Go west! Greens name Patel as Ramsey steps out for Tories – Inside Croydon

The Greens are announcing parliamentary candidates for three seats in Croydon and Sutton, while a Tory councilor is helping the party in its time of need by taking on a hopeless task in east London.

Ria Patel, the Greens councilor in the Fairfield ward since 2022, was last night confirmed as the party’s parliamentary candidate for Croydon West for the July 4 general election.

New target: Green Councilor Ria Patel

Patel replaces Marley King, who was selected as the Greens’ candidate last October but withdrew from the process earlier this week due to family commitments.

Croydon West is among the borough’s reshuffled parliamentary constituencies and is expected to be a “safe” Labor seat, with a poll earlier this week predicting Labor to win 68% of the vote and the Greens relegating the Conservatives to third place. place. Sarah Jones, MP for Croydon Central since 2017, is Labour’s candidate in the new constituency, while the Conservatives have selected another Croydon councilor since 2022, Simon Fox.

Patel is almost certain to put Labour’s scrapping of its £28bn Green Deal pledge at the forefront of her campaign with Jones, who is Keith Starmer’s shadow cabinet member for industry and decarbonisation.

Patel is Croydon’s youngest and its first non-binary councillor.

“I’m going to be your MP because we need real change and the other parties just aren’t delivering that,” Patel said last night.

“We need significant changes to make our tax system fairer and restore our public services, protecting our NHS and bringing water companies into public ownership. We need to end the failed privatization experiment and return our focus to providing a public service, not making a private profit.

“We need politicians to stand up for what is right. And when we see other countries breaking international law, we should be part of the prosecution, not make lame excuses to defend them.

“I am also your MP because I want to be a voice for local people. MPs from other parties are told by their party leaders what to do and what to say. Greens are not like that and I will be free to speak for you.

“The Greens have already outspent the Conservatives in much of the area and we are Labour’s real rivals. I have shown as a local councilor that I will stand up for local people and I will do so as your MP.”

Ballot fodder: Holly Ramsey, Conservative candidate from West Ham

Another Croydon councillor, Holly Ramsey (who is that? Ed) was yesterday named as the Tory candidate for the staunchly Labor seat of West Ham and Beckton.

Inside Croydon has been assured that the little-seen Tory councilor is neither the daughter of TV chef Gordon nor a character from the Aussie soap opera Neighbours.

Ramsey was previously on Sutton Council before being given the Croydon Tory ward of Purley and Woodcote in 2022. She will probably be touring parts of East London over the next month, he heard shouting, “Come on, Ammers!”

The Tories, having called the election for July 4, found themselves in a bit of a panic this week, with around 100 candidates still to be found for seats across the country, including some supposedly safe Tory seats, and the deadline of declaration on Friday is fast looming. .

Like Labour, the Tory High Command has taken some liberties, parachuting senior party figures into some of the more winnable seats (let’s just say Ramsey is not among them), but by last night there were still a few vacancies.

Michael Crick, via his excellent @TomorrowsMPs Twitter account, reported: “I hear the urgency for the Conservatives to find a candidate in every seat in Btish is so great that they are now contacting people who have recently resigned from the approved candidate list to see if he could still sit in a hopeless place somewhere.”

However, nothing has been heard or seen of the former gobby I do everything, Mario the Creature. How strange…

The Greens, meanwhile, have also announced their candidates for the two Sutton seats: Tracey Hague (previously a local and national election candidate in Croydon) will stand in the general election in Carshalton and Wallington, and Aasha Anam in Sutton and Cheam.

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• ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s most rotten boroughs for the seventh consecutive year in the annual summary of civic advertising in Private magazine