Previewing the 2nd May 2024 local elections Part IV — Blackpool South and Lancashire
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Welcome to the annual Andrew’s Previews megapreview, covering everything that goes on in the ordinary local elections in England and Wales on 2nd May 2024. This year marks the 50th anniversary of most of the councils up for election in England this year, which first took up their responsibilities on 1st April 1974 after having initial elections in the spring of 1973. It remains to be seen whether the whole shebang can last another 50 years.
Because of its size, this Preview has been split into four parts. Part I consisted of the introduction, Wales and London. Part II covered the English North and Midlands, with the exception of the Lancashire police area. Part III looked at the South of England outside London. We now come to the concluding Part IV: below are the Parliamentary Special for Blackpool South, discussion of other elections in Lancashire, and concluding remarks including the annual In memoriam section where we pay tribute to councillors who have passed away over the last year. Without further ado, let’s look at the council and PCC elections in the south:
Blackpool South
House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Conservative MP Scott Benton.
There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool,
That’s noted for fresh air and fun,
And Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom
Went there with young Albert, their son.- Stanley Holloway, The Lion and Albert
When Blackpool Tower was topped out in 1894, it was the tallest man-made structure in the British Empire. The Tower itself is merely the literal highpoint of an entertainment complex that includes the world-famous Tower Ballroom, which hosts an episode of Strictly Come Dancing most years. I’ve had the privilege of playing music on the Tower Ballroom stage myself.
On the clearest of days, those who take the lift to the top of the tower are rewarded with a view of up to 70 miles, with four National Parks and the Isle of Man all visible. But this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it never stops raining, as the Bury builder Sam Oswaldthwaite found out in another Stanley Holloway monologue, Three Ha’pence a Foot.
It rained and it rained for a fortnight
It flooded the whole countryside,
It rained and it still kept on raining
’Til th’Irwell were fifty miles wide.The houses were soon under water
And folks to the roof had to climb,
They said t’was the rottenest summer
As Bury had had for some time.The rain showed no sign of abating
And water rose hour by hour,
’Til th’only dry land were at Blackpool
and that were on top of the tower.
The entire Blackpool Tower complex is owned by Blackpool council and managed on their behalf by Merlin Entertainments, which runs a large number of the UK’s theme parks and tourist attractions. But not Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the south of the town, which is still run by the founding family. The park was set up in 1896 by failed New York advertising executive William Bean, who went on to become a Blackpool alderman; Bean’s great-great-granddaughter Amanda Thompson now runs the park. Its signature ride, the aptly-named Big One, was the tallest, steepest and second-fastest rollercoaster in the world when it opened in 1994, and it dominates the view of the local area; other attractions include the UK’s only racing rollercoaster the Grand National, the original Ghost Train — which is itself reputedly haunted — and Europe’s oldest amusement ride still in operation, the Sir Hiram Maxim Captive Flying Machine, which celebrates its 120th anniversary this year.
The Pleasure Beach and the Tower are both on the seafront — the long Promenade which runs the length of Blackpool borough. The Tower lies on the Golden Mile, the stretch of seafront between the North and South Piers which is actually well over a mile and a half in length. This is the focus of the annual Illuminations, an outdoor exhibition of that newfangled thing called electric streetlighting which has been going on every autumn since 1879, and which in recent years has been extended to run into Christmas and the New Year.
The Promenade is also the route of the Blackpool Tramway, which is the only UK survivor of the municipal urban tram networks of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; the first section of the Blackpool route opened in 1885, and the trams have been run by the council since 1892. Major investment in the 21st century has brought the tramway up to modern standards with a fleet of 18 sleek new trams from Bombardier, and a short extension from North Pier to Blackpool North railway station is about to open.
In addition to this, most of the old trams still exist and can be ridden on seasonal weekends and other special occasions — special fares apply.
If all this is too much effort for you, there is of course Blackpool’s beach. We hear a lot about the supposed poor quality of Britain’s rivers and bathing waters these days, but even Greenpeace admit that Blackpool has seriously cleaned up its act from the days when I was a youngster, when the beach really was an open sewer. Those stories about investment by water companies — here, United Utilities — aren’t just fantasy. Mind, intending bathers may still have to do to battle with the Great British Weather.
The Golden Mile and the South Shore are full of hotels, guesthouses, and buildings that used to be hotels and guesthouses but which are now HMOs. This was the infrastructure that was needed to support the premier tourist resort of the north of England. Northerners of a certain age still remember the way in which entire towns used to empty for the annual Wakes Weeks, when all the cotton mills in a particular town would shut down for maintenance at the same time; a team of engineers would travel the north repairing the mill engines and machinery in deserted towns, while the millworkers and their families would all travel to Blackpool for a week beside the seaside. The Illuminations were a creative way of extending the tourist season into the autumn, when most other seaside resorts were winding down. The enormous tidal flow of tourist traffic to and from Blackpool created huge problems for neighbouring towns, notably Preston which was a bottleneck that nearly all of Blackpool’s traffic had to pass through; it’s not a coincidence that the UK’s first motorway, built and opened in 1959, was the Preston Bypass.
The Wakes Weeks have left their mark on our parliamentary elections in an unusual way. The 1945 general election was hastily arranged at the end of the Second World War to end a Parliament which had spectacularly overrun its five-year term. With victory in Europe reached on 8th May, this meant a summer election which would clash with the wakes weeks in some areas. Polling was arranged for 5th July 1945, but the votes were not due to be counted until 26th July to allow time for votes to come back from the millions of British servicemen deployed overseas; this delay allowed time for alternative arrangements to be made in certain northern towns. Several constituencies in that election actually polled on 12th July, and in the Nelson and Colne seat polling day was staggered over three weeks.
Blackpool’s extensive tourist infrastructure is one reason that it was once a favourite location for political party conferences. Most of these were held at the Winter Gardens, an enormous Victorian entertainment and conference centre which was bought by the council in 2010. One notable party conference here in recent decades was Labour’s in 1994, at which Tony Blair gave his first leader’s conference speech which introduced the theme of “New Labour” and announced the abandonment of Clause IV. Blackpool fell off the roster for the political parties after the 2007 Conservative Party conference, but the Tories were back in a newly-expanded Winter Gardens for their 2022 spring conference and Labour were here last November for their North West regional conference. Perhaps the main events may be back in Blackpool soon?
The Winter Gardens is also the regular venue for the North West Regional brass band championships, won this year by Foden’s.
But this level of tourist infrastructure no longer makes sense in an era when Wakes Weeks are a boomer’s memory and foreign travel is cheap. The Mediterranean is now just as accessible as Blackpool for the working classes of Lancashire going on holiday, and the Costa del Sol has better weather than the Golden Mile. So although a fair amount of money has clearly been spent on the town in recent years — see, for example, the sleek new buildings around the railway station of which there are more to come — the town of Blackpool has visibly been on a long-term decline.
If we look at the official 2019 deprivation indices for England and Wales, census district number 1 (indicating the most deprived area) was Tendring 018A, also known as Jaywick Sands near Clacton, which has appeared in this column before. Jaywick Sands is the closest thing the UK has to a shanty town and really is in a league of its own as far as deprivation is concerned. The next eight Lower Super Output Areas for multiple deprivation are all in Blackpool, and seven of them are in the Blackpool South constituency. Apparently the worst of these is census district Blackpool 010A, which is centred on Erdington Road and Central Drive with a finger going west towards Central Pier.
This is what Erdington Road looks like from the outside, a street of terraces some of which might benefit from a lick of paint but where no house is tinned up. Frankly, I’ve seen much worse. If you want to take a look inside the terraces, one of them is currently on the market for £79,950 (link) — roughly the average property price for Blackpool 010A. This is a street within easy walking distance of the town centre (although the route to the town centre is Central Drive, which is an eyesore) and the jobs that provides — see for example the large new office building under construction next to North station, which is intended to house 3,000 civil service jobs starting soon.
Mind, owner-occupation is definitely in the minority here. We can get an idea of the sort of people who predominantly live in these terraces by looking at the census return. Blackpool 010A is part of Bloomfield ward, which makes the top 40 wards in England and Wales for private renting (55.6% of households). 21% of residents have never worked or are long-term unemployed, 13.2% are long-term sick or disabled (the 14th highest figure for any ward in England and Wales). 23.4% of Bloomfield ward’s adults of working age are working in accommodation or food service, which is the sixth-highest figure for any ward in England and Wales.
Blackpool 010A may get all the headlines, but in fact every one of Blackpool South’s census districts is in the bottom half of the deprivation indices. Closest to the top half is the seafront area around Starr Gate, the tram terminus on the southern edge of the town.
Turning our attention away from the seafront we find Marton, whose housing is mostly newer — 1930s and 1950s suburbia between Blackpool Airport and Stanley Park. The latter is as close as the countryside gets to central Blackpool, because the area to the east of park is open space mostly occupied by Blackpool Zoo. During this by-election campaign my military band played an evening gig at a hotel next to the zoo and heard lions roaring in the darkness; as young Albert Ramsbottom found out all these years ago, lions are dangerous things.
Elsewhere on the eastern edge of town we find a large office building in Marton which is the main administrative centre for National Savings and Investments. Which means that building is also home to ERNIE (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment), the machine which draws the Premium Bond numbers each month. The fifth and current ERNIE, which has been in use since 2019, uses quantum technology to produce random numbers much more quickly than previous ERNIEs; it takes just 17 minutes to generate an entire month’s worth of winning numbers.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that all this deprivation adds up to a safe Labour seat. Blackpool South has always had a much, much higher Conservative vote than its demographic might suggest. The old cliché was that the landladies in the constituency’s many, many hotels and guesthouses voted solidly Conservative. Even now the lack of an organised third political party in Blackpool has kept the Conservative vote here high: in the May 2023 local elections the wards covering Blackpool South voted for Labour by 47–39, with the councillor count being 18–6 in Labour’s favour. Several wards were straight Labour-Conservative fights. And when we look back into the history of Blackpool South’s parliamentary representation, we find that there have only ever been two non-Conservative MPs here.
When single-member parliamentary constituencies became the norm in 1885, Blackpool had only been a municipal borough for nine years and it wasn’t nearly large enough to be a parliamentary borough. The Blackpool constituency created in 1885 was a county division of Lancashire, covering essentially all of the Fylde peninsula together with villages to the north and southeast of Preston. So as well as Blackpool the constituency covered the towns of Fleetwood, St Annes, Lytham, Poulton-le-Fylde and Kirkham, and places as far away as Longridge and Penwortham. The inclusion of Penwortham was bizarre, because that area lies south of the Ribble and was (and still is) accessible from the rest of the constituency only through Preston.
This Blackpool constituency was safely Conservative and often uncontested. Its first MP was the man who gave his name to Stanley Park, the main park in Blackpool. Frederick Stanley was the second son of Edward Smith-Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby, who had served three times as UK prime minister between 1852 and 1868 and still holds the record for being the longest-serving Conservative party leader. Given the way the Conservatives get through leaders these days, this record may be safe for a while yet. Frederick had been in the Commons since 1865 and was one of the two MPs for the predecessor seat of North Lancashire prior to 1885. He was in Cabinet as the Colonial Secretary at the time of the 1885 election, serving in Lord Salisbury’s first caretaker administration; Frederick took over in that role from his elder brother Edward Stanley, the 15th Earl of Derby.
Following the 1885 election the Liberals formed a government, but this collapsed shortly afterwards over the issue of Irish Home Rule and the resulting 1886 general election returned a Conservative majority. Having been re-elected unopposed as MP for Blackpool (as he had been in 1885), Frederick Stanley got the job of President of the Board of Trade in the new Salisbury government and a seat in the Lords — as Lord Stanley of Preston — to go with it. Two years later Lord Stanley of Preston became governor-general of Canada, and it was in this capacity that he became immortal in sport: he donated and gave his name to the Stanley Cup, the trophy awarded to the NHL champions in North American ice hockey. In 1893 he succeeded to his brother’s titles and became the 16th Earl of Derby.
All this lay in the future. With Frederick Stanley off to the Lords a by-election was needed in Blackpool, which took place on 20th August 1886 and was the constituency’s first contested election. It was a big win for the Conservatives’ candidate Sir Matthew Ridley, 5th Baronet, who defeated Liberal John Pilkington by 71–29. Sir Matthew was another high-profile figure who would have already been on the Conservative frontbench had he not lost his seat in Hexham in 1885; a run at Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1886 general election was also unsuccessful.
In April 1895 the Speaker of the House of Commons, Arthur Peel, retired. In those days the convention was that a new Speaker would come from the government benches, but the governing Liberals were the second-largest party in the Commons and were reliant on Irish nationalist support for their majority. This resulted in the first contested election for the Speakership since 1839 (and the last until 1951), with the Liberal MP for Carlisle William Gully opposed by the Conservatives’ Sir Matthew Ridley. In the end the House approved the motion that Gully take the chair as speaker, by the narrow margin of 285 votes to 274.
Having narrowly failed to become Speaker, Ridley got his chance at high office when Lord Rosebury’s Liberal administration fell shortly afterwards and the Marquess of Salisbury became Prime Minister for the third and final time. Sir Matthew Ridley was offered and accepted the position of Home Secretary in the new Conservative government. Under the rules at the time he was required to fight a ministerial by-election because this was considered to be accepting an office of profit under the Crown; nobody opposed Ridley in the resulting second Blackpool by-election of 6th July 1895, and he was also elected unopposed in the 1895 general election shortly afterwards.
Ridley retired from the government following the 1900 general election and was elevated to the Lords shortly afterwards as the first Viscount Ridley. The resulting third Blackpool by-election of 21st December 1900 was the last contested by-election of both the 19th century and the reign of Queen Victoria. It returned the Conservative candidate Henry Worsley-Taylor, who defeated the Liberals’ Joseph Heap by 7,059 votes to 5,589 — in percentage terms, the closest Blackpool result on these boundaries. Worsley-Taylor was a barrister who had previously been Recorder of Preston.
In 1906 Worsley-Taylor retired after one term and successfully passed the Blackpool seat on to the new Conservative candidate Colonel Wilfred Ashley. He was from the upper class: Ashley’s grandfather had been the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, while Louis Mountbatten was Ashley’s son-in-law and the Mountbatten family inherited Classiebawn Castle in Ireland from him. Ashley had been a Grenadier Guards officer before entering politics, and had volunteered for active service in the Boer War but was invalided home. In 1917, during his time as MP for Blackpool, Ashley was one of the people involved in the founding of Comrades of the Great War, one of a number of ex-servicemen’s organisations which eventually merged to form the Royal British Legion.
By the time the Great War was over Blackpool had developed into its final form as a seaside resort, with all the ingredients we know today now present. Blackpool had become a county borough in 1889, and the 1918 redistribution promoted it into a parliamentary borough. The revised Blackpool constituency extended beyond the area of Blackpool County Borough as it was in 1918: included were the still-independent towns of Bispham with Norbreck to the north and the unmerged St Anne’s-on-Sea and Lytham to the south, excluded were parts of Marton which had yet to be incorporated into Blackpool.
The rest of the former Blackpool seat became the new Fylde constituency, and the previous Blackpool MP Wilfred Ashley moved to seek re-election there. He passed the Blackpool seat on to Albert Lindsay Parkinson, who was coming to the end of his three consecutive years as mayor of Blackpool. Parkinson was a successful businessman who ran the family building and joinery firm of Jacob Parkinson & Co; this would later become Sir Lindsay Parkinson & Co Ltd and develop into a noted civil engineering firm. Parkinson received the coalition government’s coupon and he won in 1918 with 56% of the vote, against competition from an Independent Progressive and the town’s first Labour candidate, Allen Gee.
In 1922 Parkinson stood down from Parliament after one term and just about passed his seat on to the new Conservative candidate Leonard Molloy, an Irishman who was described in his Times obituary as “one of the best known doctors in the north of England”. He had been appointed DSO and was twice mentioned in despatches for his medical service in the First World War. Molloy only just got into Parliament: he defeated the Liberal candidate Hugh Meyler by 18,206 votes to 18,040, the closest contest in the history of the Blackpool constituency.
At the following year’s general election Molloy stood down and the Conservatives selected Victor Stanley, a younger son of the former Blackpool MP the 16th Earl of Derby. Victor was a senior naval officer who would go on to command the Reserve Fleet the following year and ended up with the rank of Admiral. This was probably facilitated by the fact that he was the only Conservative candidate ever to lose the Blackpool constituency: the Liberals’ Hugh Meyler defeated him by 22,264 votes to 19,192.
The only Liberal MP for Blackpool, Hugh Meyler had fought with distinction in the Boer War and the Great War. He was gassed near Ypres in 1915 before joining the Royal Flying Corps as a balloon observation officer, ending the war with a DSO and a Military Cross to his name. In between those two wars he practised as a lawyer in Natal, and was elected as a Unionist member of the first South African parliament in 1910. Meyler resigned from the Army on his election to the UK Parliament, but his time in the House of Commons was brief: there was another election a year later, and he lost Blackpool to the new Conservative candidate Sir Walter de Frece by 25,839 votes to 18,712.
Appropriately for a resort based on entertainment, Sir Walter de Frece had made his name as a theatre impresario before entering politics. He was the husband and manager of Vesta Tilley, the noted male impersonator of the music-hall era who had reputedly been England’s highest-earning woman in the 1890s. During the Great War de Frece and Tilley ran very successful military recruitment drives, which led to de Frece being knighted in 1919. Lady de Frece then retired from the stage, while Sir Walter was first elected as an MP at a January 1920 by-election for the marginal seat of Ashton-under-Lyne, before transferring to Blackpool in 1924.
By this point Walter and Vesta were spending most of their time living on the French Riviera, in deference to Lady de Frece’ poor health. Many years later, the Labour MP John Cryer claimed in a Commons debate on lobbying that Walter de Frece only visited the UK twice a year, for Budget Day and Royal Ascot, and he covered this up by signing the bottom of an entire stack of House of Commons notepaper on his return; his secretary would then use that signed notepaper to answer constituency correspondence. Hansard does record slightly more of a contribution from Sir Walter than that story might suggest, but it’s fair to say he was not an active MP.
Sir Walter de Frece finally retired to Monte Carlo in 1931 and successfully passed the Blackpool seat on to the new Conservative candidate Clifford Erskine-Bolst, who returned to the Commons eight years after losing his seat in 1923. Erskine-Bolst had originally been elected at an August 1922 by-election in Hackney South, after the patriotic fraudster Horatio Bottomley was expelled from the House. The 1931 election was a Conservative landslide year, and Erskine-Bolst crushed the Liberal candidate — the prolific thriller writer and journalist Edgar Wallace — by 73–27.
Clifford Erskine-Bolst retired in 1935 after one term of office and passed the seat on to new Conservative candidate Roland Robinson, who had been elected in 1931 for the more marginal Widnes constituency. Blackpool was Robinson’s home town and proved to be a much safer berth for him. Robinson had a long political career which peaked with a ten-year stint as chairman of the Commonwealth Affairs select committee: he served in the Commons until 1964, after which he was raised to the peerage as the first Lord Martonmere and became Governor of Bermuda for eight years. Ted Rogers, the Canadian cable TV mogul, was Robinson’s son-in-law.
Lord Martonmere’s title came from the small lake of Marton Mere on the eastern edge of Blackpool, the surviving remnant of a much larger lake which was left behind by the last Ice Age and has mostly been drained long ago for agriculture. This was transferred into Roland Robinson’s constituency by the emergency redistribution of 1945, which split up seats in the House of Commons with more than 100,000 electors. The Blackpool constituency had gone over that limit, and it was divided into two seats — North and South. In 1945 Blackpool South covered the four southern wards of Blackpool county borough plus the borough of Lytham St Annes; this also meant it gained the Marton area, which had been incorporated into Blackpool in the 1930s, from the Fylde constituency. Further boundary changes in 1950 transferred Lytham St Annes into the Fylde constituency in exchange for more of Blackpool and more or less created the Blackpool South seat we have today, although the seat’s boundary with Blackpool North has fluctuated over the years.
Roland Robinson’s departure for Bermuda and the Lords in 1964 freed up a seat for another long-serving Conservative MP. Peter Blaker represented Blackpool South for 28 years until 1992. He had been evacuated to Canada as a child during the Second World War and subsequently fought in the Canadian forces, worked for the Foreign Office before becoming an MP, and served as a junior minister in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence during the Heath government and the first Thatcher term. Blaker’s knighthood in 1983 was from the Order of St Michael and St George, the traditional honour for foreign and diplomatic service. Only once did his majority in Blackpool South fall below 10 points: that was in 1966, when the Labour candidate was journalist and political biographer Edward Pearce.
Sir Peter Blaker retired from the Commons in 1992, at which point Blackpool South suddenly turned marginal. The Conservatives selected Nick Hawkins, a barrister, who saw his majority slashed to 1,667 votes by Labour candidate Gordon Marsden. Hawkins joined the government in 1995 as a shadow minister in the Ministry of Defence and the Department of National Heritage, but he saw the writing on the wall in advance of the 1997 Labour landslide and successfully did the chicken run to the safer climes of Surrey Heath.
In 1997 Gordon Marsden became the first, and to date only, Labour MP for Blackpool South which suddenly turned into a safe Labour seat. Marsden had been an Open University tutor and left-wing journalist before entering politics. He never really got onto the ministerial ladder while Labour were in government, but Marsden did serve as a shadow frontbencher throughout the period 2010 to 2019, mostly shadowing the further and higher education portfolios.
This shadow ministerial career was conducted from a marginal seat. The Labour majority had fallen to 1,852 in 2010 and remained at the 2,000–3,000 level in 2015 and 2017. Blackpool South was then named as a canonical Red Wall seat, and it fell to the Conservatives’ Scott Benton in 2019 with a majority of 3,690.
Scott Benton worked as a primary school teacher before entering politics, being elected in 2011 as a Calderdale councillor representing Brighouse ward — he would hold that post until 2021. He served as deputy leader of Calderdale, and then led the Conservative group after they went into opposition. Benton stood in the May 2017 Stormont election as the Conservative candidate for Strangford, and shortly afterwards he contested Huddersfield at the June 2017 general election.
This is yet another parliamentary by-election that has arisen from a Conservative MP entering the MPs Behaving Badly file (see previously in this Parliament Wakefield, Tiverton and Honiton, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Somerton and Frome, Tamworth and Wellingborough). In his 4¼ years in office Scott Benton has been a controversy magnet. As early as January 2021 he was forced to apologise for breaching parliamentary rules by late declarations of financial interests including his Calderdale councillor’s allowance. Subsequent updates of the register of member’s interests later that year revealed that Benton had accepted hospitality packages worth nearly £8,000 from a number of firms or industry groups in the gambling and betting sector, for visits to England football games, Wimbledon and Royal Ascot. Benton subsequently became chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on betting and gaming.
It was this form of gambling that brought Scott Benton down. He was the subject of a well-executed sting operation from the Times newspaper, which sent undercover journalists to a meeting with him posing as investors from the gambling industry. Benton was filmed apparently offering to leak confidential information and lobby ministers for payment. Once the Times published their findings in April 2023, Benton lost the Conservative whip and referred himself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. The subsequent report by the Commons Standards Committee found no evidence that Benton had sought improper financial gain, but recommended that he be suspended for 35 days — a sanction which led to a recall petition being opened on him. Following a failed appeal, the recall petition opened on 12th March 2024 and was due to run for six weeks; however, it was terminated 13 days letter when Scott Benton submitted his resignation from the Commons.
It seems unlikely that Benton got much support from his constituency party. In February 2023, just before the Times revelations, Tony Williams — then the leader of the Conservative group on Blackpool council, previously the bass player with Stealers Wheel — was one of several councillors to sign a no-confidence letter calling for Benton to step down at the next general election. Williams was then suspended from the Conservatives, and he lost re-election to the council in May 2023 as an independent candidate.
Scott Benton is by no means the only Conservative MP from the Blackpool area to have got into some trouble. Blackpool’s other MP Paul Maynard is currently the subject of an investigation into allegations that he used House of Commons funds to pay for printed political material. And then there is the bizarre case of the Fylde MP Mark Menzies, who resigned the Conservative whip a couple of weeks ago over allegations that he had used Conservative party campaign funds for private medical expenses or to pay off people Menzies had met on an online dating site who had locked him in a flat.
The Menzies affair is a little awkward for the defending Conservative candidate in the Blackpool South by-election, because David Jones is the chairman of Menzies’ constituency party. Jones is described as having a background in the construction industry and charitable fundraising. He is defending a majority over Labour of 50–38 in percentage terms, or 3,690 votes.
The Labour nomination has gone to Chris Webb, who previously worked as an assistant to Blackpool South’s only previous Labour MP Gordon Marsden and has also served as deputy police and crime commissioner for Lancashire. He was a Manchester city councillor from 2015 to 2018, representing Northenden ward, and his wife Portia is currently a Blackpool councillor. Webb’s most recent job was as office manager for the late Sir Tony Lloyd MP.
Third here in December 2019 was the Brexit Party, who polled 6.1% of the vote and saved their deposit. They are now Reform UK, and they have selected Mark Butcher who has a track record of charity work in Blackpool. In May’s Blackpool council elections Butcher was an independent candidate for Bloomfield ward, finishing as runner-up with a very respectable 31% of the vote. There were lost deposits last time for the Lib Dems (3.1%) and the Greens (1.7%), who have respectively selected Andrew Cregan and Ben Thomas; Cregan has previously been a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, until he left that party and joined the Lib Dems over Brexit, while Thomas is the secretary of Blackpool’s Green Party branch and he contested Blackpool’s Greenlands ward — which is not in this constituency — in May 2023.
Four new independents or parties stand. At the top of the ballot paper is independent candidate Stephen Black, whose election leaflet is an interesting selection of conspiracy theories. Yet again, we welcome to a parliamentary by-election the Official Monster Raving Loony Party’s leader Howling Laud Hope. The only woman on this ballot is Kim Knight, standing for the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom. And we round off this list with Damon Sharp who has been nominated by a new party with the recursively acronymic name NONPOL — that’s “New Open Non-Political Organised Leadership”.
The Blackpool South constituency is undersized, and the forthcoming boundary changes will expand it by moving the boundary with Blackpool North about a mile to the north from its current boundary at the North Pier. This will bring the North Shore and the Layton area into the seat. The political effect of this change is fairly neutral.
Whoever wins this by-election will have the struggles of a seriously deprived constituency and the challenges of Blackpool’s regeneration to deal with. Hopefully they’ll deal with those challenges better than the stubborn Sam Oswaldthwaite, as he refused his final chance to be plucked out of the water by Noah’s ark:
Said Noah, “You’d best take my offer,
It’s the last time I’ll be hereabouts,
And if water comes half an inch higher
I’ll happen get maple for nowt.”“Three ha’pence a foot it’ll cost you,
And as for me”, Sam says, “Don’t fret,
Sky’s took a turn since this morning;
I think it’ll brighten up yet.”
Before we turn to the rest of Lancashire, if I can just kindly point out that Andrew’s Previews do take a lot of time to research — none more so than the 2nd May previews, which I have been working on since Easter. If you have got this far, liked what you read and wish to convert your appreciation into currency, you can donate to the Local Elections Archive Project here (link).
Lancashire
Police and Crime Commissioner
The Blackpool South by-election is combined with the county-wide poll for Lancashire police and crime commissioner. This is one of the most marginal police areas, with the Conservatives gaining the PCC post last year from Labour by 45–42.
This year’s Lancashire PCC election is a rematch between the serving Conservative PCC Andrew Snowden and the Labour PCC whom he beat in 2016, Clive Grunshaw. Neil Darby completes the ballot paper for the Lib Dems. This will be a Friday count.
Local elections
There are elections this year in the Lancashire police area for the whole of Rossendale council on new ward boundaries, and for one-third of the councillors in Blackburn with Darwen, Burrnley, Chorley, Hyndburn, Pendle, Preston and West Lancashire. All of these are Friday counts except for Chorley, which counts overnight.
East Lancashire is the part of the country where the war in Gaza has had its biggest effect on the Labour party. The national media did notice Azhar Ali, the Lancashire county councillor for Nelson East who was disendorsed as the Labour candidate in the Rochdale parliamentary by-election two months ago for antisemitism. What you might not have heard about is the massive split in Burrnley Labour in November 2023, or the entire Labour council group in Pendle walking out of the party just a week before the nomination deadline for these local elections. In Pendle, nine of the ten ex-Labour councillors are Muslim. In both cases the defectors include the council leadership, and the Labour-Lib Dem coalition in Pendle and the Labour-led traffic-light coalition in Burrnley have both continued with “independent” substituted for “Labour”.
Which makes this year’s elections in Burrnley and Pendle even more unpredictable than usual. Pendle council currently stands at 13 Conservatives plus a vacancy, 10 ex-Labour independents, 7 Lib Dems and 2 other independents. Five of the ex-Labour councillors are up for election this year (including one who had previously defected from the Conservatives), and all five of them are seeking re-election as independent candidates, two of them without official Labour opposition. The council leader Asjad Mahmood actually put nomination papers in as an official Labour candidate, before withdrawing them and filling out a new nomination form as an independent. The par score would see the Lib Dems gain two seats from the Conservatives, but really it’s anybody’s guess what will happen here.
In Burrnley there is a coalition in place of 11 ex-Labour councillors in the “Burrnley Independent Group”, 7 Lib Dems and 7 Greens; in opposition is the rump Labour group of 11, 8 Conservatives and a non-aligned councillor. Four of the ex-Labour councillors are up for election this year, with three seeking re-election as independent councillors (in Bank Hall, Daneshouse with Stoneyholme and Lanehead wards) and the other retiring. The par score, such as it is, would see Labour lose Brunshaw to the Green Party but gain Gawthorpe from the Conservatives, while there is also an open seat up for grabs in Gannow ward following the recent winding-up of the Burrnley and Padiham Independent Party.
The meeting at which Azhar Ali made his fateful remarks took place in Hyndburn, where the massive Labour split was underway well before the war in Gaza. Following the 2023 elections Hyndburn council stood at 16 councillors each for the Conservatives and Labour with two Greens and an independent councillor holding the balance of power; despite or perhaps because of the fact that both Green councillors were originally elected on the Labour ticket, they installed a Conservative minority administration. Both Labour to Green defectors (in Barnfield and Peel wards) are retiring this year; if Labour can get those seats back and repeat the 2022–23 results elsewhere they will gain overall control.
The other Lancashire councils up for election are much more placid. The tiny Rossendale district, tucked away at the head of the Irwell valley, is all-up this year with new ward boundaries coming in; the outgoing council has 21 Labour councillors against 9 Conservatives, 2 Community First, 2 independents, 1 Green and 1 vacant seat. This is one of those councils where when one party wins they tend to win big; good Labour performances here last year suggest that their majority is not under serious threat this time round.
West Lancashire got new ward boundaries last year, with the all-out 2023 election returning 26 Labour councillors against 15 Conservatives and four seats for Our West Lancashire. By contrast to Rossendale this is a council with very few marginal wards; the only ward with split representation is Burscough Town, which the OWLs will be defending from Labour.
The Labour majorities in Preston and Blackburn with Darwen are not under serious threat and Labour control of Chorley is impregnable. Unfortunately we may lose the viral star of 2021 Tiger Patel, who was elected as a Conservative councillor for the safe Labour ward of Audley and Queens Park in Blackburn; he’s no longer in the Conservatives and he is standing as an independent candidate for a different ward.
To complete this megapreview there is one by-election to report in the Lancashire districts not up for election, and that’s in the ward of Carnforth and Millhead. Carnforth is a railway town to the north of Lancaster, which still gets some tourist trade from being the location for shooting of the 1945 film Brief Encounter; legend has it that a very young Cecil Parkinson was an extra in that film, as his father worked at Carnforth station as a signalman. The last time I was at the Carnforth station tearoom I had a brief encounter with … the nuclear flask train, which turned up from Sellafield and stopped at the station waiting for its turn on the main line. Suddenly the platform was crawling with armed police. They don’t tell you that in the tourist brochures.
Carnforth and Millhead is a cursed ward which is having its fourth by-election in nine years following the death of Labour councillor Paul Gardner, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 70. He had represented the ward on and off since 2003. As can be seen this by-election has taken quite a long time to organise, which is a bit of a shame since this is a marginal ward which is closely fought between Labour and the Conservatives, but we’re here now. The defending Labour candidate is Jackson Stubbs, former Tory ward councillor Peter Yates wants his seat back, and also standing are Emily Heath for the Green Party and Lynda Dagdeviren for the Lib Dems.
In memoriam
As usual, before finishing this mega-preview we should pause, to remember those elected representatives who passed away during the municipal year 2023–24. The Grim Reaper’s toll is indiscriminate, and here we have names of councillors who were veterans or rookies, young or old, party or independent. They all served us. Andrew’s Previews has told many of their stories over the last twelve months, but there were some councillors whose seats were left vacant after their deaths without a by-election being held, and they are listed here.
Sir Tony Lloyd MP
Pamela Adams, Swindon
Joe Amar, South Tyneside
Linda Arkley, North Tyneside
Peter Astell, East Riding
Richard Body, Dudley
John Briggs, North Lincolnshire
Ian Brookfield, Wolverhampton
Carole Burdis, North Tyneside
Peter Christie, Torridge
Ed Cohen, Wychavon
Sophie Connelly, Ipswich
Huw Cox, Teignbridge
Brian Crawford, Wyre
Simon Cronin, Worcester
Nick Daubney, Norfolk CC
Julie Davies, Haringey
Colette Dennis, Reading
Barry Duffin, Norfolk CC and South Norfolk
Malcolm Eastwood, Horsham
Martin Elengorn, Richmond upon Thames
Tony Ferrari, Dorset
Diana Friend, Warrington
Ron Gaffney, Buckinghamshire
Paul Gardner, Lancaster
Les Gilbert, Cheshire East
John Glover, North Ayrshire
Peter Griffiths, Worcestershire CC
Julian Halls, South Norfolk
Edwina Hannaford, Cornwall
Linda Hawthorn, Havering
John Hills, Greenwich
Keith Iddon, Lancashire CC and Chorley
Ken Ingleton, Swale
Peter Innes, Chesterfield
Liam Jarnecki, Lambeth
Peter Jinman, Herefordshire
Bob Jones, Wiltshire
Sue Johnson, Nottingham
Patrick Joyce, Torbay
Norman Kay, Stroud
Leanne Kennedy, Durham
Julie Killey, Lincolnshire CC
Andrew Law, Waverley
Andrew Lee, Bromley
Gillian Lemmon, South Derbyshire
Mike Lewis, Somerset
Brian Lohan, Mansfield
Mac McGuire, Cambridgeshire CC
Robert McIntosh, Brighton and Hove
Luke Mackenzie, Essex CC and Basildon
Hanzala Malik, Glasgow
Maggie Morgan, Gosport
Tony Morley, Derbyshire Dales
Gill Ogden, North Kesteven
Reg Owens, Pembrokeshire
Viv Padden, East Riding
Caroline Page, Suffolk CC
John Payne, Castle Point
Vivien Pengelly, Plymouth
Sheila Penry, Neath Port Talbot
Peter Prendergast, Denbighshire
Vickie Priestley, Sheffield
Roger Redfern, Derbyshire CC
Alasdair Rhind, Highland
Stephen Ridley, South Norfolk
Andy Roberts, Worcestershire CC and Worcester
Isabella Roberts, Durham
Dean Ruddle, Somerset
Peter Rush, Rochdale
Jim Sadler, Caerphilly
Geoffrey Samuel, Richmond upon Thames
Abdul Sattar, Cardiff
Rupert Simmons, East Sussex CC
Paula Spencer, Sefton
Marcia Spooner, Neath Port Talbot
Stephen Swift, North Lincolnshire
Barry Taylor, East Sussex CC
Mike Tebbutt, North Northamptonshire
Tony Trotman, Wiltshire
Brian Vincent, Plymouth
Cyril Weber, Cumberland
Eirwyn Williams, Gwynedd
Ray Wootten, Lincolnshire CC and South Kesteven
Requiescat in pace.
Concluding remarks
As has become normal practice in recent years, results for these elections will trickle through slowly. A fairly small minority of councils will count on Thursday night, with most council results coming through on Friday; some of the mayoral and PCC counts will declare on Saturday, and Kent PCC, Sussex PCC and Salford council won’t even start counting until Sunday. The Press Association have published their usual list of estimated final declaration times (link), although anybody who has followed counts should be well aware that these times are often little more than guesswork. There will be plenty of time for result followers, so pace yourself.
When the results come through, be prepared for shocks — because elections are always like that. Once the results are in I will name one result which made my jaw drop when I saw it, so if you’re one of the 10,662 candidates in these local elections and you think that I’ve unfairly written off your chances of winning, the best way to counter that is to get out there on the campaign trail, prove me wrong and make the case for me to give you that award. It will be much more satisfying for all of us if you send me a smug message afterwards than a whinging message now — and you’ll give me material for future columns. And the prize for winning is a worthwhile one: the chance to improve your local community, to fix those potholes rather than point at them.
We should salute the efforts of all the Returning Officers and their poll and count staff, who do a thankless job that doesn’t just last for one day a year. There is a fantastic amount of behind-the-scenes work that’s needed to put this show on for your benefit: polling day is just the tip of the administrative iceberg, representing the culmination of months of planning. Your council election teams have no margin for error: it all has to go right, every single time. This column sends its best wishes to everybody working on this election for a smooth and trouble-free poll and count.
But the most important person on Thursday is you, the voter. Celebrate at your local polling station with your photo ID in hand: you can find where that polling station is on your polling card or by going to wheredoivote.co.uk. If you want information on your local candidates (I’m not listing them all here) and you haven’t had flyers from all of them, enter your postcode into whocanivotefor.co.uk.
I’ll finish with the same words that I wrote last year, because unfortunately they are still relevant. Democracy is a fragile thing. There are many people all over the world who live in places where democracy is not free, not fair or not existent. The people of unoccupied Ukraine are literally fighting for their right to live in a country that holds elections rather than stages election-type events. The best way you can defend Britain’s local democracy is to take part in it. Your vote will be free, it will be fair, it will be secret, and it will count in the same way as my vote and everybody else’s vote. But if you don’t vote, your voice won’t be heard when the ballot papers tumble out of the box onto the counting table, to decide your councillors’ future — and yours. If you have a postal vote you should have received it by now; if you intend to vote at a polling station, don’t forget to go there between 7am and 10pm on Thursday and take your photo ID with you. You will be most welcome.
This column doesn’t just come out at election time: Andrew’s Previews works hard for you all year round. We will continue to fulfil our advertised role of covering all the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order, by returning next week for the first by-election of the municipal year 2024–25 which will take place in North Ayrshire on 9th May. Stay tuned.
If you enjoyed these previews, there are many more like them — going back to 2016 — in the Andrew’s Previews books, which are available to buy now (link). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale
