Inside Croydon
https://insidecroydon.com/ 
In its own words:
"Local news. National impact. Paying a modest subscription helps Inside Croydon continue to deliver the news that matters to you. Support our journalism by signing up here today: https://www.patreon.com/insidecroydon"
Constitutes: independent media
Inside Croydon is an online news/media website based in south London. Its editor is Steven Downes.
Hacked 5 years ago
The Al Jazeera investigations unit’s final episode of their documentary series The Labour Files focused on the illegal and malicious hack attack against the Inside Croydon website in February 2021, and how unlawfully obtained data was used by party officials to hound and harass Labour councillors and long-serving local officers.
Documents leaked to Al Jazeera included an email to Clive Fraser, the Town Hall Labour group’s chief whip, which had a 77.9MB attachment file of documents stolen from the Inside Croydon website’s email account.
The author of that email was Ruth Bannister.
Sources have come forward with documentary evidence which shows Bannister’s association with David Evans, and his business, The Campaign Company, that goes back at least 10 years.
When contacted by the producers of the Al Jazeera programme, Bannister declined to comment on her role in the illegal hack of this website.[1]
Read more:
- #TheLabourFiles: Source of hacked data worked for Evans
- #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
- #TheLabourFiles: Whip letters prove they knew hack was illegal
- #TheLabourFiles: It’s long past time to clean-up the Party
- #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed provided endorsement for Stanger
Targeted by SFFN
On 13 October 2025, Paul Holden wrote:
This week, I’ve released stories from my book "The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy" that expose how Morgan McSweeney and his close ally, Imran Ahmed, used their dodgy astroturf projects, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), to launch a pan-Atlantic war on free speech in the US and UK while also intervening in the 2019 European Elections.
Part of this story, now told in full and without caveat in my book, involved SFFN launching a genuinely despicable campaign to demonetise The Canary, behind the veil of anonymity, because The Canary posed a threat to McSweeney’s political ambitions.
But The Canary was not the only outlet targeted by the people who now occupy major positions of power in the Labour government. Also targeted was an indefatigable local news outlet called Inside Croydon and its editor Steven Downes.
Inside Croydon reported on the politics of the borough of Croydon, the stomping ground of Steve Reed MP. It reported critically, but I believe accurately, on Reed and his local political allies, as well the Labour-led Croydon Council. Croydon Council declared effective bankruptcy in 2020 while under the control of the very same people Inside Croydon was reporting on.
Reed, as my book shows, was one of McSweeney’s closest collaborators, in addition to serving as a director of Labour Together for seven years between 2016 and 2023.
The stories of the targeting of both Inside Croydon and The Canary are genuinely shocking. I believe they speak believe to a disturbing hostility towards independent media outlets, and independent journalists, conducting public-interest investigative journalism.
In the spirit of restorative justice, I have decided to release exclusive extracts from my book to The Canary and Inside Croydon. They are the first and only outlets I have granted the right to reproduce material from my book. I feel it is important that The Canary and Inside Croydon both get to relay their full stories, on their own sites, without any paywall, free for the public to read.
Personally, I can think of no better way for The Canary and Inside Croydon to finally get a modicum of much-delayed justice: by using journalism to speak truth to power.[2]
Founded in 2010
In its first five years, Inside Croydon was threatened with a libel action by a Tory peer, whose lawyers quickly abandoned that notion.
We’ve had late-at-night visits on behalf of a Conservative councillor, who also hired one of the most expensive firms of lawyers in London. We did not back down. The individual concerned is now an ex-councillor.
And we’ve received multiple threats from a Labour MP, too, in an attempt to gag us from publishing the truth. Once again, we held our ground, always based on hard evidence.
Activities
We also helped launch the campaign to Save the David Lean Cinema, we revealed the secret sale of the Riesco china collection, we exposed the £24million scandal of the Bridge to Nowhere at East Croydon Station, provided in-depth coverage of the #WadGate affair at the Town Hall and since 2014 have delivered a 24-hour live blogs on local and General Elections.
We have also been at the forefront of the coverage of the wretched collapse of Croydon Council, from the launch of Brick by Brick, the Fairfield Halls fiasco, the damning Ofsted report on the council’s children’s services and, of course, the financial crash of the council in 2020.
Meanwhile, other publications have made their journalists redundant and abandoned their coverage of the area, and its politics.
And all through that time we have provided a platform for an eclectic and varied range of views and opinions about living life on the fringes of London.
This site has become an evolving mass of news, views and information about where you live and work that we attempt to make interesting, stimulating and which offers a real voice in your community, so often missing from council events or the established mainstream media.[3]
