On 7 October 2021, a referendum was held in Croydon on the option to change its local governance from the cabinet model aka the “strong leader” model, or that of a directly elected mayor. Turnout was 58,897 – 21% of eligible voters , of which 47,165 (80%) voted for the change to a directly elected mayor, with 20% opposed. The switch is due to take place in May 2022. This post while it is focused on the events that led up to referendum, has an additional importance greater than a decision of governance in a major town, but the story of what appears to be the beginning of the end of the Labour Party’s control of Croydon Council, and the decline of Croydon Labour itself.
Background
The Labour Party first gained control of Croydon Council in the council elections of 2014, with Woodside councillor Tony Newman as the Leader of Croydon Council. This was the era of austerity delivered by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, and coupled with the restrictions on spending imposed on local authorities constistent with the Local Government Act 2000, and the Localism Act 2011, leaving the newly Labour-controlled Croydon Council without many opportunities to provide services effectively without running into financial strain or for new local projects – its response to these problems was initially was limited to the “mundane” purview of many councils such as the raising of council tax of its residents – to scheming various manners of property speculation. Croydon is also the site of the Home Office Asylum and Intake Unit at Lunar House – many of whom require some form of housing even if the accomodation is temporary – having to meet a particularly high intake of unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC), alongside demands to provide shelter to the homeless – particularly those from neighboring boroughs. The latter requires an article on its own to describe the reality of just how messed up it actually is.
When the schemes went well in Croydon Council, they went really well – such as allowing the creation of Croydon Boxpark. However, when they bad it went catastrophically – such as the plans for a new Westfield shopping mall after three years going belly up, the in-house property development company Brick by Brick (BxB), and the purchase of the Croydon Park Hotel with the intention of raking in £1million a year for the council blowing up in their face when the companies they partnered with withdrew – forcing the hotel into administration and turned into a temporary accomodation for the homeless. Whatever benefits that came from the rejuvenation of Fairfield Halls was negated by the coronavirus pandemic, and news of the £12 million cost to refurbish the arts centre soon followed. Soon after Croydon Council successfully secured a £2.5million grant, it laid off 400 staff – all of whom the celebrated “frontline workers” of the pandemic to meet a £65million shortfall. Croydon UNISON led a protest against the cuts, citing the staff workers were overworked and underpaid.
Mismanagement, corruption and cronyism were common accusations thrown towards Croydon Council, which a culture of opaqueness in its decision-making did not help. Unbeknownst to most of the Croydon residents were the attempts within Croydon Labour to push for a culture of transparency and a change to collective decision-making within the Council, using the Labour Party Democracy Review as a jump-off for this initiative. Within the meetings, the significant members of the Labour Group displayed a, shall we say…intransigent reaction to the proposals made during the Working Groups generated from the Review. Beyond a pamphlet and an internal report, very little of significance came about from these meetings – and as a result of the leadership change from Jeremy Corbyn to Keir Starmer – nothing came of ‘expanding local democracy’ or transparency ever again. This was problematic for the Labour administration, particularly when taking into account how these events led to the current crisis, and gave another campaign its running legs – ceding the rhetoric of ‘local democracy’ to its most prominent political nemesis.
The Road to DEMOC
The Directly Elected Mayor Of Croydon (DEMOC) campaign had been bubbling since July 2019, advanced by a coterie of local businesses – particularly the Whitgift Foundation, and residents’ associations. The Croydon Conservative Party – who advanced it in the hopes that they regain control of the council from Labour. The Croydon South MP Chris Philp had advertised the campaign on his personal website, and the Croydon Conservative webpage also advertises the campaign. Despite this, the DEMOC campaign was able to pitch itself as an non-party affiliated position, particularly with the presence of Labour Party notables – the former Secretary of Croydon South CLP Stella Nabukeera and the former Chair of Croydon Central CLP Joyce Reid appeared in DEMOC’s photo material, and the Bensham Manor councillor Jamie Audsley was not only quoted in this reading material, but outright led a separate campaign Labour for a Directly Elected Mayor in favour of the change, and to promote himself.
The DEMOC campaign appealed to the disgruntled residents’ associations frustrated with Croydon Council, with various grievances such as the raising of rates, planning property building in green spaces and Brick by Brick house-building plans in the south (read:affluent part) of the borough to adapt to the borough’s demographic shifts. Initially, it got off to a very poor start – with DEMOC’s crowdfunding attempt failing miserably and falling far short of its expected goal. However, what was perceived as a laughably marginal and astroturfed campaign appealing to the nimbyist elements of Croydon became very serious as a result of the biggest crisis the Council had ever faced.
The Hole
By late 2020, it was understood that the £1.4bn Westfield shopping mall scheme had failed, and Brick by Brick not being the housing golden goose that it was believed that it was going to be, with £200million poured in to the developer without receiving dividends. On 12 October 2020, Tony Newman gave a brief statement on Twitter announcing his resignation as the Leader of Croydon Council following the resignation of the Council Member for Finance Simon Hall. Newman had previously told local party activists that austerity had been the cause of the council’s problems, however the mood among them was, at best, a mood of disenchantment and at worst, apoplexy.
Newman was succeeded by the Broad Green Cllr Hamida Ali – becoming the council’s first BAME leader, and Hall was replaced by Thornton Heath Cllr Callton Young. Barrier-breaking celebrations over Ali’s selection as council leader were clouded by the inauspicious circumstances of her rise, which worsened once Croydon Council filed a section 114 notice on November 11, 2020 – halting all public spending save for essential services – an admittance that Croydon Council could not meet the demands of a balanced budget required of it: effectively declaring bankruptcy. The Section 114 meant to stave off the audit commissioners taking control, Croydon Council had to reorganize its expenditure, including the closure or selling off of parks, and the closure of libraries. Croydon Council Leader Ali launched Q&A’s to Croydon Labour on the direction of the council and addressing rumours of council cuts to “non-essential” services. Ali also insisted in interviews that the pandemic had worsened Croydon Council’s situation leading to the section 114, which was held in place until March 2021. The independent audit report into Croydon Council’s expenditure revealed that for at least three years the council would overspend its allocated budget.
The nail-in-the-coffin came when ITV News exposed the derelict conditions of flats located in Regina Road, South Norwood, with residents claiming they “weren’t fit for human habitation”, and earning the ignominous title of “the worst council flats in Britain”. The news could not have been more embarassing for the Council, which let out a public statement in response, and hurriedly placed the residents in Regina Road into new (temporary) accomodation. Now many Croydon residents, mindful of the ignominious reputation the Council received over its failures would not show mercy or understanding to a Council which appeared to them to be amoral, hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.
We didn’t start the fire…
By September 2020, the DEMOC campaign acquired the 20,000 signatures in its petition to hold directly-elected mayor referendum in the following year, which Cllr Hamida Ali accepted – and scheduled for 6 May 2021. On January 2021, it was announced that the referendum would take place in the autumn.
The DEMOC campaign had become quite influential, and been granted several boons from the Council’s many misfortunes. However, some elements of resistance to the campaign emerged to try to halt the DEMOC advance. “Croydon Says No” was launched as an anti-DEMOC campaign in early June 2021. Croydon Says No later set up a Facebook and Twitter account to accompany its blog, though the latter appears to have not been particularly active – only posting two tweets overall. On the 12th June 2021, they posted an interview with Croydon North MP Steve Reed, who expressed his firm opposition to a DEM effectively saying that it was a Tory plot and saying it would cost the taxpayer money. For months, the DEMOC campaign had maintained an internet ad campaign – and so it was decided that Croydon Labour Party in response had to launch its own. But there was a problem, and that was the lack of accountability from central figures in Croydon Council’s woes.
Following their resignations, Tony Newman and Simon Hall had both continued to attend CLP meetings – most notably on the November 2020 meeting to oppose the no-confidence motion on Keir Starmer for the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn, until their own suspensions from the Labour Party in February 2021. Local activists would complain that the councillors wouldn’t even admit that the council was bankrupt, and Steve Reed himself also seemed to run on this silent policy of not admitting wrongdoing, basing the social media anti-DEMOC campaign on this. Curiously, Reed did not throw his weight behind Croydon Says No, opting instead to launch “No to a Directly Elected Mayor” before the referendum was due to be held, with his Croydon Central counterpart Sarah Jones, and lead the anti-DEMOC campaign as they would a Labour Party one, with Labour Party leaflets and mail distributed to supporters of the party to encourage them to vote. The Labour Group had already decided collectively to oppose the campaign for a directly-elected mayor, in June 2021 motions to oppose the campaign were passed both in Croydon North CLP and Croydon Central CLP, making it official Croydon Labour Party policy. The “No to a Directly Elected Mayor” was an outgrowth of Croydon Labour’s stance, and so the campaign reflected a typical Labour Party campaign, blaming the Conservative Party for cuts to councils, and denying that the council was bankrupt. The leaflets distributed by Labour Party canvassers were coloured in Labour’s traditional red – and infamously had pictures of burning £20 notes to illustrate the claim that the office of a directly-elected mayor would cost a million pounds, accusing the Conservative Party of seeking to waste money.
Steve Reed and Sarah Jones had effectively turned the anti-DEMOC position into a Labour position and treated them as they would the Conservatives, trying to pull off the DEMOC campaign’s veil of plausible deniability. However, there was a thorn in the side of the anti-DEMOC campaign in Croydon North. Cllr Jamie Audsley as mentioned before had supported the campaign for a directly-elected mayor even to the point of independently campaigning “Labour for a Directly Elected Mayor” in May 2021. The anti-DEMOC campaign advanced by the Croydon North and Central Labour Parties was close to the councillor candidate selection process, which Audsley suddenly would himself deselected – ostensibly for breaking the Nolan Principles by not declaring that he had campaigned for a directly-elected mayor. Cllr Audsley filed an appeal against the decision to deselect him, which he lost.
He claimed that his deselection was politically motivated, and the outrage from his deselection prompted the Bensham Manor Branch of the Labour Party to write a letter inquiring about the selection process. Other allegations that prospective candidates were similarly blocked for various reasons including appearing at the South Norword library protest. The allegations implied that Steve Reed or prominent members of the Labour Group had interfered with the selection process to allow for candidates more closely aligned with them. Nevertheless, Reed faced outwardly and launched a social media campaign e-mailing the Labour Party members of his constituency, explaining his opposition to the directly elected mayor proposal.
Reed later hired an agency line to launch an aggressive social media campaign, and it was here that things took a turn for the farcical. Steve Reed’s social media campaign saw the use of internet memes displayed on his Facebook page, and that of other councillors in his constituency also from prominent supporters and allies. The memes featured the Simpsons character Mr. Burns, cabinet members of Ronald Reagan presidency sharing a laugh, US dollar notes flushed down the toilet, and the “change my mind” meme featuring Canadian far-right internet personality Steven Crowder. It is unknown whether this strategy was independently arrived or had drawn influence from “Croydon Says No”, which had also used internet memes in their blog posts. Reportedly, it was deployed with the estimated cost of £15,000 in campaign funds paid to the agency. That’s right. A social media agency allegedly received £15,000 to produce this:
The only answer that could make sense of the strategy behind the social media campaign was if Reed and Jones – particularly Reed, were banking on the ‘tribal’ allegiance to the Labour Party within Croydon, and especially the perception of themselves as popular within their local constituencies. At best, the campaign was incredibly insular, and the memes brought bemusement rather than amusement. The campaign continued to insist that Croydon wasn’t bankrupt, that Croydon Labour was doing a good job even in hard times – claiming the Labour-run council “kept the libraries open”, and that the Conservatives were failing nationally with the fuel crisis. Such was the strength of Croydon Labour’s opposition that the “No to a Directly Elected Mayor” campaign referred to a hypothetical directly-elected mayor as a “fat cat [politician]”. The social media videos asked “Would you spend £1million on a Conservative politician?”. On Friday 8th October 2021, they received their answer.
Conclusion
A cold and miserable Thursday saw 58,897 people to a polling station in Croydon, and in the early hours of Friday 8th October, an announcement of the results confirmed the referendum proposition passing with 47,165 votes – a landslide. Chris Philp – the Conservative MP for Croydon South wasted no attempt to baske in the glory on Twitter. MP Steve Reed’s response to the result was sheepish, saying that Croydon can “learn from the best Labour mayors in other boroughs”, and hope that Croydon Council will make sure funds are not diverted from public services.
Local mayoral candidate selections are now underway for the Mayoral election in May 2022. A candidate from the Conservative Party – which they have confirmed to be Cllr Jason Perry of South Croydon Ward. Whoever becomes the mayor will have to see through the cuts recommended by the auditors which is likely to spell curtains from several of Croydon’s libraries, and the almost certainty of Croydon Council refusing to take any more USACs. As this blog points out, the newly Directly Elected Mayor of Croydon will have seven months until the Croydon 2023 launch – pressures that the Labour-run Croydon Council under a cabinet system were struggling to meet. An Extraordinary Council Meeting following the results of the referendum is due to take place today.
Ultimately, this is not a story about a referendum, but about the rise and fall of the Labour Party in Croydon. The saga of the Labour administrations in Croydon Council is a Greek tragedy – an unlikely rise to power in 2014, and an eventual dominance of Croydon politics – forcing the Conservative Party to bank its electoral chances on a long shot directly-electoral mayor campaign exploiting the trifecta of disillusionment with the Council and with local Labour Party politicians, nimbyism and rising council tax rates.
Croydon Council under Newman (and Ali) and indeed before faced the pressures of all councils in England and Wales thanks to the decade-long austerity, and the clamp on local government expenditure enforced by central government to ensure that the events of the rate-capping rebellion never happens again. What this did, is severely limit what local authorities could do, in delivering services for its residents, and constrained its avenues to generate local investment. As is often remarked on the consequences of austerity measures to local goverments, councils are forced “to do more with less”. And from this pressure, it’s easy to see how they arrived at the Westfield shopping-mall gamble, Brick by Brick, and the Croydon Park Hotel purchase. For what it’s worth, Croydon Council did make up for the Stanley Halls closure by refurbishing the arts centre, it also launched the “climate emergency” campaign to make Croydon a sustainable borough by 2025 – allowing for a local committee supported by the New Economics Foundation to run and address local obstacles and climate-conscious strategies to appeal to homeowners, unfortunately cut short by the coronavirus pandemic – forcing a report on a series of recommendations to a Council that is now almost certainly unlikely to fulfill them. There were a variety of issues that were indeed outside Croydon Council’s control, however there were many decisions that the Council definitely took that were very bad, and even excluding the BxB stuff – it did have a predilection for encouraging massive skyscrapers, often at the cost of small businesses.
This leads to the heart of the issue that the council seemed to struggle coming to terms with: accountability. Croydon Council felt itself unable to even properly admit its mistakes, or level with concerned party members, much less the wider residents of Croydon even at the face of political oblivion – a Newman at political death’s door citing anything from the pandemic to austerity comes too little, too late – as his administration spent six years trying to square the circle of a tight-belted local authority with various schemes, such was his influence that he could go without informing much of even the Cabinet of his decisions, and he often didn’t. Even Hamida Ali’s leadership had the pall of Newman, and local outlets felt her administration to be an insufficient break from the previous regime. Adding to the feeling of unaccountability was a culture not just within the council and the Labour Group, but also embedded in Croydon’s Labour Parties of an inflexibly hostile attitude to an expansion of democracy, and fierce factionalism in the latter – ironically citing the need to appeal to the wider borough than just the Labour Party. Indeed, their response to austerity is contrasted with that of Labour councils in Ealing, Bradford, Southampton and more – even Labour Groups remaining in opposition to Tory councils, yet found the time to state firm and vociferous opposition to Tory cuts. Had Croydon Council and the Labour Group did more to be honest and trust the reaction of the people it represented – the DEMOC campaign would have been dead in the water, and Tony Newman may still have been council leader until at least 2022.
The directly elected mayor campaign was not a victory for democracy. It was probably one of the most grotesque displays of power jockeying by the nakedly opportunistic and ambitious sorts who had the gall to call themselves local representatives brought before the eyes of the people of Croydon, soon to be succeeded by the actual mayoral election. No great expansion of democracy or accountability will come from the directly-elected mayor – because the DEM is accountable to no-one, not even the council.
What could have been the last-ditch effort to make the case for a continued Labour-run council, to show humility and ask the forgiveness of the boroughs residents, and a golden opportunity for all sides of the Labour Parties of Croydon North and Central to unite, and even form coalitions with local parties and organisations against a transparent democratically-elected mayor campaign run by Croydon Conservatives – had instead turned into an absurdist double act mandating the Labour Group to ensure that members vote the right way. A potential redemption arc squandered, scrapped, and undermined by a perilous gamble to bank the north-south borough divide, and local Labour loyalties on an easy victory – and returning with absolutely nothing. Literally nothing. Every single ward – even in “safe Labour” Croydon North voted for the DEM once Steve Reed and Sarah Jones turned it into a referendum on Labour in Croydon, and lost badly. The very culture of unaccountability had become Croydon Labour’s undoing – leaving saner heads out of the anti-DEMOC campaign, and allowing it be blighted by embarrassing accusations of cronyism and control freakery, utterly unnecessary for an attempt to prevent a potential governance shift – yet wholly consistent with the motivations of politicians prioritizing threats to their power in Croydon over the health of their local party.
Never again shall I hear Steve Reed bark “worst result since 1935”, at least not without a hearty chuckle. Since this ridiculous man allowed himself to be convinced that his own personal popularity was what gave him his majority, which played into his decision to launch a deeply cretinous social media campaign followed by a very ambitious, yet highly credulous posse – which predictably did nothing for him but display his own vanity: the memes in particular were virtually incomprehensible to his own base. To feed his vanity, he shamelessly rifled through campaign funds with the motivation of preventing even the possibility of an emergence of a power – even within the Labour Party, that could eclipse his. This is embarrassing and should in a sane and sensible world bring questions over his position given how blatant his liability to Croydon Labour is. But it won’t. For I do not exist in a sane world, but in a pocket dimension called Croydon.
In this pocket dimension, MPs who allegedly squander the local party’s campaign funds to call the very prospect of directly-elected mayor a fat cat in a blatant attempt to secure his position, have people seriously discussing whether he’ll run (and presumably vote for him in spite of his callousness). In this dimension, MPs can give shout outs to Stormzy and Krept & Konan, while supporting the very policies that would have prevented their rise to fame and certainly the launch of a restaurant were they in force. And in this dimension, bankruptcy is denied until the local representatives are blue in the face, because even after national news coverage, it is admitting it before party members that makes them look bad.
The losers in this story are not Steve Reed or Sarah Jones; or Croydon Labour; or the residents’ associations in the deluded belief that a future Croydon DEM will prevent develop planning (though they will suffer as well). It is the refugee children likely to be turned away from the borough, and the people whose libraries are at risk of closure. That’s who really loses.
See also:
- Directly-elected mayor
- Steve Reed
- Sarah Jones
- Chris Philp
- Croydon Council
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