There is to be a public meeting to discuss the EU referendum, organised by Grassroots Out Croydon, held in Coulsdon next Thursday, May 12.
Described by the organisers as “A group of local campaigners presenting the case to leave the EU”, anyone interested can turn up on the night. Continue reading
A prominent member of Croydon Conservatives has described the Zac Goldsmith Mayoral campaign as “offensive, patronising, off-putting, negative and pathetic”.
John Cartwright also publicly admitted that to “register a protest”, he voted for Sian Berry, the Green Party candidate, as his first preference for London Mayor.
Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate, was the overwhelming winner of Thursday’s election for London Mayor, while Goldsmith’s campaign faded in the final days amid widespread acrimony over its divisive approach in trying to characterise his rival, a Muslim, as an “extremist”.
Save St Helier Hospital is staging a free screening of Sell Off – The abolition of the NHS at Ruskin House, Coombe Road, Croydon on Monday May 23.
The film will be followed by a discussion session. Continue reading
CROYDON COMMENTARY: A new era has begun for the capital. After an historic election, STEVEN DOWNES reports on the role of a Croydon property developer in Sadiq Khan’s campaign, and how that creates a challenge for the new Mayor of London
It was gone midnight when the candidates, all but one of them, finally emerged on the presentation stage at City Hall for the formal declaration of what had been pretty much established as inevitable seven hours earlier: Sadiq Khan is the new Mayor of London.
Sadiq Khan, the son of a bus driver, had eclipsed Old Etonian millionaire Zac Goldsmith in the Mayoral election
Those attempts were too little, too late, and Goldsmith’s nasty ploy should never be forgotten. Continue reading
Steve O’Connell, a former mortgage salesman (he quit that job when he found the tax-payer paid more generously), has got his pension pot sorted, with £220,000 guaranteed income for the next four years, as the results from the London Assembly elections trickled in from Olympia.
Steve O’Connell: cushty
At least that was the case until about 50 minutes later, when someone discovered an as-yet uncounted box of votes. One box-load, though, was not be enough to swing things away from the Conservatives.
For the second time in four years, O’Connell’s cosy sinecure was saved for him by the voters of Sutton, as the Labour candidate, Marina Ahmad, won the majority of support in Croydon.
“Silent Steve” O’Connell’s majority was only marginally larger than last time. Indeed, with an improved turnout compared to the elections in 2012, both Tories and Labour saw their share of the votes reduced, with UKIP’s Peter Staveley’s vote share up 3 per cent, after another sorry showing for the third-placed LibDems. Continue reading
Croydon Council still has a long way to go if it is to make the £100 million austerity cuts required by the Conservative Government, after it was reported this week that it will make savings of £3.3 million from making 76 staff redundant.
A shortage of trained social work staff is costing Croydon Council millions on agency workers
Achieving that budget target won’t be made any easier after it was decided, meanwhile, to spend £9 million on hiring agency staff – mainly social workers.
The figures were released at a cabinet meeting last week. It is six months since the council offered redundancy terms across its entire 10,000-strong workforce. The meeting agreed to extend the contract of Comensura, the company that provides agency staff to the council.
“There is a shortage of permanent social workers in London so we have no choice,” was the explanation offered by Simon Hall, the cabinet member in charge of finances for the Labour-run council, to the Croydon Guardian. “That is the reality of the marketplace we are trying to deal with.”
Callton Young, Croydon’s newest councillor, speaking to residents before yesterday’s vote. Photo: Lee Townsend
The local Tories failed to amass even 1,000 votes in a ward which, two years ago, they forgot about altogether and left off their advertising for the local elections. So any claims of improving their vote share by 2 per cent since 2014 probably isn’t much of a boast.
Young, a former senior civil servant who is active in local community events, including the Thornton Heath Arts Festival, replaces The Hon Emily Benn, who stood down from her council seat in order to pursue her banking career in New York.
They want to spend £1,400,000,000 demolishing and rebuilding much of the town centre, to build 1,000 “luxury apartments”, a car park for eager shoppers with 3,000 bays, and they are still promising 5,000 jobs (though they remain vague about exactly what kind of jobs these might be). But the developers behind the Croydon Partnership still can’t come up with a name for their long-promised supermall.
An imagined view of how the supermall. Except now, they want to stick a concrete box of a car park over most of the lit walkways
Because of the slightly involved nature of the partnership between shopping centre rivals Hammerson and Westfield, it has been confirmed that they won’t be able to call it “Westfield”.
Which is something that could undermine the longer term prospects of the gargantuan scheme, since one of the great advantages of the redevelopment when it was first sold to Croydon by Boris Johnson and his sarf London bestie, gaffe-prone Gavin Barwell, was the pulling power of the Westfield brand. Continue reading
Tony Newman out campaigning with Steve Reed OBE (left) and the West Thornton by-election candidate, Callton Young. Behind them is Stuart Collins, looking left out. Who will the joke be on come Monday night? Photo: Lee Townsend
In the past 18 months, through poorly presented and badly timed policy announcements issued from Croydon Town Hall, Newman and his small clique of close chums have handed a series of gift-wrapped political presents to their opponents, managing to undermine the election chances of their own party’s candidates at the 2015 General Election and in today’s London vote. Probably nothing deliberate. Just crass incompetence let loose.
But by allowing a challenge to one of his deputies, Stuart Collins, at next week’s Croydon Labour group annual meeting, Newman could be wrecking his own hopes of maintaining control of the council after 2018.
The Norwood Society’s next talk, on Thursday May 19, celebrates the bi-centenary of Charlotte Bronte’s birth with a talk by the biographer of the Brontes’ biographer.
Winifred Gerin, a Norwood resident, was an important biographer of the Bronte family
Winifred Gerin: a writer’s life from Norwood to Howarth, will be presented by the author Helen McEwan, and concerns Gerin, who was an important biographer of the Bronte family.
Gerin spent her childhood on South Norwood Hill and McEwan has recently published a biography of Gerin and her interesting family. This talk is of interest to not only those with an affection for the Brontes but also those concerned with local history and the people of the past who made Norwood.
The talk begins at 7.30pm at the Upper Norwood Library, Westow Hill, SE19 1TJ. Continue reading
Two years ago, WALTER CRONXITE correctly predicted the 40/30 seat result in the Croydon Council elections. Last year, he said Croydon Central was “too close to call”. So, will he be right in his prediction of tomorrow’s Croydon and Sutton London Assembly vote?
Labour has only once mustered a serious challenge for the Croydon and Sutton London Assembly seat. Twice they have been third and once they just pipped the Liberal Democrats to second place.
“Silent Steve” O’Connell: another four years, another £220,000 for doing not very much
It was only at the last London Assembly election, when Labour’s Louisa Woodley had an energetic campaign, George Osborne had just issued his omnishambles Budget and Labour under Ed Miliband (remember him?) was polling the equivalent of a 39per cent national share of the vote in local elections that the Tories came under a real challenge in Croydon and Sutton. But while Labour got its highest ever number of seats – 12 – on the London Assembly, Woodley was not one of them. Continue reading
As Boris Johnson wafts through his final days in power at City Hall – much like the manner in which he has wafted through the previous 2,922 days in office – WALTER CRONXITE tries to find what the Tory Mayor has achieved for the capital and Croydon
Tomorrow will be the fifth time Londoners have had the opportunity to vote for a Mayor for our city. The past eight years, at least, will have confirmed what many people suspected – that it is a extra tier of government, at extra costs, that we really don’t need.
Boris Johnson in full-on blundering buffoon mode in 2012: his PR overcame any examination of his record
That notion has been reinforced amply by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the epitome of the blundering part-timer, who has cruised through his two terms in office doing little and achieving far less.
But then, Johnson is from that part of the Conservative Party that always maintained that London does not need a Mayor. So his being half-hearted and half-cock about the role may have been deliberate. Continue reading
Money prioritised over all else? In cricket? Surely not…
Yet that is the key finding of Death of a Gentleman, an award-winning sports documentary which the country’s television channels have so far found too hot to handle for their scheduling.
Death of a Gentleman gets a rare theatre screening at the David Lean Cinema next month, just a couple of days before the England v Sri Lanka Test is held at Lord’s. Continue reading
More than one-third of young Londoners have “fallen off” the electoral register in the past 12 months and so won’t be able to vote in tomorrow’s London elections, according to research published today.
In some of the most deprived areas of the capital, the researchers claim that as many as 7 in 10 under-24s have lost their right to vote, and so won’t get a say in next month’s European referendum, either.
Thes figures suggest that more than half a million people will be denied their democratic rights at the polling booths when it comes to choosing a Mayor of London and the members of the London Assembly for the next four years.
Changes in the voting registration system were introduced a year ago by “Dodgy Dave” Cameron’s Conservative Government. Judging by the results of the research, the Tories have got the desired effect. Continue reading
With two days to go until the London elections, and “Silent Steve” O’Connell, the London Assembly Member for Sutton and Croydon, has found himself in a double squeeze which could see him kicked off the City Hall gravy train where the senior Tory has managed to trouser more than £500,000 of public cash for doing very little over the past eight years.
Sian Berry: wants Greens to use second preference votes for Sadiq Khan
At the previous London elections in 2012, O’Connell lost the popular vote in Croydon, the first time ever that Labour had out-polled the Conservatives in this borough.
But voters in LibDem-controlled Sutton helped him hang on to a 10,000 vote majority and his annual allowances.
So imagine Silent Steve’s dismay today when a senior Liberal Democrat wrote an appeal for his party’s supporters to back Labour’s Sadiq Khan for London Mayor and reject the “nasty, desperate and dog-whistling campaign” of O’Connell’s colleague, Zac Goldsmith.
It is eight days now since Marina Ahmad, O’Connell’s Labour rival for Croydon and Sutton, invited the Croydon Tory to reject the divisive and racist campaigning which had accompanied multi-millionaire Goldsmith’s efforts to become London Mayor.
Since when, there’s been silence from O’Connell. Continue reading
A two-car collision on the Purley Way left hundreds of Bank Holiday shoppers at Valley Park frustrated and angry, as they were stuck in the shopping and leisure centre’s car park for hours.
A typical Bank Holiday on the Purley Way
And according to Inside Croydon‘s loyal reader, there was again no staff on hand to help because of the Bank Holiday – even though it is often one of the busiest trading days for the retail park, where Croydon’s Ikea superstore is located. Continue reading
Barbara Peacock, a former senior council employee, has landed the executive director job in charge of education, housing and social care in the borough, the council announced this morning.
Barbara Peacock: returning to Croydon
Peacock will succeed Paul Greenhalgh as “executive director, people”, when he takes early retirement in July.
The position is one of the three most senior jobs at Croydon Council, carrying with it a six-figure salary.
Peacock will be arriving at Fisher’s Folly at a time of considerable flux among the hot-desking execs: as well as Greenhalgh’s departure, CEO Nathan Elvery is due to leave, with the exec director for place, Jo Negrini, taking charge as interim chief executive.
Peacock previously worked at Croydon for three years from 2007 as director for development and care, during which time she led on children’s social care and school standards. She has also worked at Action for Children, the country’s largest children’s charity. She worked at Sandwell council in the Midlands for two years after leaving Croydon, and moves back to south London after four years at Medway as director of children and adults services. Continue reading
Television presenter Steve Backshall, second left, together with Thom Evans, right, join in with the Croydon Cubs’ fun at the weekend
Television adventurer Steve Backshall flew in to Croydon at the weekend to help local Cub Scout packs celebrate the centenary of their organisation.
Backshall’s visit to Croydon was centred on a weekend-long camping adventure in celebration of the Cubs’ 100-year anniversary. They took part in a range of activities during the weekend at Frylands Wood Scout campsite. Continue reading
The Earl and Countess of Wessex are to be the guests of honour at the final classical music concert to be held at the Fairfield Halls before its temporary closure for refurbishment.
The Wessexes are to be the guests of honour at the Fairfield Halls on its final classical concert before the refit
The Halls were opened in 1962 with a performance attended by Prince Edward’s grandmother, the Queen Mother.
Queen & Country, on June 30, featuring the London Mozart Players, will celebrate the Queen’s 90th birthday, as well as honouring the centenary of the Somme.
Led by conductor Dominic Peckham, (a mentor on Gareth Malone’s The Naked Choir on BBC2, and assistant director of the National Youth Choir), this concert will pull together many different art forms and cross sections of the Croydon community, including schools, choirs, artists, young composers, local brass bands and dance groups.
The London Mozart Players received a significant subsidy from Croydon Council for many years when it was based at the Halls. The Halls are to undergo a £30-million refurbishment, and are due to re-open in 2018.
“The London Mozart Players have put together a creative piece that will showcase what Croydon’s talented young people have to offer,” said Paula Murray, the council’s new culture director. “Celebrating Croydon’s cultural and artistic diversity in events like this is an important part of the future development of the borough.”
“Dog whistle politics” and allegations of racist campaigning by the Tories have seen this week’s London elections described as among the dirtiest ever fought. And it’s not just WALTER CRONXITE reporting that, but the Green Party, a Conservative peer and even a columnist from the Daily Mail.
So why won’t Tory Assembly Member “Silent Steve” O’Connell speak out against the nastier elements of the Goldsmith campaign?
Labour candidate for the London Assembly Marina Ahmad, campaigning with Sadiq Khan in Croydon
Marina Ahmad, Labour’s candidate in Croydon and Sutton in the London Assembly elections this Thursday, has challenged her Tory rival Steve O’Connell to condemn the racist approach of his Conservative colleague, Zac Goldsmith, and his increasingly desperate efforts to discredit Sadiq Khan in order to become the third Mayor of London.
Goldsmith put his name to a column in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, which was accompanied by a picture from the 7/7 terror attacks on London, and which has been condemned as “offensive” by Sayeeda Warsi, the former chair of the Conservative Party. Continue reading
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