of the Met’s controversial Live Facial Recognition swoops on Croydon town centre.
The top brass at Scotland Yard must have been delighted to have such “support from the community”. That £1.6million of grant funding to MyEnds and associated groups must be having the desired effect.
Anthony King is billed as the “host” of a TTIP event being staged in Whitehorse Road tonight to launch Murray-Turner’s candidacy in the General Election.
“Meet your next MP!” screams the event poster.
Despite the absence of any meetings of the council’s Safer Neighbourhood Board, Murray-Turner still boasts of her position as its chair, mentioning it in potted biographies ahead of public appearances for other organisations. “Donna Murray-Turner is the polar opposite of a bystander. She is involved,” according to the blurb for one of her speaking engagements. “She is leading change at every level.”
One bio mentions that DMT is “advising New Scotland Yard (she sits on four advisory forums)”, and “works with London’s City Hall on reducing violence against women and girls”.
Murray-Turner’s work in the community, therefore, appears to have impressive seals of approval on a city-wide basis.
It seems unlikely that London’s Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan, or Sarah Jones, Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Croydon West, will regard Murray-Turner’s defection to TTIP with such approval.
Tragic event: Donna Murray-Turner (centre), with Labour’s Sarah Jones (right), talking to TV news on the day after the murder of 15-year-old Elianne Andam last year
“It seems strange that Donna should be standing against Sarah in Croydon West,” one senior source in the Labour Party told Inside Croydon. “They always seemed to work together so well.”
Another figure from Croydon Labour spoke with regret at Murray-Turner’s decision to run for TTIP. “It’s a real shame,” they said. “She’s wasting her career. She has so much ability and charisma.”
But someone who remembers Murray-Turner’s failed campaign to be Labour’s mayoral candidate in Croydon in 2022 says that at selection meetings, “she would just stand up and make things up about the other candidates. Straightforward lies. She was reckless, like she’d say almost anything to get a few more votes”.
Murray-Turner, or any TTIP candidates, seem unlikely to be elected to Parliament at the General Election on July 4. As a party, Taking The Initiative has only been registered since 2017, an effort to harness the political energy of the Black Lives Matter movement.
They fielded some candidates in Croydon’s local elections, but attracted little popular support. They did, however, attract complaints to the police, over questions whether their candidates were actually qualified to stand for election in Croydon.
Inside Croydon wanted to speak to Murray-Turner. But the self-appointed community spokesperson’s phone was switched off.
Looking for some explanation for her decision to leave Labour at this time, her recent social media activity might offer some clues. Keir Starmer’s abusive treatment of Diane Abbott, and the party’s delays in restoring the Labour whip to the first black woman MP, infuriated Murray-Turner.
“The silence is deafening,” she wrote in March.
“Nothing said by local Labour or Conservative leaders calling out the vicious attack on [Diane Abbott] in a borough that has a majority black, Asian and mixed populace.
“As a black woman with a public profile…” Murray-Turner put herself front and centre, just in case you hadn’t noticed, “…the lack of allyship speaks volumes.”
But she has a point.
Whether, as Donna Murray-Turner actually seeks public endorsement as a community spokesperson, she will get many votes, though, we will find out on July 5.
- HUSTINGS UPDATE: One of the election hustings organised for later this week, the Croydon TUC event in Ruskin House on June 20, has been postponed (in part, at least, to allow Croydon East candidates to attend the event in their constituency on the same evening). We hope to publish more details as we get them.
Read more: Bringing the parties to book: manifestos are empty of promise
Read more: Kerswell opts to go ‘in-house’ and stage count at Fisher’s Folly
Read more: Scotland Yard’s cyber crime unit investigating Croydon Labour
Read more: Before you next vote, you must read this from The New Yorker
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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
The Taking the Initiative Party took part in the 2022 elections for the Mayor of Croydon, putting up the unlovely Farah Farazad aka “Farah London”. She came sixth.
Her three companies, Chameleon Jungle, Phoenix Global Trade and Farazad Productions are limping along, each of them nearly being compulsorily struck off recently by Companies House.
Strange bedfellows