EXCLUSIVE: Our Sutton reporter, BELLE MONT, has uncovered proof that a close party colleague of MP Tom Brake was enjoying hospitality with the incinerator operator just four days before a crucial council meeting to approve a £1bn, 25-year contract
Evidence has emerged that suggests that a senior Liberal Democrat councillor, at the centre of the decision-making process over the £1billion Viridor incinerator at Beddington Lane, dined out with the chief executive of Viridor just four days before a key council meeting – and yet failed to declare the hospitality or his relationship with the company chief, as is required by law.
The £1bn Viridor incinerator on Beddington Lane: senior councillor kept his friendship with company CEO a secret
Inside Croydon’s findings tonight prompted one current Sutton councillor to call for full and independent investigation into the affair, while the local resident who mounted a High Court challenge against the decision to build the incinerator – costing him personally £5,000 – accused Sutton Council of deliberately helping to conceal the links between the LibDems and Viridor.
John Drage stood down as a Sutton councillor in 2014, when he took on the role of chair of the Sutton Liberal Democrat Party.
Together with his wife, Elaine, the Drages had for many years been among the most generous donors to the LibDems in Sutton, handing over £68,305 for the party’s campaign war chest, with £8,373 of Drage cash going to help get Tom Brake re-elected.
Brake is the Liberal Democrats’ longest continually serving MP, having been first elected for Carshalton and Wallington in 1997. For many of those years, Elaine Drage served as Brake’s election agent.
This Thursday, fervent Remainer Brake is seeking re-election once again in a strongly Brexit-backing constituency, and the outcome is thought to be so close that it has been suggested that a call has gone out to Brake’s most loyal and effective campaigners, John and Elaine Drage, to leave their retirement home in the Malvern Hills and return to Wallington to help get the vote out once again. Continue reading →
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“Flooding on the railway is severely impacting services,” they said in an urgent alert issued just after 8am.
The fourth General Election since 2010 is significant because it is the first in a decade to deliver a government with a working majority – and after the coalition, fudge and paralysis of the past nine years or so, there’s some that suggest that a parliament that can actually get things done is preferable to the alternative.
