As a Conservative, I am a great believer in fairness and in being inclusive, which obviously I apply to my role as a councillor. Crawley has people from a wide variety of backgrounds and I find that most people are welcoming of each other and respect the differences we have - including political persuasion.
Labour will claim to believe in fairness and inclusivity but their actions show that they apply these principles selectively, which greatly undermines these claims. An example of this at national level is the dreadful anti-Semitism problem that Labour has, which is undermining their historical credibility of challenging racism, as clearly anyone lacks credibility in being anti-racist if they are perceived to be against only some forms of racism and not others.
In Crawley, Labour has a major fairness and inclusivity problem relating to anyone who doesn’t share their dogmatic political views, which is actually over half of Crawley. We shamefully saw this at last week’s Annual Council meeting where excellent Conservative nominations for either Mayor or Deputy Mayor and for vice-chairmanships of committees were dismissed by Labour, in favour of much less qualified Corbynite councillors.
With 20 Labour councillors and 17 Conservatives, Crawley has a 55/45% split of councillors but each year the ruling Labour group seize virtually all the committee chairmanships and vice-chairmanships for themselves, and well as trousering all 15 positions of special responsibility at the council that receive additional financial payments.
Labour’s lack of fairness and inclusivity means that Crawley Borough Council does not have the most capable councillors in the right roles to do the best for our town. It is embarrassing that we have a Labour Mayor who has only been a councillor for two years and who has barely lived in Crawley for four years, and a vice-chairman of the Planning Committee who in the two years he’s been on the committee, has not spoken once on a single planning application. We Conservatives never behaved like this when we ran the council and will be inclusive next time too, as we are the party of fairness for everyone in Crawley.
Councillor Duncan Crow, Leader of Crawley Borough Council Conservative Group
23rd May 2018