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Labour tweaks the rules to make sure members have no say

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The chosen ones (just not by party members): some of the candidates announced by Labour on Tuesday night gathered for some of the obligatory campaign piccies, with candidate for Mayor, Rowenna Davies (fourth left). Left is Ben Taylor, who has not been picked. Yet

There might actually be something resembling a council candidate selection meeting for Labour members in Broad Green ward tonight – though most reasonable people will see through it as a thinly disguised foregone conclusion
By STEVEN DOWNES

Some Labour members in Croydon will tonight actually get to have a say over the choice of the party’s candidates in next year’s local elections.

Though to be fair, it won’t be much of a choice, as Labour’s all-powerful NEC and officials from London region continue to meddle and manipulate the selection process, disenfranchising grassroots members across the borough, and preparing just another version of the charade already witnessed elsewhere in Croydon.

Tonight will provide a further example of what one experienced Croydon Labour figure has described as a “very strange manipulation of candidates”.

Inside Croydon reported over the weekend how Labour suddenly released a flood of candidate selection decisions, involving nine safe Labour wards and 23 candidates.

Most, if not all, were decided upon without the party staging any actual ward selection meetings for members, as the National Executive Committee and London region handed down a series of fait accomplis for each of the branches.

Members have described the Machiavellian manipulations of selection as a “travesty”.

Almost five years since Tony Newman (who, remember, was a Labour-approved candidate) and his Numpties bankrupted the borough, Keir Starmer’s Labour still has its party in Croydon under a form of “special measures”, denying them even routine local functions such as candidate selection. No grassroots Croydon members were allowed any say in the panelling (interviews) and long-listing of potential candidates for the council elections.

Deselected: Patsy Cummings, who in 2021 was considered good enough to be Labour’s candidate for the London Assembly

Six sitting councillors, including five women, four of them black women, were summarily deselected by the NEC apparatchiks, without any local involvement or right of appeal. 

The party is going to the polls next May hoping that Croydon voters will put their trust in Rowenna Davis, their mayoral candidate. Yet the NEC does not even trust Croydon Labour. Hence the ward-by-ward charades, bypassing selection meetings in the majority of safe council seats.

None of which will ease growing concerns about the increasingly authoritarian attitudes of Starmer’s Labour Party, as managed by his Downing Street enforcer, Morgan McSweeney

Tonight, there might still be a selection meeting of sorts for council candidates in Broad Green ward. Though even here, where the selection rules don’t necessarily suit the NEC/London region’s favoured candidates, they have already just imposed a new one that does.

Emails went out to members in Broad Green over the weekend.

Members there will have already gathered – probably from Inside Croydon reports as much as any information provided by their own party – that Stuart Collins (Newman’s deputy council leader and a councillor for more than 30 years) was standing down and that Croydon’s laziest councillor, Sherwan Chowdhury, had been blocked from standing again.

Useless, but still selected: Broad Green councillor Manju Shahul-Hameed is already guaranteed a place on next year’s ballot paper

The email from a party official, Hakeem Omar, sought to explain that the shortlist had been decided “following an interview and assessment process by NEC/REC [London region] members with successful applicants being placed on a longlist”.

The email continued: “The NEC subsequently shortlisted people from that longlist to enable wards to host independent selection meetings.”

It has not been confirmed with the Labour Party, but it is not thought that this was Omar’s idea of irony.

According to the email, Broad Green’s shortlist had five names on it:

But then came the catch. Sandover has already been “selected” (meaning hand-picked and imposed) in neighbouring Bensham Manor ward.

The officials from a party that has just deselected five women councillors has now deemed Broad Green to be a “two-woman AWS” (all-women short-list) ward, in an effort to bump up the number of women candidates and ultimately councillors.

So the latest fix is in.

With Sandover selected, the party’s email informed, “the remaining women have been selected as candidates”. So Shahul-Hameed, one of the last remaining Newman Numpties and a strong contender for the most self-centred and useless councillors ever seen in Croydon, plus Amoah, are waved on straight through.

Amoah just happens to be secretary for the Croydon West Constituency Labour Party, one of a suspiciously high number of local party officials to be finding themselves handed places on the ballot and a guarantee of at least four years of council allowances starting from £12,000 per year.

The Labour email to members continues: “This means that the shortlist for the selection of the final candidate consists of:

Kacper Borkowski
Tom Bowell.”

Bowell is young, and has already been selected by Labour as a (albeit losing) council candidate for a by-election. But he is not Borkowski young: Kacper Borkowski is 17, in the middle of his A-levels at Reigate College.

What happens next?: Tom Bowell (left) and Aba Amoah (right) out campaining at the weekend, seemingly confident of their being selected tonight

With Bowell being among the favoured local activists, this looks to be a shoo-in for him to be selected for a winnable seat in his home ward.

So a selection meeting will take place, with hardly anything for the members to select.

Inevitably, though, this will have knock-on consequences for “selection” in other wards. Tomorrow night, Thornton Heath is supposed to have its selection meeting.

Members there have already seen one of their councillors, Callton Young, the deputy leader of Labour’s group at the Town Hall, decide to retire from the fray, while hard-working charity worker Karen Jewitt has been blocked from reselection.

The shortlist for Thornton Heath, therefore, is Tamar Nwfar (who has been a councillor since 2022), Vicky Newton (a New Addington resident who missed out on election to the council three years ago), Jose Fernandez, Ben Taylor and Tom Bowell…

But if Bowell is, as expected, picked for Broad Green tonight, that will leave members with a choice between four.

With Labour obliged to pick at least one woman candidate in Thornton Heath, it is looking likely that Ben Taylor, Croydon South’s losing parliamentary candidate last year who in 2022 delivered Labour’s record worst ever council election result, might actually get selected for a council seat that even he can’t possibly lose. Or could he…?

Croydon’s local elections, including votes for 70 councillors, are due to be held on Thursday, May 7, 2026, alongside the borough’s second mayoral election.

Read more: Local Labour members angry at ‘travesty’ of selection process
Read more: Four black women among six councillors rejected by Labour
Read more: Fix! Internal Labour inquiry confirms selection stitch-up
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection

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