WALTER CRONXITE, our political editor, wasted his morning turning up to see the son of a toolmaker, who swerved at the first sign of awkward questions and so missed out on seeing the mess made of Croydon by his Labour Party colleagues
The Labour Party appears still to be in denial over the damage that its members did to Croydon when they crashed the council’s finances, after they planned to stage a pre-election rally this morning outside the Fairfield Halls, which stands as a lasting monument to their crass mismanagement.
Monument to failure: the flawed £70m Fairfield Halls refurbishment was a significant factor in Labour crashing the council’s finances
But what promised to be a potential car crash for Keith Starmer’s election battle bus was subject to a last-minute diversion. It might be looked back on as a lucky escape.
Under the now discredited council leader, Tony Newman, the Fairfield Halls arts centre was closed for more than two years, for a refurbishment and modernisation costing £30million. The project was supposed to have been managed by Brick by Brick, the council-owned housing company that borrowed £200million and never made a penny profit.
Once contractors cleared the site in 2019, little of the promised refurb had been completed, and Brick by Brick left the Labour-controlled council with a budget-busting bill for the works of £70million. Little more than a year later, Newman was forced to resign as leader, external auditors published the first first of two damning reports, and the council declared itself effectively bankrupt for the first time.
Yet none of this recent tawdry local history appears to bother Starmer’s Labour Party, as they push on, juggernaut-like, towards what is predicted to be a landslide General Election victory on July 4.
Today, shameless Labour was planning to use the Fairfield Halls as the backdrop to their latest party rally.
Keeping people in the dark: Sarah Jones wants to be MP for Croydon West
Even the borough’s Labour MPs, who stood by and looked on as their party colleagues bankrupted the borough, appear not to realise, four years on, how toxic the association with the omnishambles Brick by Brick and Newman’s council remains with Croydon residents.
“Are they mad?” one senior Katharine Street figure said when told of Labour’s Baldrick-level cunning plan.
“They want to put a senior party figure, possibly even the next Prime Minister, in front of the building that helped crash the local council under Labour?
“What campaign genius dreamt that one up? It’s right down there with putting Rishi in front of an ‘Exit’ sign.” Obvious to some, not so much to others.
So it was, late yesterday evening, that Sarah Jones, who is seeking re-election to Parliament for the new constituency of Croydon West, issued a gushing email to party loyalists under the bizarre heading of “Change is coming! beep beep”.
Jones, who was Croydon Central’s MP from 2017, had had a ringside seat to witness Newman’s nasty and incompetent council. Last night, she wrote to her fans: “The road to No 10 runs through Croydon.
“Join me, Ben and Natasha (plus a very special guest) TOMORROW…”, Jones’s own capitals, “at 10am outside Fairfield Halls.”
“Ben” and “Natasha” are Ben Taylor (Croydon South) and Natasha Irons (Croydon East), who are hoping to ride on Jones’s coattails all the way to Westminster (note how Steve Reed OBE, MP for Croydon North since 2012 and one of Newman’s staunchest of supporters, appears to have lost all interest in the Croydon bit of his new Streatham and Croydon North constituency).
“You won’t want to miss this one,” Jones implored, before providing a link for people to indicate their intention to attend. “See you there!” Jones gushed.
There was considerable speculation over who might be the “very special guest”, perhaps arriving on a special campaign “battle bus”? Might it be Angela Rayner, and her charabanc with its very own fridge?
Or might it be the tool-maker’s son himself?
In the end, Labour’s Fairfield Halls rally plans were binned in the early hours this morning, because of fears that word had got out and members of the public, even some voters, might have turned up. A small gaggle of slightly older Croydon residents, some carrying “No ceasefire, no vote” signs did arrive, only to be disappointed by Labour. Not for the first time.
‘Security threat’: the gaggle of demonstrators who turned up at the Fairfield Halls, hoping to confront Starmer over his stance on the genocide in Gaza
Many of those Labour members who did show up on a fool’s errand were convinced that they would get to greet Labour’s Great Leader.
Some were told the event was cancelled “because of security concerns”. Seriously.
Contrast this to the visit to Croydon in 2017 on the first day of that election campaign, when Jeremy Corbyn drew large crowds of supporters, well-wishers and the simply curious, as he proceeded through the shoppers on North End with barely a police officer in sight, shaking hands and actually engaging with real people as he went.
Within weeks, Labour had shocked the pollsters and the Tories, and Sarah Jones was Labour’s new MP for Croydon Central.
These days, it seems, Jones and the rest of the Labour Party can’t be arsed.
The latest edition of Private Eye magazine made the point that Rishi Sunak, Ed Davey and Starmer are assiduously avoiding anything like contact with real people, while many of their party candidates are deliberately torpedoing public hustings events by refusing to turn up.
Jones, for her part, has so far failed to respond to emails or phone calls inviting her to answer Inside Croydon’s readers’ questions – even with questions submitted to her well in advance of the interview (a particularly fawning and generous practice, and not something we would usually do).
“For all the banners saying ‘CHANGE’,” the Eye’s politics correpondent writes, “Starmer was glutinously cautious, largely limiting himself to brief, controlled stump speeches in front of hand-picked supporters.” Bus “touchdowns”, they wrote, “…lasted little more than a few minutes, a temporary stage hastily being packed back into the coach’s luggage bay once the Labour leader had done a minute or two’s sloganeering in front of fellow Labour members”.
Avoiding scrutiny: shadow cabinet member Liz Kendall was in Croydon on Tuesday with candidate Ben Taylor. Journalists were not invited
And so it has been in Croydon.
On Tuesday, Liz Kendall – the vacuous Leicester MP who got 4% of the vote when she stood for the Labour leadership in 2015 – was in Croydon at an event with Taylor. Labour did not invite any journalists to attend the event, staged at Saffron Valley Collegiate on Croydon High Street.
Instead, a day after the event, they sent out pictures and a press release, expecting gullable hacks to regurgitate Kendall’s ramblings.
“Same everywhere,” one veteran, left-leaning political commentator told Inside Croydon. “I won’t vote for the bastards.”
As this website reported earlier this week: “The political parties might say that they want your vote, but residents reckon that in most of Croydon, not much effort is being taken to win that vote. At the halfway stage in the 2024 General Election campaign, and by and large, Croydon’s voters are being taken for granted.”
And as the Eye notes, there is now a belief among the main parties’ strategists that they no longer need to be seen mixing with the public. “Politics is not for little people: that seems to be the message. This may explain why Farage has been doing well in the opinion polls.”
Read more: Voters being taken for granted as ‘battleground’ moves south
Read more: Philp’s Hampstead address exposed by wife’s business dispute
Read more: The Nasty Party gives rape-shaming Slator a job in Bromley
Read more: The New Yorker’s take on the damage of 14 years of Tory rule
For the full list of all the candidates standing for election in your constituency in the General Election on July 4, use our widget here:
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
FREE ADS: Paid-up subscribers to Inside Croydon qualify for a free ad for their business, residents’ association or community group, just one of the benefits of being part of our online community. For more information about being an iC subscriber, click here for our Patreon page
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our near 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, which is featured on Google News Showcase and followed by 16,000 on Twitter/X, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- 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
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
- Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as BBC London News and ITV London
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
I have no idea who to vote for. I have a choice of candidates who want to be MPs, not for my benefit but for their own.
Fame, glory, a little power and a few minutes on Breakfast TV every few months will keep them happy. None of them gives a damn about me, my family, or my problems. I might as well vote Raving Looney Party. I have in the past.
Of all the elections since my 18th birthday, this is the most dire. By now I know pledges are not promises, promises are not binding, intentions are actually lies, manifestos are dreams, and the real effects of policies are kept quiet until after the election.
None of them deserves to represent me.
At least British cynicism is similar to that in the rest of Europe and elsewhere. If we put all political hopefuls on a spaceship with former telephone sanitisers and jingle writers, might we all feel better?
“On Tuesday, Liz Kendall – the vacuous Leicester MP who got 4% of the vote when she stood for the Labour leadership in 2015 – was in Croydon at an event with Taylor.”
I worked with her many, many moons ago – she was our junior assistant – and we kept up for a good few years after.
Obviously, being ‘blue Labour’ makes her wildly unpopular the much of the rest of her party, yet never been able to quite understand why.
Fiercely clever and one of the brighter, higher calibre politicians around IMHO.