Previewing the four by-elections of 24th November 2022
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
There are four by-elections on Thursday 24th November 2022, with the Conservatives defending three and Labour one. However, before getting to them I need to address something which has been kindly pointed out to me by a correspondent. I apologise for having to interrupt your weekly reading to do this, but it is important.
One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky. In one word he taught me the secret of success in mathematics:
plagiarise!Plagiarise,
Let no-one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarise, plagiarise, plagiarise
only be sure always to call it please “research”.- Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky
Last year your columnist gave an interview to Politico about the work I do here and with the Local Elections Archive Project. The inevitable question inevitably came up: why do you do all this stuff about such an obscure subject, local elections?
Well, one part of the attraction is that almost nobody else is writing about local politics on a regular basis. Look at the teams of reporters and journalists who hang around Westminster analysing every word which is declaimed in Parliament or which leaks from the top of the ship of state. Now compare and contrast with the teams of reporters and journalists who are doing the same thing for your local council. Alright, “teams” might be a little optimistic there. But your council has a lot of control over your local services with tax-raising and enforcement powers to match. What your local politicians do needs taking seriously.
Instead of hundreds of journalists all chasing the same story from Westminster, this column gives you one person chasing hundreds of stories from the rest of the country, all of which are worth telling but are often overlooked by the national media. There’s literally something different every week, and I think that after twelve years of writing Andrew’s Previews I have proved the point that there is no such thing as an uninteresting by-election.
Now if somebody wants to go and write about the same polls from a different angle, that’s entirely their prerogative. Imitation, so they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. But there’s a fine line between imitation and plagiarism, and I regret to say that a correspondent has kindly informed me of something which crosses that line.
Until further notice Andrew’s Previews is definitively published at medium.com/britainelects. Do feel free to put that address in your bookmarks, email subscription, RSS reader, whatever method you prefer to keep up-to-date every Thursday.
Now let me take you to medium.com/@greenselectltd, run by a Medium account with the name “Green Elects”. What you will find here is a collection of bits which would appear to have been copied and pasted from the Previews, but only the bits therefrom which involve Green Party candidates. And when I say “copied and pasted”, this includes my typing errors. Look in the first line of the following screenshots from the pieces dated 3rd November.
There’s basically zero original thought there, just a brazen attempt to pass off my own work as somebody else’s.
Longtime readers will be aware that every year the Previews are collected up and republished in book form. Andrew’s Previews 2021 is available right now for your reading pleasure and will make an excellent Christmas present for the discerning psephologist of your acquaintance. These books are an important way of making money to support the Previews and for the Local Elections Archive Project, which is why they get plugged at the end of every week’s piece.
In due course the Previews for this year will be collected up and republished in book form, in a similar way to what has happened in the previous six years. I have four ISBN numbers left, and given the amount of money I paid for them I intend to use them.
Publishers are rightly aware of the dangers of plagiarism and copyright. My book printers know that I write the Previews and that I hold the copyright in them. But if my work were to appear under somebody else’s name, that would make it more difficult to prove that I have the copyright in the Previews and thus jeapordise one of my sources of income.
My correspondent has already tried to tell “Green Elects” off on my behalf in private, and got nowhere. So, “Green Elects”, whoever you are, you can consider this a telling-off in public. If you want to write about local by-elections under your own name, do it in your own words, not mine.
Here endeth the rant.
We now return to your normal weekly viewing by travelling to Warrington…
Rixton and Woolston
Warrington council, Cheshire; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Joshua Dixon.
There’s a bit of a north-western bias to the Previews at the moment. We had three council by-elections in traditional Lancashire last week, there are one-and-a-bit more polls in traditional Lancashire this week, and next month we have parliamentary by-elections to come in the City of Chester and in Stretford and Urmston.
I say one-and-a-bit traditional Lancashire polls this week because of the presence of Rixton and Woolston. This is one of the few wards which contains territory from both sides of the River Mersey, the traditional boundary between Lancashire and Cheshire. However, the south side of the Mersey here is unpopulated, and the meandering old river has been superseded as a boundary by the straighter Manchester Ship Canal, which forms the southern boundary of this ward.
There are only two ways south from here, both of which involve bridges high enough for ships to pass underneath. One is to take the motorway over the Thelwall Viaducts, which are a landmark on the M6. The original viaduct, which now carries the northbound carriageway, was when it opened in 1963 the longest motorway bridge in England.
The other crossing is the Warburton Toll Bridge, one of a handful of pre-motorway toll bridges remaining in the UK. The tolls here were set by the Rixton and Warburton Bridge Act 1863 at half-a-crown “for every Carriage drawn or propelled by Steam or any Means other than Animal Power”. Now decimalised at 12p per crossing or 25p for a return trip, the charge has otherwise remained unchanged for well over a century — until now. The Manchester Ship Canal Company, which now owns the bridge, is seeking to increase the toll charge to £1 per crossing, an inflation-busting increase even in these days of cost-of-living crisis. A public inquiry into this proposal is currently under way.
The Warburton Toll Bridge is possibly the least-used crossing of the Ship Canal, carrying a minor road with a 3-tonne weight limit in a rural location some distance to the east of Warrington. Its access road comes to an end at a set of traffic lights on the A57 road, which links Warrington with the city of Salford to the east. This junction is within the parish of Rixton-with-Glazebrook. Despite the ward and parish name there’s no real village of any size called Rixton, but Glazebrook is home to the ward’s railhead on the Manchester to Warrington Central line.
Instead, Woolston is the main component of this ward. This is suburbia on the eastern edge of Warrington which is not really New Town development at all; the ward has a high owner-occupation rate. Your columnist used to visit here fairly often, because the UK quiz circuit once had a regular venue at Woolston Rovers rugby league club.
Rixton and Woolston have together formed a ward of Warrington for many years. It’s generally a Labour-voting area, but the Conservatives performed very well here in the 2021 local elections to win a seat here for the first time since 2004. Shares of the vote here last year were 40% for the Conservatives who won two seats, 37% for Labour who held one seat, and 13% for an independent candidate. One of the Labour candidates who lost out was Faisal Rashid, who sat in Parliament from 2017 to 2019 as the Labour MP for Warrington South; Rixton and Woolston, however, is within the Labour-held but marginal parliamentary seat of Warrington North.
Labour have a majority on Warrington council, which has a page on its website with the unapologetic but concerning title of “Our debt position”. As of March 2022 the council was in debt to the tune of £1.7 billion, having used that money to make investments in assets and property. The council has used the resulting rental income to fund some of its statutory services. This might prove to be a more sustainable investment approach than that taken by Thurrock council, which has recently had the Commissioners sent in after its loans went sour; but in these days of higher interest rates and renewed austerity it remains to be seen whether Warrington can continue to service this level of debt in future.
In the meantime the Conservatives have the tricky task, judging from the downturn in their national polling position since 2021, of holding a by-election in Rixton and Woolston ward following the resingation of councillor Joshua Dixon. A change in Dixon’s work commitments meant he was unable to continue as a councillor, and when all’s said and done a councillor allowance is no substitute for a full-time salary.
Defending for the Conservatives is Rob Tynan, a Woolston parish councillor who was their unsuccessful candidate here last year. The Labour candidate is Trish Cockayne, who is described as an anti-poverty campaigner. The independent candidate from last time has not returned, so Brian Meichen completes the candidate list for the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Warrington North
ONS Travel to Work Area: Warrington and Wigan
Postcode districts: WA1, WA3
Trish Cockayne (Lab)
Brian Meichen (LD)
Rob Tynan (C)
May 2021 result C 1250/1120/1064 Lab 1157/1069/970 Ind 412 LD 295/294
May 2016 result Lab 1314/1215/979 Ind 882/717 C 560/460/411 LD 168
Previous results in detail
Linacre
Sefton council, Merseyside; caused by the death of Labour councillor Gordon Friel.
The River Mersey links together two of our by-elections today. It might be a fairly narrow channel at Woolston, but by the time we get to Bootle that has changed. This is the point where the Mersey estuary reaches the wide-open spaces of the Irish Sea. In these times of the FIFA World Cup, let’s do what many football fans will be doing for the next few weeks and cross over to look at Linacre.
Linacre ward is the heart of Bootle; indeed Bootle town hall still bears the town’s older name of “Bootle-cum-Linacre” on its Victorian stonework. Bootle’s economy was completely dependent on the docklands of Liverpool, which by the end of the nineteenth century extended all the way along the town’s riverfront. This gave Bootle enough economic clout to successfully fight off a number of attempts to incorporate it into the big city, even through it’s difficult for any non-local to know where Liverpool ends and Bootle begins.
The centenary of Bootle’s incorporation as a borough, in 1968, was marked by the opening of the New Strand shopping centre, next to Bootle New Strand station on the Merseyrail Northern Line. Notorious as the location from which the toddler James Bulger was abducted in 1993, the New Strand has had a few redevelopments over the years. It was bought by Sefton council in 2017. The town hall is served by another Northern Line station, Bootle Oriel Road.
The docks are still important today. Here can be found the Seaforth Dock, a modern container terminal at the end of the East Lancashire Road whose cranes dominate the landscape. To the south of this is Gladstone Dock, from which regular ferries arrive and depart bound for Dublin.
All of this dockland and the surrounding area was heavily bombed in the Second World War, and after that the docks went into a decline resulting in high unemployment. The 2011 census return for Linacre ward shows that this is a still a problem: Linacre made the top 100 wards in England and Wales for long-term sickness or disability (13.9%), unemployment (10.4%) and social renting (49.2% of households).
This column has made a number of trips to Liverpool over the last 18 months to cover local by-elections which have been rather lacklustre for Labour. However, Bootle is part of the Sefton local government district which stretches up the coast as far Southport. This district has been swinging to Labour throughout the last decade, to the extent that the Southport parliamentary seat — once a Lib Dem stronghold, now the only Conservative parliamentary seat in Merseyside — is now looking like a realistic Labour target.
Bootle, by contrast, is one of the strongest Labour-voting areas in the country. The Labour vote here is not counted but weighed, and in May this year Labour polled 76% of the vote in Linacre ward against independent and Conservative opposition. One of the opposition candidates who has previously tried and failed to break through here was the former UKIP leader Paul Nuttall, who at the time was an MEP for north-west England: Nuttall stood in this ward in 2010, coming third with 12%. On the same day he also saved his deposit as UKIP candidate for the local Bootle constituency. In 2007 Labour were opposed in Linacre ward only by the Communist Party, who lost 86–14; that’s a rather better score than the average Communist candidate gets in Britain.
The winning Labour candidate here in 2010 and in May was veteran councillor Gordon Friel, who passed away in July at the age of 69 just two months into his tenth term of office. Friel had represented Linacre ward continuously since 1994. He had got into politics as a union convenor at the Jacobs biscuit factory in Aintree; in recent years Friel’s political activities had been focused on transport, as he sat on the transport committee for Merseytravel and the Liverpool city region.
Big shoes to fill for the defending Labour candidate Dan McKee, who contested Birkdale ward at the other end of Sefton district in May. Only one candidate has come forward to oppose McKee: that’s Ian Smith, who is standing as an independent candidate.
Parliamentary constituency: Bootle
ONS Travel to Work Area: Liverpool
Postcode districts: L20, L21
Dan McKee (Lab)
Ian Smith (Ind)
May 2022 result Lab 1320 Ind 299 C 114
May 2021 result Lab 1560 C 196
May 2019 result Lab 1177 Ind 270 LD 106 C 100 Soc Lab 65
May 2018 result Lab 1536 Grn 108 C 106 LD 75 Soc Lab 69
May 2016 result Lab 1426 Grn 101 Ind 94 C 89 Soc Lab 64
May 2015 result Lab 3698 Grn 538 Soc Lab 126
May 2014 result Lab 1410 UKIP 429 Soc Lab 129 C 70
May 2012 result Lab 1682 LD 74 C 73
May 2011 result Lab 1758 UKIP 191 LD 110 C 93
May 2010 result Lab 2699 LD 543 UKIP 457 C 211
May 2008 result Lab 1050 UKIP 219 LD 192 C 140 Communist 45
May 2007 result Lab 1350 Communist 214
May 2006 result Lab 1130 LD 453
June 2004 result Lab 1646/1532/1312 LD 561/416/400 Communist 120
Previous results in detail
Sutton
Bassetlaw council, Nottinghamshire; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Denise Depledge.
Our last two by-elections are in areas which have previously featured in this column within the last few years. Indeed I previewed Bassetlaw’s Sutton ward just 20 months ago. This is a rural ward in the Nottinghamshire countryside, covering four parishes to the west and north of Retford. The largest of these parishes is Sutton. covering the village of Sutton cum Lound next to the East Coast Main Line; this parish has 582 electors on the roll.
Much of the eastern boundary of this ward follows the River Idle, which here is in a landscape of lakes created by gravel and aggregate extraction during the twentieth century. Today these gravel pits are a haven for wetland birds, and are run as a nature reserve by the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust. Last year the Trust released a small number of beavers into this habitat, the first beavers to live wild in Nottinghamshire for over 400 years.
In the 2011 census Sutton ward had the highest population of any ward in the East Midlands, and the fourth-highest in England and Wales, in the “Inactive: Other” category for economic activity. This is due to the presence here of HMP Ranby, a low-security men’s prison west of Retford which holds around 1,000 prisoners. None of those prisoners will be eligible to vote in this by-election, which is for permanent residents only.
The permanent residents of Sutton ward were voting Conservative long before the party sensationally gained the Bassetlaw parliamentary seat in December 2019. This is normally one of the strongest Conservative wards of Bassetlaw district, but in May 2019 the local Tories had a terrible local election here, winning only one council seat within the Bassetlaw constituency. That wasn’t in Sutton ward, which was gained that year by an independent candidate, Rob Boeuf; he thrashed the Conservatives 62–26.
Boeuf stood down partway through his term, and a by-election was held here in May 2021 at which the Sutton ward reverted to the safe Conservative seat it had been previously. Denise Depledge, the new Conservative councillor, defeated Labour 64–20. On the same day the Conservatives also held the two Nottinghamshire county council seats which cover the ward, the safe Misterton division and the marginal Retford West division. Denise Depledge hasn’t finished her term either, so the voters of Sutton ward are now being called out for the second by-election in as many years.
Defending for the Conservatives is Fraser McFarland, the chairman of the Bassetlaw branch of the party and chief of staff for the local MP Brendan Clarke-Fraser. His candidature appears to have exposed some splits in the Bassetlaw Conservatives: councillor Gerald Bowers, who was the leader of the Conservative group on Bassetlaw council, quit the party in protest at McFarland’s selection and is now an independent councillor. The Labour candidate is Darrell Pulk, who has previous local government experience as a long-serving Nottinghamshire county councillor and Gedling councillor; Pulk was previously elected for the Nottingham suburb of Carlton, but now lives within this ward in Barnby Moor. Phil Ray completes the ballot paper for the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Bassetlaw
Nottinghamshire county council division: Retford West (Babworth and Barnby Moor parishes), Misterton (Sutton and Lound parishes)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Worksop and Retford
Postcode districts: DN10, DN22
Fraser McFarland (C)
Darrell Pulk (Lab)
Phil Ray (LD)
May 2021 by-election C 422 Lab 134 LD 107
May 2019 result Ind 381 C 163 Lab 74
May 2015 result C 774 Lab 302 LD 97
May 2012 result C 340 Lab 163
May 2008 result C unopposed
June 2004 result C 572 LD 190
September 2003 by-election C 335 Lab 48
May 2002 result LD 461 C 193
Previous results in detail
Brighstone, Calbourne and Shalfleet
Isle of Wight council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Steve Hastings.
As with last week, Andrew’s Previews finishes today on an island. Last week it was Shetland; this week we travel south to the Isle of Wight.
There aren’t many wards which stretch from coast to coast, but Brighstone, Calbourne and Shalfleet is one of them. The north-west coast of Wight here, facing the New Forest across the Solent, could have had an important role to play in the history of the island. In the fourteenth century there was a busy harbour at Newtown, the point where the Caul Bourne and Clamerkin Brook empty into the Solent, but the settlement never recovered from the twin blows of the Great Plague and a 1377 French raid. Newport became the main commercial centre for Wight instead, and Newtown is now a silted-up backwater.
Despite this the Isle of Wight Newtown remained a rotten borough, and was entitled to send two MPs to Parliament until the Great Reform Act of 1832. From 1793 to 1796 and again from 1806 to 1807 one of its representatives was George Canning, who was first elected here as a young man in his mid-twenties. Until very recently Canning held the record as the shortest-serving UK prime minister, holding that post for the last 119 days of his life in the summer of 1827.
The Caul Bourne flows north into the Solent from the villages of Shalfleet (on the main road from Newport to Yarmouth) and Calbourne, which is noted for its picture-postcard houses. I mean, just look at this photograph of Winkle Street. Wish you were here.
Over the watershed to the south we come to the parish of Brighstone, which covers a large chunk of Wight’s sheer south-west coast. Known as Brixton until relatively recently, Brighstone has left its mark on the Church as three of its rectors went on to become bishops. They included “Soapy” Samuel Wilberforce, son of the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce and now best-known for his opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Some time after Wilberforce had left the parish the Reverend William Fox became curate at St Mary’s Brixton: ironically, Fox was an amateur palaeontologist who discovered several new dinosaur species in the cliffs that line Brighstone Bay.
These are villages with a large retired population and a very white demographic makeup. In the 2011 census eight of the top 16 wards in the South East region for White British population were on the Isle of Wight, including both of the wards which then covered this area: West Wight (Calbourne and Shalfleet) and Central Wight (Brighstone).
Your columnist covered Central Wight ward in some detail in January 2018, with a by-election that was one of those polls where one thing leads to another. The story can be traced back to 2006, when the Conservative MP for the island, Andrew Turner, suffered a stroke. He recovered and represented Wight in Parliament for another eleven years, but his personality was never the same after that. Turner progressively fell out with a large proportion of his voters and with the local Conservative association, which started to look for any excuse to deselect him. They eventually got their wish on 28th April 2017, when Turner spoke to a group of schoolchildren and made some deeply homophobic remarks. With a general election imminent and Labour on the attack, Turner recognised that he was going to get no support from his constituency party and was forced to announce his retirement.
Having finally got rid of Andrew Turner, the Wight Conservatives then selected Central Wight councillor Bob Seely, who was duly elected as the island’s MP in June 2017. Seely had already had a notable career outside of politics, having reported for the Times from the USSR and its successor states before joining the Army, where he did tours of Afghanistan and Iraq. Seely has a military MBE, awarded in 2016 while he was a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps.
Bob Seely stood down from the Isle of Wight council after becoming an MP, and the resulting by-election (Andrew’s Previews 2018, page 31) was held for the Conservatives by Steve Hastings. Hastings also had a notable history before joining the Isle of Wight council. He was elected to Portsmouth city council as a UKIP candidate in 2014, then defected to the Conservatives in 2015. Hastings moved to Brighstone in 2016, but still commuted across the Solent to Portsmouth city council meetings until resigning when his nomination papers went for the Central Wight by-election. By that point Hastings was in the final months of his Portsmouth term, and there wasn’t time for a by-election to fill his vacated city council seat. Which is a bit of a shame in one sense: in the 12-year history of Andrew’s Previews, Portsmouth was and still is one of the few councils which has never been given a full by-election preview in this column.
The present Brighstone, Calbourne and Shalfleet ward was created by boundary changes in 2021. Both of the predecessor wards had been safe Conservative, but Steve Hastings — who received the Conservative nomination for the new ward — was re-elected with a minority vote share of 44%. The opposition vote was fairly evenly split, with the Lib Dems receiving 30% and the Greens 27%. This reflected a general anti-Conservative swing on the island, as the Conservatives lost their majority here in 2021; a coalition of independent councillors and the Green Party is now running the show. Following the election Hastings became leader of the Conservative group on the council, but he stood down from that role after a few months on health grounds. He has now left the island and retired to Dorset.
Defending for the Conservatives is Carol Bryan, who works part-time in a care home on the island; she is a former chair of Totland parish council at the western end of the island and has stood in Totland at all of the last four Wight elections, losing out last year by just ten votes. Runner-up here last time was Nick Stuart for the Lib Dems, who is back for another go; Stuart sits on both Brighstone and Calbourne/Newtown/Porchfield parish councils, and outside politics he is a fencing coach. Also returning is the other defeated candidate from last year, Doug Alldred of the Green Party; he is a musician and has also sat on Brighstone parish council. Two other candidates are standing, Gary Clarke for Labour and Stephen Parkes for the localist Vectis Party. The local press have interviewed all the candidates, and you can find out more here (link).
Parliamentary constituency: Isle of Wight
ONS Travel to Work Area: Isle of Wight
Postcode districts: PO30, PO31, PO38, PO41
Doug Alldred (Grn)
Carol Bryan (C)
Gary Clarke (Lab)
Stephen Parkes (Vectis Party)
Nick Stuart (LD)
May 2021 result C 549 LD 377 Grn 335
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 and will make an excellent Christmas present for the discerning psephologist (link). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale
