Community Group are a British political party in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, founded in 2001. The Community Group has four councillors serving on Doncaster Metropolitan Borough council.
The party was founded in the wake of a political scandal dubbed "Donnygate" that saw 21 Doncaster councillors convicted of expenses fraud from 1997. The party had 6 borough councillors in Doncaster in 2001. Party leader Martin Williams contested Doncaster North at the 2005 general election against Ed Miliband, receiving 2,365 votes (7.5%, in fourth place). Jessie Credland stood for election as Mayor of Doncaster for the party in 2005, coming fourth with 10,263 votes (9.4%). Garth Oxby defected to become an independent in May 2005 following a deal made with the Labour group for Community Group councillors to be given positions chairing council committees, a deal repeated the following year. Richard Walker and Jessie Credland also later left to sit as independent members. The party lost John Cooke's seat to Labour in 2007. In 2007, the party also had 10 town councillors.
English Democrats Mayor Peter Davies is associated with the group. The Community Group's own candidate, Stuart Exelby, formerly a Labour councillor and deputy mayor from 2008-9, received 2152 votes. Martin Williams said of his election, "I am happy about this," but in February 2010 said that "I think the mayoral system is in tatters... It has been tried and failed."
Famous quotes containing the words community and/or group:
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)