2026 LOCAL ELECTIONS: Market trader was removed as chair of the Croydon Business Association last October, and is now running as an independent candidate after quitting Labour and Reform in the first three months of this year
High opinion of himself: Jose Joseph’s social media has taken a new turn
Jose Joseph, the Surrey Street market trader who is standing for election as Mayor of Croydon, paid a £40,000 fine to the Home Office last year after he was accused of employing an illegal immigrant on his fruit and veg stall, Inside Croydon can reveal.
Joseph, 50, is running as an independent candidate in the mayoral elections on May 7.
Joseph is doing so only after being rejected as a candidate by the Labour Party and after having quit Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Inspectors working for the Home Office observed a person working unlawfully on Joseph’s Surrey Street stall in early 2025.
Joseph maintains that he did nothing wrong, and that immigration inspectors had wrongly assumed that a person who is an asylum-seeker was his employee, when in fact they were a customer shopping in Surrey Street.
It was also claimed that the Home Office had got the wrong stall, and that the migrant working illegally had in fact been employed on a neighbouring stall, one registered in the name of Joseph’s wife.
At one point, Joseph also claimed that he had consulted lawyers and that their intervention had seen him removed from the Home Office register.
But the Home Office has confirmed that Joseph was removed from its register of offenders only once the fine was settled.
As a consequence of the offence, Joseph was removed as chair of the Croydon Business Association, an organisation which he helped to found.
Yet Joseph, 50, has continued to be described in the media, by BBC London and by gullible local newspapers, as the association’s chair.
Companies House records show that Joseph resigned as a director of CBA on October 13 last year.
Gullible: BBC-funded reporters have repeated the falsehood that Jose Joseph is the chair of the Croydon Business Association. He was removed from the position in October 2025
Joseph stood as a council election candidate in his home Fairfield ward for the Labour Party in 2022, but was not elected.
In 2019, he was the victim of a Labour selection fix, when despite being democratically chosen as the candidate for a Fairfield ward by-election, party officials put forward someone else as the candidate – a close friend of the local party agent.
Joseph claimed he had been mistreated by Labour again last year, when he was blocked from seeking selection for the 2026 local elections. Labour sources suggest that Joseph’s rejection was as a result of complaints over his conduct at CLP – Constituency Labour Party – meetings. Labour sources confirm that the decision was not connected to the Home Office offence, of which they were unaware at the time the decision was taken.
Joseph resigned from the Labour Party in January, accusing it of racism.
He then joined Reform.
Joseph is believed to have been lined up as a potential Reform candidate in the local elections, even as a possible mayoral candidate. He was photographed at Farage national party HQ, where it is suggested that he may have paid the £1,000 fee that the grifters’ party demands of its members if they wish to stand for a mayoralty. Joseph did not dent this when questioned on this point by Inside Croydon.
Values: Surrey Street trader Joseph’s dalliance with racist Reform Ltd did not last long
In a rush of enthusiam for his new party, Joseph even established a “British Indians for Reform” social media page. Reform members in Croydon confirm that earlier this year they were considering canvassing the borough’s Hindus and Tamils, in an overt anti-Muslim campaign.
Joseph’s time with Reform Ltd was short-lived. He told Inside Croydon that he discovered that they didn’t “share my values”.
Joseph has since emerged as an independent candidate, promising, if elected, to donate his £86,000 a year mayoral salary to food kitchens – he continues to provide free hot meals to the homeless and anyone who passes by on North End every Tuesday, as he has been doing for the past 10 years.
“Upholding British values of democracy, rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect,” his official election statement says, without mentioning unlawfully employing asylum-seekers.
Most recently, in multiple social media posts that usually carry the ramdom hashtag “#viral”, Joseph has taken to claiming that residents are calling him “the Croydon Mamdani”, a reference to the recently elected Mayor of New York City, radical socialist Zohran Mamdani.
“If he’s the ‘Croydon Mamdani’,” a male Katharine Street source said, “then I’m Purley’s Mother Theresa.”
“I am running for Croydon Mayor because all the politicians have let down our town and our community, especially Labour,” Joseph told a gullible BBC-funded reporter recently.
“My qualification is that I am working with the community, I work with people and understand their problems.
“This community gave me a better life.”
And a £40,000 fine for breaking employment and immigration rules.
- For the full list of candidates standing for Croydon Mayor, as published on the council website, click here
- For the full list of election candidates in the borough’s 28 wards, click here for the official listings on the council website
Read more: Surrey Street market trader Joseph quits Labour in race row
Read more: Tawdry affair of Fairfield candidate coup and the double agent
Read more: Fewer than 100 votes in it between Perry and Davis for Mayor
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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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