Work in progress: cashiers to return to Trinity School this afternoon for the fourth session of the still-slow council election count
WALTER CROONSITE, political editor, on the country’s longest-running election and even more unpopular for Croydon
The Croydon election countdown looks set to focus on its fifth day and second week, after yesterday’s session at Trinity School managed to announce results in just eight of the district’s 28 constituencies.
An interested observer, Tory Crowley, an adviser to Tory in Sutton, tweeted angrily: “I learned that after the polls closed on Thursday at 22:00, you could fly to Sydney, have lunch at the Opera and return, but have not yet announced Addington’s new result in Croydon.
Pompous: Steve Reed OBE finally talks about Croydon Council’s mismanagement
Things got so bad that even Steve Reed OBE, the Progress MP from Croydon North, managed to remain silent while his friends Tony Newman, Alison Butler and Manju Shahul Hamid bankrupted the neighborhood, losing tens of millions of pounds, leaving the council’s tenants to rot. in Dickensian’s living conditions and the cutting of Meals on Wheels, this morning managed to provoke a mild rebuke.
“It’s not good enough,” tweeted the pompous Justice Minister in the shadow of Keith Starmer this morning.
Many of the problems with the census stem from a decision by the council’s chief executive, Catherine Kerswell, to conduct a complex census of mayors and councilors in the area in the gym and theater of an independent school. Trinity needed her main gym on Friday, the day after the vote, for level A exams, so Kerswell, as a return employee, decided to postpone the start of the calculation for Croydon’s first elected mayor until 5.30pm on Friday. 19½ hours after the closing of the polling stations. From there, everything was down.
When the organization of the census ran into problems and delayed the whole process, the mayoral election count, which was to be conducted and cleared by 22:00 on Friday, still continued at 4:30 on Saturday.
What’s going on ?: MP Sarah Jones and mayoral candidate Val Shawcross (back to the camera, white jacket) get together trying to figure out what’s going on in the early hours of Saturday
Inside Croydon understands that the mayoral candidates and their agents have convened a meeting with the returning official in the early hours of Saturday morning to highlight the problems with the slow progress of the two-stage preferential vote count.
Candidates suggested to Kerswell that plans to count the ward begin this morning should be abandoned.
Initially, Kerswell tried to maintain that everything was going according to her schedule. It was 2.30am yesterday when she was forced to admit defeat, and she finally admitted that none of the district census could be completed this morning, and she kindly advised councilor candidates to go back to bed tired you are.
Sources in the census suggest that the slow progress is not due to too few staff recruited from council staff, but due to a lack of organization. “There were many cashiers,” said one source. “But many of them sat without anything to do for hours on Friday night.
“There seemed to be some difficulty in the process, as senior census observers checked the votes against the number of ballots issued.”
Someone else said, “I keep my sympathy for the poor who count (or rather sit and wait for instructions) who have been so poorly managed all along.”
Slow walking: executive director of the board and returning employee Catherine Kerswell
And as Reed also noted, when it comes to renting halls, time is money. “Someone has to ask the return employee how much it costs to rent a hall for four or five days, plus all the overtime costs of staff, paying for their food outside the office and transport … what had to be completed for one day seems to take five.
– Who organized this?
However, Kerswell’s problems did not end on Saturday morning. The slow count of ice lasted until Sunday.
As Trinity’s main sports hall is not available to continue the census, Kerswell announced in the early hours that this crucial process will begin at 6pm on Saturday in the small hall and Miter Theater, starting with the census only for 12 of the 28 departments.
The rest will be considered at the next counting session on Sunday afternoon.
Business partners: Mark and Maddie Hanson on the left with Labor Secretary-General David Evans on the campaign trail. The Hanson family received an employment contract without tenders
On Saturday, the count began an hour late. Even with relatively low turnout throughout the neighborhood, it was three hours before the first result was announced.
Some close conversations required a census; Kerswell’s preferred, time-saving strategy was to offer candidates a “film package,” which was done at Addiscombe East, a two-seater department that retained the same Labor councilors, Tori Jeet Baines and Maddie Hanson of Labor.
Hanson seems to have clung to the office thanks to the heavyweight campaign in her area, conducted on her behalf by mayoral candidate Val Shawcross and local MP Sarah Jones.
In fact, this was the model of the night, without any change in the political representation in the announced departments, only with a change in part of the staff. Newman’s numps, such as Hanson, and those who were part of the old Labor council team that bankrupted the neighborhood, were duly returned for another four years on the town hall sauce train.
At Addiscombe West, this meant that the chairman of the uncontrollable, Sean Fitzsimmons, was returned along with Newman’s chief whip, Clive “Thirsty” Fraser, who survived being removed from the election in his hometown of South Norwood to return to the council. Addiscombe West is the third district Fraser has run in three elections.
Adiscombe West voters were so disappointed with the proposal from political parties that less than 1 in 3 bothered to vote – 32 percent reported turnout.
Brod Green, arguably the safest Labor department in the neighborhood, waved to Stouge Collins, Newman’s vice chairman for six years, his loyal counterpart Shervan Chowdhury and extremely useless business cabinet member Manju Shahul-Hamid. . The turnout here was only 26.5 percent – hardly a term.
Counting the time: the counting of the ward starts last night at Trinity School, with tables arranged, ward by ward
It is as if the events in the town hall from November 2020 have never happened.
The safety zones, ward after ward, diligently returned the same advisers who had put Croydon in his financial mess in the first place. In Thornton Heath (30% turnout) and West Thornton (27% turnout), Labor’s vote seemed as strong as ever, with “local” Conservatives never coming close, with the Greens and LibDems failing to strike. Border group Taking The Initiative Party failed to take any initiative.
With each statement from the Safe Labor polling stations, low turnout served to underscore why Shawcross missed the town hall by less than 600 votes – Labor leaders failed to go to the polls.
According to Labor geniuses, the Tory-held South Croydon was a special unit. In the midst of Partygate and other scandals involving the Tory government, the three current Conservative advisers still won the poll in South Croydon – Labor Josh Andrew received within 300 votes of the lowest Tories.
30,000 pound by-elections: Jason Perry delivers speech to receive mayor on Saturday morning
What was interesting here was that the South Croydon vote was led by former IRA gunwoman Maria Gatland, ahead of Jason Perry, who was named Croydon’s new mayor earlier Saturday.
Unable to be mayor and councilor at the same time, Perry will not continue as a councilor in the area and will now have to hold by-elections in the area to fill the vacuum – an opportunity that Perry must have had. when he allowed his name to continue on the nomination form.
So that’s another £ 25,000 to £ 30,000 in unnecessary by-elections, without which Croydon’s long-suffering taxpayers could.
Conversely, during the census, Kerswell’s problems did not become easier.
Saturday midnight came and went. In a quarter to one, with unresolved counts in two districts – Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, where the Liberal Democrats had made Labor candidates “shit themselves”, according to a party insider, and Wadden, the only branch in Croydon’s parliamentary constituency. South, which is held by Labor – Kerswell calls time.
CPUN and Waddon will have to wait until the countdown resumes on Sunday for their batch movements, a process far faster than a full count, in which counters sort votes into piles of 25 or 50 and then transmit them for verification. by a team leader to make sure all votes were counted correctly. Electoral agents who agree to a batch film cannot request a recount.
The countdown is set to resume at 1pm on Sunday, but candidates were sent a message this morning asking to come early. Trinity School is busy; there is an event …
Click here for the Croydon election count so far
Read more: Tori Perry wins historic mayoral election with less than 600 votes
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