Previewing the Aberdeen and Wrexham by-elections of 23rd February 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Two by-elections on 23rd February 2023, one in Wales and one in Scotland:
Dyce/Bucksburn/Danestone
Aberdeen council, Scotland; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Avril Mackenzie.
So, Scottish politics has got interesting this month to observers from south of the border, with the announcement last week that Nicola Sturgeon is to step down as leader of the Scottish National Party. While the SNP gets its leadership contest organised, the party’s Aberdeen branch have some more important business to attend to this week in the form of a local by-election.
Dyce/Bucksburn/Danestone ward covers the north-west corner of the Aberdeen city council area. A lot of the ward’s acreage is undeveloped due to consisting of rather steep hills on the western side of the Don valley, but also here we have one of the most important pieces of infrastructure for the North Sea oil industry.
This ward covers Aberdeen Airport, which is claimed to be the world’s busiest heliport thanks to the number of flights which take off from here to the oil rigs offshore. Aberdeen is also the most convenient route for air passengers and freight travelling to and from the northern isles: three of Aberdeen Airport’s ten busiest routes are to airports in Orkney or Shetland.
The airport is next to the village of Dyce, which has seen strong population growth thanks to the oil industry — among other things, it’s home to the North Sea headquarters of BP. Dyce railway station, which links the village to Aberdeen city centre, was reopened by British Rail in 1984, and the line through the station was recently upgraded to double track to allow a half-hourly service to run.
It’s not just fossil fuels that provide employment here. Just off the southern end of the airport runway is The Event Complex Aberdeen, centred around Scotland’s largest indoor arena. P&J Live, named after and sponsored by the local newspaper the Press and Journal, opened in 2019 and can hold up to 15,000 people for concerts and other events.
P&J Live is located next to the Aberdeen suburb of Bucksburn, which like Dyce lies on the western bank of the River Don. On the far side of the river can be found Danestone, a 1980s estate located within the corner of Aberdeen’s original ring road. This has now been replaced by the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route, a motorway-standard dual-carriageway bypass of the city which opened in 2019 and passes through this ward.
Dyce/Bucksburn/Danestone ward was created in 2007, when Scottish local elections went over to proportional representation, and was modified at a boundary review in 2017. All elections here since 2007 have seen the Scottish National Party poll the most votes, although in 2007 they only had one candidate who polled 1.8 quotas. The beneficiary of this was the Liberal Democrats, who won two seats in the ward with Labour winning the other. The second Lib Dem candidate, George Penny, won the final seat just 22 votes ahead of the Conservative candidate Avril MacKenzie.
The SNP councillor elected here in 2007 was Mark McDonald, who was subsequently elected to Holyrood in May 2011 as a list MSP for North East Scotland — a serious achievement, given that the SNP had already won every constituency in that region. Two weeks later Dyce/Bucksburn/Danestone was back to the polls in a by-election following the death of Lib Dem councillor Ron Clark, and his seat was gained by the SNP who won with an absolute majority of the votes. The Conservative candidate in that by-election was a very young Ross Thomson, who would subsequently have an ill-starred career in the Holyrood and Westminster parliaments.
The remaining Lib Dem councillor didn’t seek re-election at the 2012 Aberdeen city council elections, and his seat was gained by Labour resulting in a 2–2 split in the ward’s seats between the SNP and Labour. The SNP’s Mark McDonald stood down from the council at that election, and he subsequently won the 2013 Holyrood by-election for the Aberdeen Donside constituency which covers this ward. His career in the Scottish Government, as the minister for childcare and early years, was terminated in November 2017 by a misconduct investigation into his behaviour towards a number of women: McDonald subsequently quit the SNP, and served out the rest of his Holyrood term as an independent.
The Conservatives’ Avril MacKenzie had served as an Aberdeen city councillor since 2017, when she gained the second Labour seat in Dyce/Bucksburn/Danestone. She took early retirement from her previous career as an accountant to focus on her council duties, and this clearly did the trick since she was re-elected for a second term in May 2022. The first preference shares last year were 41% for the SNP, 26% for the Conservatives and 18% for Labour, with the SNP winning two seats and the Conservatives and Labour one each. All four outgoing councillors were re-elected. Sadly, Avril MacKenzie passed away in December at the early age of 67.
MacKenzie’s death leaves the Conservatives with a tricky by-election to defend. They start in second place, some distance behind the SNP, and probably can’t rely on transfers to save them. If we re-run the 2022 results for a single seat, then the SNP councillor Gill al-Samarai defeats the Conservatives’ MacKenzie by a 58–42 margin.
The SNP took over the running of Aberdeen council in 2022 after a controversial Conservative-Labour coalition was defeated. The party is, however, short of a majority with 20 councillors and governs the city in coalition with four Lib Dems; that coalition controls a majority of the 45 seats on the council. Labour (11 councillors), the Conservatives (8) and independents (2) are in opposition.
The Scottish National Party also control this area at other levels of government. As stated, Dyce/Bucksburn/Danestone ward is part of the Aberdeen Donside constituency at Holyrood, which reverted to the SNP in 2021 after the disgraced Mark McDonald retired. At Westminster level Dyce and Danestone are part of the Gordon constituency, which has returned four different MPs at its last four elections; in 2019 the SNP’s Richard Thomson gained the seat from the Conseratives by just 819 votes. Bucksburn is located within the Aberdeen North seat, which has been SNP-held since 2015.
Defending for the Conservatives is Akila Kanthaswamy, who until recently ran the Dyce branch of Spar. The Scottish National Party candidate is Tomasz Brzezinski, who is fighting his first election campaign. Labour have selected Graeme Lawrence, a retired plumber who previously represented this ward on the city council between 2012 and 2017. Also standing on a long ballot paper are Mevrick Fernandes for the Lib Dems, Sylvia Hardie for the Greens, Amy-Marie Stratton for the socially-conservative Scottish Family Party (who also stood here last year), Charlie Abel for Alba and independent candidate Simon McLean, who last came to the attention of this column in 2019 when he polled 0.8% at a by-election in the neighbouring Bridge of Don ward. This is a Scottish local by-election, so Votes at 16 and the Alternative Vote are in use: remember to rank the candidates in your order of preference.
Westminster constituency: Gordon (most), Aberdeen North (Bucksburn area)
Holyrood constituency: Aberdeen Donside
ONS Travel to Work Area: Aberdeen
Postcode districts: AB15, AB16, AB21, AB22
Charlie Abel (Alba)
Tomasz Brzezinski (SNP)
Mevrick Fernandes (LD)
Sylvia Hardie (Grn)
Akila Kanthaswamy (C)
Graeme Lawrence (Lab)
Simon McLean (Ind)
Amy-Marie Stratton (Scottish Family Party)
May 2022 first preferences SNP 2726 C 1728 Lab 1174 LD 579 Grn 296 Scottish Family Party 95
May 2017 first preferences SNP 2455 C 2012 Lab 1202 Ind 509 LD 403
Previous results in detail
Smithfield
Wrexham council, North Wales; caused by the resignation of Plaid Cymru councillor Paul Williams.
For our Welsh by-election this week we have come to one of the new cities proclaimed for last year’s Platinum Jubilee of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Specifically, we’re in North Wales’ third city (after Bangor and St Asaph) and largest settlement, the city of Wrexham. As you can see from the graphic below, OpenStreetMap’s contributors have wasted no time in updating the map.
Part of Wrexham’s city centre is covered by Smithfield ward, including the largish 21st-century Eagles Meadow shopping centre. However, this is also one of five wards which cover one of Wales’ largest housing schemes, the Caia Park council estate which covers much of eastern Wrexham. Owner-occupation in Smithfield ward is low.
In the 2011 census Smithfield ward, which then had slightly different boundaries, set a number of Welsh records. 30.2% of its workforce were employed in manufacturing, which was not only the highest figure for any ward in Wales but beat every ward in England too. 18.3% of the population were born in the new EU states, which was the highest figure for any ward in Wales and in the top 10 for England and Wales. Connected with this, Smithfield ward was in the top 40 in England and Wales for semi-routine occupations, and had the highest figure in Wales for the White Other ethnic group (22.4%) and “other” (ie foreign) qualifications (13.2%). This is not your standard Welsh urban ward.
If Smithfield ward were in England, then the franchise for most of the ward’s EU residents would be about to get a bit complicated — although those EU citizens with settled status in the UK will retain their vote in English local elections. In Wales, as it is in Scotland, the local government franchise is a devolved matter; the last Senedd made the local government franchise much simpler by extending the right to vote in Senedd and Welsh local elections to anybody, of whatever nationality, who is legally resident in Wales. Votes at 16 also apply in this by-election.
Those changes have also been made in Scotland; but Scottish local elections, as described above, also use proportional representation. To date no Welsh council has adopted this, and Smithfield is a single-member ward of Wrexham council. Its five elections this century have been a bit of a mixture. In 2004 Smithfield elected an independent councillor, John Humberstone, in a close three-way result. He lost his seat in 2008 to another independent, Keith Gregory, who earlier in life had been a victim of child abuse at the Bryn Estyn care home.
Gregory joined Plaid Cymru before standing down on health grounds at the 2017 Wrexham elections, and a freak vote split led to Labour councillor Adrienne Jeorrett being elected with just 28% of the vote, 10 votes ahead of Plaid Cymru’s Paul Williams and 15 votes ahead of independent Jayne Johnson. Jeorrett stood down in 2022 after one term and Paul Williams was then elected at the second attempt, polling 41% of the vote against 34% for a new Labour candidate and 16% for independent Richard Bennett; this translates to a Plaid gain from Labour by 31 votes.
Smithfield ward is part of the Wrexham constituency, which was a Conservative gain from Labour in the 2019 general election but has been held by Labour in the Senedd since 2007. Lesley Griffiths, the MS for Wrexham, is a long-serving Welsh cabinet minister who currently holds the rural affairs and North Wales portfolios; she is also Trefnydd, or Leader of the Senedd. The town’s Conservative MP, Sarah Atherton, holds the distinction of being the first female Welsh Conservative MP.
Wrexham council covers a larger area than the constituency, extending south into more rural areas like the English Maelor and the Ceiriog Valley. It has been hung throughout this century, with independent councillor Mark Pritchard serving as leader of the council aince 2014. The 2022 Wrexham elections returned 23 independent councillors, 14 Labour, 9 Conservatives, 9 Plaid Cymru and a Lib Dem. Despite gains for Labour and particularly Plaid, the council’s ruling independent-Conservative coalition has continued in office.
Paul Williams resigned last month on health grounds. For the resulting by-election the defending Plaid Cymru candidate is Jon Jolley, who has lived in the area all his life and is raising his young family in the ward. Labour have changed candidate to Siôn Edwards, who contested the neighbouring Caia Park ward of Queensway last year; he works as a playworker for children and young people with autism, ADHD and similar conditions. Independent candidate Richard Bennett, who finished fourth here in 2017 and third in 2022, is back for another go; he is one of three independents on the ballot alongside Jayne Johnson, a housing support officer who was a close third in this ward in 2017, and Toni Prince who is a customer service adviser for a well-known banking group. A ballot paper of six candidates is completed by Graham Kelly of the Liberal Democrats. We may be in a Conservative-held parliamentary seat, but slightly surprisingly that party hasn’t managed to rustle up a candidate.
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Wrexham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Wrexham
Postcode district: LL13
Richard Bennett (Ind)
Siôn Edwards (Lab)
Jayne Johnson (Ind)
Jon Jolley (PC)
Graham Kelly (LD)
Toni Prince (Ind)
May 2022 result PC 184 Lab 153 Ind 70 C 38
Previous results in detail
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
