Let's test the “takeover” with arithmetic instead of fear
Much of the objection to the Proposed Constitution comes down to a single worry: that people who don't share our purpose could join in numbers, vote as a bloc, and take control of CMCA.
It's a fair thing to raise. So let's test it properly - against what the Constitution actually is, and against the numbers.
1. There is nothing to take.
CMCA is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee.
• It has no share capital.
• It has no shareholders.
• Nobody can buy an interest in it, because there is no interest to buy.
• No member - not one, not a thousand, not the entire membership - is entitled to a share of the Club's income or its assets.
• It cannot be sold. There is no owner to sell it, and nothing for a buyer to acquire.
A member's financial relationship with CMCA begins and ends with their guarantee and their subscription. That is the whole of it.
So, a “hostile takeover” isn't merely unlikely here. The mechanism doesn't exist. You cannot mount a takeover of an entity that has nothing to hold.
Which makes the more useful question not “could a group take control?” but “what on earth would they get?”
The answer: the right to run a not-for-profit at their own expense, with no ability to extract a cent from it. There is no financial benefit in controlling CMCA - not for a person, not for a group, not for a business. None.2. Now the arithmetic.Changing the Constitution requires a special resolution - at least 75% of the votes cast in favour.
Around 3,000 members vote in a Club ballot. If a motion were put that our existing members saw as contrary to the Club's purpose, it's reasonable to assume those 3,000 would vote against it.
Do the sum. For a motion to pass, those 3,000 “no” votes must amount to no more than 25% of the total. That means:
• Total votes cast would need to be at least 12,000; and
• At least 9,000 of them would need to be votes in favour.
Nine thousand people. Not nine thousand names on a list - nine thousand non-RV financial members who all join for the same purpose, all stay financial through to the ballot, all remember to vote, and all vote the same way.
3. And they'd pay for it. Every year. For years.
Membership isn't a one-off. Every one of those thousands would have to pay their subscription, year after year, and keep paying until the numbers were finally sufficient to carry a motion.
Consider how long that takes. Recruiting 100 committed, fee-paying, reliably-voting members a month toward this single objective would take about seven and a half years to reach 9,000 - and that assumes not one of them lapses, loses interest or changes their mind along the way. At 250 a month, a sustained rate of growth this Club has never seen, you're still looking at three years of continuous, disciplined, funded recruitment.
Three to eight years of paying fees to an organisation you don't want to belong to, in the hope of eventually winning a vote that entitles you to precisely nothing.
Nobody does that. There is no return at the end of it - the Constitution guarantees there can't be.
4. And nobody would be asleep while it happened.
A membership shift of that scale isn't invisible. It would build over years, in plain sight, in the membership numbers reported to members. Our current 3,000 voters are a baseline drawn from a quiet ballot, not a ceiling. Faced with a genuine threat to the Club's purpose, participation would rise sharply - and every additional member who votes against raises the bar the other side has to clear by four votes, not one.
That is the quiet strength of a 75% threshold. It doesn't just make change hard. It makes an organised campaign against the wishes of the membership arithmetically hopeless.
Stay Safe,
Nelson Crawshaw, Chairman
And Directors Paul Scully, Jo Tremain, Dean McAuley and Jan Binskin
Page Last Updated: Friday, 4 September 2026 4:22 pm, Session:
