Steve Reed OBE, the MP for Croydon North/Lambeth South [delete to taste] has been accused of “riding roughshod” over local Labour Party members, after supportive officials at his Constituency Labour Party have manoeuvred to stage a leadership nomination meeting at short notice, excluding more than a thousand members from having a say.
Steve Reed OBE: excludes party members from a nomination meeting
“There’s a real sense of fear,” one Labour member from the north of the borough told Inside Croydon today. “I’m just an ordinary member, and I just want to have my say, to have my vote, but Reed and his friends want to deny me that.
“And the members know that if there’s any sort of protest on Thursday, they risk being purged by Reed and the Progress lot, accused of intimidation, bullying or worse.”
Reed, a former leader of Lambeth Council, is the vice-chairman of the Progress, the party-within-a-party which is funded by Blairite millionaire Lord Sainsbury. He was a willing participant in the “coup” among aome Labour MPs to dislodge Corbyn as the party leader.
“Even the Tory Party has one member, one vote. But that’s not allowed in Steve Reed’s version of democracy,” was the view of another Labour member.
And a third party member said, “One of my friends said that they never even wanted to consider re-selection of their MP, but after what has happened, they are fed up of Reed ignoring the members. He’s just riding roughshod over us all the time.”
Reed was not present last year, when at a meeting which was open to all members of the Croydon North CLP, they voted overwhelmingly to nominate Jeremy Corbyn for leader.
“Reed was off sunning himself somewhere. He will have been really red-faced with embarrassment if he’d been at that meeting.”
“The British Empire’s finest practitioners of theatrical Victoriana in the macabre vein,” is the suitably florid, fairground-style barker’s claim for the company, which in its previous visits to the theatre upstairs over the Katharine Street pub has delivered sell-out performances of The Singular Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, Old Haunts and The Ghost Stories of MR James.
Six weeks after Robbie Gibson went missing from his south London home, the appeal to find him continues with national television coverage on Monday.
Croydon Health Services NHS Trust has overall responsibility for both Mayday and Purley hospitals. Croydon CCG operates 58 local GP practices.
From July 25 until September 2, themed play and craft sessions and multi-level soft play will be on offer from Monday to Friday at The Triangle in Coxwell Road, in two sessions daily, from 9.30am to 12pm and from 1.30pm to 4pm.
