With Croydon’s Town Hall elections to be held one month today, one mayoral candidate has been ordered to censor her election brochure by party bosses, with MP Reed suspected of being behind move.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Labour’s candidate for Croydon Mayor, Rowenna Davis, has been ordered by party bosses to remove reference to Israel’s genocide in Gaza from her election manifesto.
Getting her message across: Labour candidate Rowenna Davis has changed her published manifesto
The instruction followed a complaint made by one of Labour’s own council election candidates, thought to have been done with the backing of cabinet minister Steve Reed.
Reed, the MP for Streatham (and Croydon North if he can be bothered), has received generous donations from pro-Israel individuals.
Davis’s manifesto has been plagued with difficulties, not least the defection to the Green Party of the Labour councillor who was hired to assist in its drafting.
The 26-page document was finally released at the end of March, ahead of the local elections which are being held on May 7.
And there, on the 25th page, is a short section on “Ethical investment” which said, “There is a genocide happening in Gaza. I do not believe the council’s Pension Fund should be used to support arms companies that are supplying Israel at this time.”
It goes on to say, “I will campaign for all London boroughs to divest from arms companies operating in Palestine…”.
With more than 70,000 Palestinians killed since 2024, a slew of international bodies, from the United Nations to Amnesty International, and Israeli organisations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have taken the view that what has been going on in Gaza at the direction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu constitutes a genocide.
But not the Labour Party of Steve Reed OBE.
At the end of last week, Davis’s mayoral manifesto was censored to remove the references to genocide and to Palestine.
Now you see it: the pensions policy statement as it originally appeared, with the reference to a genocide in Gaza and arms companies operating in Palestine
Now you don’t: how Davis’s manifesto has been amended in the last few days, after complaints from within the Labour Party
Now it reads: “I believe the council’s Pension Fund should be reviewed to make sure it is ethical, including reviewing investments in arms companies.”
Croydon Council manages a pension fund of £1.98billion, with almost two-thirds of that used under a London councils pooling arrangement, where investments include arms companies with links to Israel.
A source close to Davis told Inside Croydon, “At this stage of the campaign, it was decided that the best course of action was to make the change.
“The important thing is for Rowenna to win the election and win back control of Croydon Council, so that the changes can be made for more ethical investment of the pension fund.”
Labour has been widely criticised for its silence and refusal to act against Israeli aggression in the Middle East generally, with large numbers of Muslim voters either not bothering to vote Labour or instead supporting the Green Party, as they did in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election.
Funded by Israel supporters: Steve Reed OBE
The new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, spoke of Labour’s “complicity in genocide” in her first press conference after being elected.
Reed’s role in Croydon’s “Red on Red” action emerged today in the right-wing Zionist newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, where Labour candidates were accused of “pandering to ‘sectarian agenda’.”
The article quotes Reed, as the local government minister, urging councils to “stay out of foreign conflicts and get on with the job of delivering local services”.
The censoring of Davis’s manifesto comes at the same time that one of Croydon Labour’s leading councillors, Chrishni Reshekaron, has stepped down from the role as agent for the party’s 70 Town Hall election candidates. “Family matters” has been given as the reason for Reshkaron standing down, though Labour sources suggest that there have been tensions over the politically ambitious young councillor’s membership of the controversial Labour Friends of Israel group.
Croydon Tories have as yet produced no manifesto for their mayoral candidate, Jason Perry, as they did in 2022 – possibly an acknowledgement that that document has become a checklist for all of the Conservative Mayor’s multitude of failures and broken promises.
McAsh and carry: Green Party leader Zack Polanski with Southwark councillor James McAsh (right)
Certainly, Davis’s manifesto has endured some problems prior to publication, including the loss of one of its principal authors, James McAsh. The councillor in Southwark defected to the Green Party in February, with Davis’s Croydon manifesto tantalisingly close to completion.
McAsh’s defection was at least partly in response to Labour Party national officials overruling his democratic election as leader of their Southwark Town Hall group. “Labour is no longer the vehicle for social justice I once thought it was,” McAsh said, presumably not long after giving up his role as Croydon manifesto writer.
There are no fewer than nine references in Davis’s Croydon manifesto to Southwark.
Labour are under threat of losing Southwark council to the Greens next month, with control of Lambeth, Hackney and Islington also seen as being at risk.
Because of the fear of such widespread losses – including Westminster and Wandsworth being retaken by the Conservatives – Labour’s London Region has been fighting a defensive local election campaign in the capital.
That has meant that Croydon has received no support from Labour regionally or nationally, though Davis might have reasonably hoped that she would not have come under such direct attack from one of the party’s MPs.
Read more: 43 days to go and desperation is appearing in election leaflets
Reed more: MP Reed gets dragged into the scandal over Peter Mandelson
Reed more: Reed’s £2,400-a-seat cosy curry night with building lobbyists
Read more: Four black women among six councillors rejected by Labour
Jason Perry, Croydon’s failed Mayor, has refused to give a pre-election interview to Inside Croydon, where he would face questions about his record in office- Paid-up subscribers to this website can listen to The Andrew Fisher Interview with Labour’s Rowenna Davis by clicking here
- Andrew Fisher has also interviewed Liberal Democrat candidate Richard Howard and later this week we will be releasing a podcast with the Green Party’s Peter Underwood
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2026, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for an EIGHTH time in nine years, in Private Eye magazine’s annual round-up of civic cock-ups
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Pathetic. Yet another reason not to vote Labour
A pointless, generalised comment. Reducing everything to party loyalty is exactly why bad decisions go unchecked. Grow-up, A
I agree with your second sentence.
The chair of the pension committee is already a Labour Councillor!
Why didn’t they do anything about this in the last 4 years if they were so bothered?
Useless and political showboating. Nobody should be voting for Croydon Labour this election.
In answer to your question, probably because council officials – paid staff – have refused to act as required by elected representatives. It has been something of a long-running issue.
The notion that politicians lay out their plans for office going in to an election is an estimable one. It means that they can be judged on their record – as Jason Perry, the Conservative Mayor for the past four years who has determined the council’s policy on pension investments since 2022 (not a matter in the gift of a committee chair), should be judged in this election for his failures, broken promises and incompetence.
The Chair of a council pensions committee – no matter which party they represent – has no executive control of the pension scheme.
They chair meetings and that is it. They aren’t checking the stock market every morning and issuing orders over what shares to buy and sell as that’s the role of the actual fund managers.
They still have to operate within the statutory framework for local government pensions and not their personal wishes.
We know of at least one chair of the pensions committee who very much did check the FT every day, and who provided enough direction for the fund managers that the council pension fund is now so robustly over-funded.
But their efforts to make the fund more ethically based were strongly resisted by council officials.
The Mayor is called ‘Piss-Poor Perry’ for a reason, and it is not because anybody thinks he has done a good job in his four-year term.
Davis has made much of her close ties to the current (flailing) Labour government, claiming that she has a seat the table to secure better funding terms for Croydon.
This manifesto change is evidence that in all matters she’s more likely to be steamrollered by national Labour, who know she’s unable to publicly criticise her own party.
The article quotes Reed, as the local government minister, urging councils to “stay out of foreign conflicts and get on with the job of delivering local services”.
If he believed that he wouldn’t support public pension schemes investing in foreign conflicts!! Reading this, it’s clear that Rowenna wants Croydon Council to stay out of foreign conflicts, hence her ethical stance on this because the easy thing would have been to not mention it at all in the manifesto, so I’ll give her credit for that. She’s obviously been forced to water down the position in the manifesto. I think Labour will probably win the council but it will be mostly a disaster for Labour nationally which will hopefully spell the end of Reed and his ilk and their grip over the Labour Party. As far as I can tell, Rowenna seems like a good person who means well.
This may be Labour, but, in my view, Jason Perry is an ineffective and weak politician who consistently avoids accountability and appears more focused on party interests than public service.
His leadership reflects poor judgement, limited competence, and a reluctance to listen or adapt. Decisions linked to controversial payouts, which he later acknowledged were unjustified, raise serious questions about his oversight and credibility.
Overall, he comes across as out of his depth and ill-suited to the responsibilities of Mayor. DO NOT VOTE FOR THIS PLASTIC PIPE SALESMAN.
So being a woman of principle who is opposed to the genocide in Gaza, we can now expect the Labour candidate for Mayor to step down? Or is she another Starmer boot licker?
“Review their investments”? I just got the ick.
I will vote for Rowenna, this is because she is a rare decent person in Politics today with good intentions even though she is with this horrible bullying Labour Party.
This article raises a fundamental question that Croydon voters deserve an answer to: who is actually in charge of Rowenna Davis’s campaign?
If a mayoral candidate can be overruled on something as basic as their own manifesto, then it’s clear the decisions aren’t being made by them. So who is actually calling the shots?
And more importantly, if Rowenna Davis cannot control her own campaign, how could she possibly be trusted to run a council facing one of the worst financial crises in local government? We’ve seen what happens when leadership is weak or distracted. Croydon didn’t end up effectively bankrupt by accident. It happened under Labour.
Now we’re being asked to believe that things will be different. But this episode suggests the opposite: decisions being made behind closed doors, by unnamed figures, with the candidate acting as the public face rather than the decision-maker.
It raises the same uncomfortable question people have been asking nationally in Labour politics: are there powerful figures behind the scenes pursuing their own agenda, while voters are presented with a more acceptable front?
Croydon cannot afford a figurehead Mayor.
We need someone who is clearly in charge, accountable for their decisions, and capable of leading from the front – not someone who appears to be taking instructions from elsewhere.
Because if voters don’t know who is really calling the shots now, they certainly won’t once the election is over.
Rowenna is one of my councillors and leaves a lot to be desired. As a Mayor she’d be blinking useless
But Major: the manifesto policy has not changed. Only the language used.
It’s unlike you, in your non-politician’s way, to try to confuse and mislead in this manner.
Let’s not forget: you agree that the council’s pension fund should divest from arms firms, and you agree that there’s a genocide going on in Palestine.
And if you were to get elected, does that mean we’d have to put up with Ed Davey pulling the strings?