Previewing the four local by-elections of 8th February 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Four by-elections on 8th February 2024:
Ebbw Vale South
Blaenau Gwent council, Gwent; caused by the resignation of councillor Carl Bainton.
Our four polls today split neatly into two pairs, with a pair of by-elections in England to replace Conservative and Labour councillors, and a pair of by-elections in Wales to replace independent councillors. Let’s start west of the border with a look at one of the biggest regeneration schemes currently ongoing in Wales.
The story here starts in 1789, when a partnership of Walter Watkins, Charles Cracroft and Jeremiah Homfray leased some land in an undeveloped valley of south Wales, that of the Ebbw Fawr. Watkins ran a forge near Crickhowell which was short of pig iron; Cracroft was his son-in-law; and Homfray was ironmaster at the Penydarren Ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil. The site at Pen y Cae Farm had all the ingredients for ironmaking, with iron ore, coal and limestone abundant in the local geology and the Ebbw River available to provide power. A blast furnace and casting shop was erected on the hillside, and soon the Ebbw Vale Furnace Company was turning out pig iron at the rate of 25 tons per week.
This was just a promising start. Investment by subsequent owners expanded the plant and allowed Ebbw Vale to produce rails for the 19th-century railway boom. Ebbw Vale became a massive steelworks of national importance, to the extent that when the site closed in 1929 through lack of investment — leading to unemployment of 54% in the town — a Conservative government forced the owners to sell out to new investors. The new owners, Richard Thomas and Company, then totally redeveloped and modernised the site, allowing Ebbw Vale to reopen for business in the late 1930s.
The Ebbw Vale steelworks came into public ownership in 1951 and became part of the British Steel empire in 1967. British Steel redeveloped the works to specialise on tinplate manufacture; this allowed the steelworks site to contract, and the Ebbw Vale Garden Festival was held on the released and cleaned-up land over the summer of 1992. In 1999 British Steel merged with the Dutch steelworkers Hoogovens to form Corus; Corus then announced the closure of the Ebbw Vale steelworks in 2001, and the furnaces went cold the following year. 780 jobs were lost.
The site of the former Ebbw Vale steelworks is now a focus for regeneration work. The railways returned to the town in 2015 with the opening of Ebbw Vale Town railway station, a branch-line terminus with hourly trains to Cardiff; the station is located next to the former steelworks General Offices (which is now the home of Blaenau Gwent council and also houses the Gwent archives), the further-education Coleg Gwent and the Ebbw Vale Cableway, a rather curious inclined lift which links the site to the town centre. Also here is a new hospital for the area which is rather appropriately named after the architect of the NHS, Ysbyty Aneurin Bevan.
Bevan represented Ebbw Vale in Parliament from 1929 until his death in 1960, when Michael Foot won the resulting by-election. His seat was expanded in 1983 to form the modern Blaenau Gwent constituency, which is based on the heads of three parallel valleys: the main towns are Ebbw Vale in the centre, Tredegar to the west, and Brynmawr and Abertillery to the east. The Blaenau Gwent local government district covers the same area, although not for much longer; at the next general election the Westminster seat will expand further west to take in Rhymney at the head of a fourth valley, with a consequent name change to “Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney”.
The Blaenau Gwent constituency is usually described as rock-solid Labour, but this has not always been so in recent years. Local politics in Blaenau Gwent tends to follow the usual coalfield pattern of Labour versus independent candidates; unusually, this once spilled over into national politics. Labour MP Llew Smith retired at the 2005 general election, and Labour lost the seat to Peter Law who was at the time the Welsh Assembly member for the seat: Law stood as an independent candidate after failing to get the Labour nomination for the Westminster seat. He died shortly afterwards forcing simultaneous by-elections to both Westminster and Cardiff Bay in 2006: Peter Law’s Assembly seat in Blaenau Gwent was taken by his widow Trish and his Westminster seat by his election agent Dai Davies, both of them effectively representing the Blaenau Gwent People’s Voice party. Davies lost his seat back to Labour in 2010; Nick Smith, who has represented Blaenau Gwent in Westminster since then, was recently promoted to the Labour frontbench as shadow deputy leader of the Commons. Trish Law stood down in 2011 and Labour backbencher Alun Davies has been the MS for Blaenau Gwent since then.
Blaenau Gwent People’s Voice is now defunct as a party, but at all four local elections here since the 2006 by-elections control of Blaenau Gwent council has alternated between Labour and independent councillors. We’re currently in a Labour phase, after the 2022 elections returned 21 Labour and 12 independents.
The whole of the former steelworks site is within the Ebbw Vale South ward which, after voting for independents in 2017, split its two seats in 2022: independent Carl Bainton topped the poll with 385 votes, with the lead Labour candidate Sue Edmunds winning the second seat on 354 votes. The two outgoing independent councillors, Jonathan Millard and Keith Pritchard, both lost re-election; Millard finished as runner-up, 34 votes behind Edmunds. Newly-elected independent councillor Carl Bainton then defected to the Labour group almost immediately.
At the time of his election in Ebbw Vale South, Carl Bainton worked for the Gwent Association of Voluntary Organisations on Communities for Work Plus, a scheme providing support and mentoring for jobseekers from groups who are underrepresented in the Labour market. This scheme is funded by the Welsh Government, which sees this as a job for local government: accordingly, they asked for the Communities for Work Plus team to be transferred to Blaenau Gwent council. This meant that Carl Bainton became an employee of his own council (under TUPE) with effect from 1st October 2023. Council employees are disqualified from serving on the council they work for, and that left Bainton with no option but to resign either his employment or his council role. Which of those roles pays more can be guessed from the fact that we are having this by-election.
The fact that Bainton was elected as an independent and then defected to Labour makes it rather difficult to work out who the defending candidate for this by-election is. There is one independent candidate, local resident and former ward councillor Jonathan Millard who lost his seat here in 2022; in his spare time Millard works in the boxing ring as an announcer and MC on fight nights. The Labour candidate is Amy Smith, who currently works for the NHS, used to work for the council and volunteers as a school governor. Completing the ballot paper is Jonathan Powell for the Green Party.
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Blaenau Gwent
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney
ONS Travel to Work Area: Merthyr Tydfil
Postcode district: NP23
Jonathan Millard (Ind)
Jonathan Powell (Grn)
Amy Smith (Lab)
May 2022 result Ind 385/320/269 Lab 354/296 C 97
May 2017 result Ind 619/549 Lab 420/352
May 2012 result Lab 691/551 Ind 441/217
May 2008 result Lab 589/448 Ind 409 People’s Voice 295/255 LD 208
June 2004 result Lab 637/556 LD 440 Ind 394 PC 235
Previous results in detail
Criccieth
Gwynedd council, North Wales; caused by the death of independent councillor Eirwyn Williams.
Our other Welsh by-election today couldn’t be more different. We’ve come to the coast of Gwynedd, to a small seaside town on the northern edge of Tremadog Bay. Criccieth has been here since the thirteenth century, when Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (also known as Llywelyn the Great) erected a castle on the shoreline in 1230. Llywelyn was king of Gwynedd and effective ruler of Wales for over 40 years, and Criccieth Castle became the administrative centre of the Eifionydd — a rural area in the south-western Llŷn, between Portthmadog and Pwllheli. The castle fell to Edward I’s English in the 1280s; following further fighting, it has lain in ruins since the fifteenth century.
Modern Criccieth really got going in the 19th century, when the railways came here and a small seaside resort was founded. The town’s economy is still based on tourism, and Criccieth ranks in the top 40 wards in England and Wales for people employed in accommodation and food service sector (15.7%); it’s also in the top 70 wards in England and Wales for those aged 85 or over.
Criccieth is a strongly Welsh-speaking town, and its most famous former resident grew up speaking Welsh as his first language. David Lloyd George was born in Manchester but educated a couple of miles to the west of here in the village of Llanystumdwy, and he started his career right here in Criccieth as a young solicitor: his first practice was set up in his uncle’s house. His practice quickly grew, and he came to national prominence in 1888 by winning a case over burial rights for nonconformists at the Divisional Court in London.
On the strength of that, the local Liberal Party adopted David Lloyd George as their parliamentary candidate for the Caernarvon District of Boroughs, a very curious parliamentary seat which consisted entirely of disconnected towns within what was then Caernarvonshire. The original six Caernarvon Boroughs were Bangor, Conwy, Criccieth, Nefyn, Pwllheli and Caernarfon itself. Those towns returned David Lloyd George to Parliament at a by-election on 10th April 1890, following the death of Conservative MP Edmund Swetenham; Lloyd George defeated the new Conservative candidate, major Caernarvonshire landowner Hugh Ellis-Nanney, by just 18 votes. He would go on to represent the Caernarvon Boroughs seat for almost 55 continuous years, including sixteen years as Father of the House, until he was elevated to the peerage shortly before his death in 1945.
Which was a bit of an achievement, not least because the 1918 redistribution abolished every other District of Boroughs constituency in Wales: one suspects that if David Lloyd George had not been the Prime Minister at the time, then the Caernarvon Boroughs would have gone the same way. Lloyd George’s seat instead had three new boroughs added to it by the redistribution — Llandudno, Penmaenmawr and Llanfairfechan — but in the 1918 general election the Caernarvon Boroughs’ electorate of 23,787 still made it the second-smallest constituency in Wales, only Merioneth having a smaller headcount.
These days Criccieth is contained within the parliamentary and Senedd constituency of Dwyfor Meirionnydd, which also has a notably low headcount: its electorate is currently the smallest of any parliamentary seat on the British mainland. The seat will be greatly expanded for the next election to take in Caernarfon and Corwen.
Liberalism is not a feature of Criccieth’s politics any longer. Plaid Cymru have represented Criccieth in Parliament for almost fifty years, since Dafydd Wigley gained what was then the Caernarfon seat from Labour in February 1974; and every Senedd election to date has also returned a Plaid AM or MS here. Plaid’s current representatives for Dwyfor Merionnydd are Mabon ap Gwynfor in the Senedd and Liz Saville Roberts, the leader of Plaid’s Westminster group of MPs.
Plaid Cymru also run Gwynedd council with quite a large majority: currently 44 out of 69 seats. Criccieth, however, is not part of that majority. The town has returned independent Gwynedd councillors at every local election since 2008, and it has been represented since 2012 by Eirwyn Williams. A former chair of Cyngor Gwynedd’s language committee, Williams was a very long-serving councillor: when he passed away in October at the age of 75, he had 45 years of service on Criccieth town council under his belt.
Eirwyn Williams was run rather close by Plaid Cymru at his final re-election in 2022: his majority was 32 votes or, in percentage terms, 47–42. Local elections in rural Wales often have unopposed returns, so Criccieth has done well to have contests at all five Welsh local elections this century, a streak which continues in this by-election.
One independent candidate has come forward to succeed Williams: that’s John Allport, who runs a filling station in Criccieth and a string of fish and chip shops in nearby towns. Plaid Cymru have selected Sian Williams, a Criccieth town councillor who was until recently chair of that council. Also standing are representatives of two parties who didn’t stand here in 2022: Bernard Gentry (who has local government experience as a former Lambeth councillor) for the Conservatives, and Andrew Joyce for the Liberal Democrats.
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Dwyfor Meirionnydd
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Dwyfor Meirionnydd
ONS Travel to Work Area: Pwllheli and Porthmadog
Postcode district: LL52
John Allport (Ind)
Bernard Gentry (C)
Andrew Joyce (LD)
Sian Williams (PC)
May 2022 result Ind 263 PC 231 Lab 62
May 2017 result Ind 470 PC 168 LD 46
May 2012 result Ind 287 Ind 174 PC 133 C 98
May 2008 result Ind 329 PC 286 C 94
June 2004 result PC 356 Ind 346
Previous results in detail
Crewe Central
Cheshire East council; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Anthony Critchley.
“The place which is Crewe is not Crewe, and the place which is not Crewe is Crewe.”
We now travel to England for the week’s Labour defence, which is in the Crewe Central ward. Which opens a bit of a can of worms, given the surprisingly complicated history of the town of Crewe. Let me explain.
Until the nineteenth century, there was very little in this corner of Cheshire: rolling fields, a tiny village called Crewe, and a rambling Jacobean mansion in landscaped parkland called Crewe Hall which was home to the ancient Crewe family. Then, in 1837, everything changed here with the arrival of the Grand Junction Railway. This was an ambitious transport project to provide new transport links between Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester rather than try and fix the innumerable potholes in the roads of the day. Imagine that.
The railway company opened a station a mile and a half west of Crewe village, and established its locomotive works nearby. Crewe station is now a six-way junction on the busy West Coast Main Line, with routes north to Warrington and Liverpool, north-east to Manchester, north-west to Chester, south to Stafford, south-west to Shrewsbury and south-east to the Potteries.
The Grand Junction Railway proved to be enormously profitable, and the Crewe locomotive works boomed, producing huge demand for housing for the railway workers here and their families. So in 1840 the railway’s chief engineer (and future MP for Honiton) Joseph Locke produced a plan for a new town to the north-west of Crewe station, which was built in the 1840s and 1850s — largely by the railway company itself.
Which is where the complicated history bit comes in. Crewe station took its name from the township (from 1866, the parish) of Crewe which it was located in, but it was hard up against the township’s western boundary; and the new railway town had been built within the neighbouring township (from 1866, the parish) of Monks Coppenhall. So, when local government came to the railway town in 1858, it was initially in the form of the Monks Coppenhall Local Board. This body was renamed as the Crewe Local Board in 1870 but the underlying parish was not, producing a very confusing situation where the Crewe Local Board covered the parish of Monks Coppenhall but not the parish of Crewe. Further local government reorganisation over the 154 years since has sorted this out, and the original Crewe village has now taken the name of Crewe Green to avoid confusion with the town that stole its name.
The Crewe Central ward is the core of the old railway town, taking in both the town centre and the Crewe Works, which has built thousands of steam, diesel and electric locomotives since its foundation nearly two centuries ago. At its height, over 7,000 people were employed here. Much of the sprawling Crewe Works site has now been redeveloped, but there is still heavy engineering going on here: from next year Crewe Works will start to assemble the bogies and wheels for the future High Speed 2 trains. Those who like to study the railways of the past will enjoy the Crewe Heritage Centre, where a number of signalboxes and the only remaining British Rail Advanced Passenger Train can be visited.
All this engineering gives Crewe Central a very working-class demographic profile: it is in the top 50 wards in England and Wales for “routine occupations” (27.2%). The ward is also in the top 25 in England and Wales for residents born in the 2004 EU expansion states of Eastern Europe (15.1%) and has the highest figure in north-west England for both this statistic and for the White Other ethnic group (23.0%).
One of the main thoroughfares through Crewe Central ward is called Dunwoody Way, after the long-serving Labour MP Gwyneth Dunwoody who represented Crewe and Nantwich until her death in 2008. The Conservatives gained the resulting by-election. Labour took Crewe and Nantwich back in 2017 by just 48 votes, but could not defend that gain two years later and the seat is now back in Conservative hands. Mind, Conservative backbencher Kieran Mullan is clearly sufficiently worried about his prospects of re-election that he attempted to do the chicken run by applying (without success) for the Conservative selection for Chester South and Eddisbury, which is the successor to the current Eddisbury seat and has a much larger Conservative majority.
In local elections Crewe is the major source of Labour votes in the sprawling and badly-named Cheshire East district, which also takes in Congleton, Knutsford, Macclesfield, Nantwich, Wilmslow and much of the Manchester stockbroker belt. With a makeup like that this really should be a Tory-run district, but the Conservative administration which ran Cheshire East from 2009 proved to be somewhat controversial and it lost its majority in 2019. The Conservatives are still the largest party on the council, but they have been shut out of power since then by a coalition between Labour and independent and localist councillors. The 2023 elections returned 33 Conservatives, 31 Labour, 10 independents, 5 Wilmslow localists, 2 Lib Dems and an Alderley Edge localist. Two of the independents are not part of the ruling coalition: they are husband and wife John and Julie Smith of Handforth ward, and readers may remember John Smith as the sane one who took over the meeting in that video.
Crewe Central is one of the safest Labour wards in the Cheshire East district, and Anthony Critchley was re-elected last year for a second term as the ward’s councillor with a 55–23 lead over the Conservatives. He then resigned from the council last November, indicating that he was looking to pursue other opportunities and interests.
Defending for Labour is Kim Jamson; she is a Nantwich town councillor who works for the teachers’ trade union NASUWT. The Conservative candidate is Roger Morris, who runs a motorcycle dealership in the ward. Also standing are much-defected former councillor Brian Silvester who this week is in the localist group Putting Crewe First, Te Ata Browne for the Green Party and — appropriately for a railway town — Vicky Pulman, for the Women’s Equality Party.
Parliamentary constituency: Crewe and Nantwich
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Crewe and Nantwich
Postcode districts: CW1, CW2
ONS Travel to Work Area: Crewe
Te Ata Browne (Grn)
Kim Jamson (Lab)
Roger Morris (C)
Vicky Pulman (Women’s Equality Party)
Brian Silvester (Putting Crewe First)
May 2023 result Lab 448 C 192 Putting Crewe First 126 Reform UK 53
May 2019 result Lab 450 C 139 LD 94 Ind 55
May 2015 result Lab 879 UKIP 373 C 213
May 2011 result Lab 525 LD 226 C 119
Previous results in detail
East Hunsbury and Shelfleys
West Northamptonshire council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Suresh Patel.
We finish the week in Northamptonshire, where next week’s column will start with the Parliamentary Special in Wellingborough. Before then it’s time for a look at the ward of East Hunsbury and Shelfleys, which covers some comfortable suburbia on the southern edge of Northampton: the demographic profile is middle-class, and the housing stock is nearly all from the last 50 years with large proportions of detached properties. Before the houses were built from the 1970s onwards, this area had been extensively quarried for iron ore. The M1 motorway is the ward’s southern boundary, and the Northampton Loop railway line disappears into a tunnel here under Hunsbury Hill on its southern approach to Northampton.
Northampton is the largest town in the UK which has never had city status. Indeed, when the current parliamentary seats were drawn up based on the 2000 electoral register, the then Northampton borough was too large for two constituencies of its own. As a result, some of its southern fringes including the area which would become this ward were hived off into a new constituency called South Northamptonshire, which is a safe Conservative unit represented since its 2010 recreation by former Cabinet minister Dame Andrea Leadsom.
The forthcoming boundary changes will move East Hunsbury and Shelfleys into the Northampton South constituency represented by Conservative MP Andrew Lewer, who before his election to the Commons in 2017 had served as an MEP for the East Midlands and as leader of Derbyshire county council. Despite this relevant experience, Lewer has failed to climb the greasy pole of government and is currently on the backbenches.
Andrew Lewer took the Northampton South seat over in 2017 following the effective deselection of the Conservatives’ previous MP David Mackintosh, a controversial former leader of Northampton council. On Mackintosh’s watch, the council sold one of its assets — an ancient Egyptian statue of the scribe Sekhemka — in order to raise money, leading the Arts Council to remove its accreditation of Northampton Museums. The council also loaned £10.25 million of council taxpayers’ money to Northampton Town FC for the redevelopment of their Sixfields stadium, which never happened; instead, most of the money disappeared in mysterious circumstances.
A businessman involved in that loan, Howard Grossman, then returned the favour to Mackintosh by making donations to his 2015 parliamentary election campaign totalling £39,000. This was done via third parties, and the necessary declarations that the money had ultimately come from Grossman were not made. This eventually led to charges being brought for offences under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which regulates political donations. Mackintosh and Grossman themselves were found not guilty of trying to conceal the source of the donations by a jury at Warwick Crown Court last October, but four of the agents who made the payments on behalf of Grossman ended up with fines or suspended prison sentences following guilty pleas.
Northampton council no longer exists, because Northamptonshire had its local government reorganised in 2020 following the bankruptcy of the county council. The county was split into two new local authorities. West Northamptonshire council covers Northampton and a very large rural hinterland, including the towns of Daventry, Towcester and Brackley. Its first elections, postponed to May 2021 for pandemic reasons, returned a large Conservative majority with 66 councillors against 20 for Labour, five Lib Dems and two independents. The next local elections here will be in 2025.
The 2021 local elections reused the boundaries of the old Northamptonshire county council divisions, so we actually have results for East Hunsbury and Shelfleys going all the way back to 2013. These previous results show a safe Conservative ward; in 2021 the Conservative slate won with 52% of the vote against 25% for Labour and 23% for the Liberal Democrats.
Top of the poll here in 2021 was Suresh Patel, who transferred here from the Duston area of western Northampton; Patel had previously been a Northampton councillor (representing Old Duston ward from 2011 to 2020) and a county councillor (representing St James division from 2009 to 2013, then New Duston division from 2013 to 2020). He had also previously been chair of the Northampton South branch of the Conservative Party, and he appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the recent Mackintosh and Grossman trial. Patel’s resignation is on health grounds, and results in the very first by-election to West Northamptonshire council.
Defending for the Conservatives is Daniel Soan, an IT engineer who is chairman of the Far Cotton and Delapre community council and also sits on the newly-formed Northampton town council, which must be one of the largest parishes in the country by population. Both of those parishes border but do not cover this ward. The Labour candidate is Clare Robertson-Marriott, a former teacher who contested the rural Moulton ward in 2021. Another former 2021 candidate is the Lib Dems’ Carl Squires, a former Northampton councillor who is now the chairman of West Hunsbury parish council which covers the Shelfleys part of this ward. He completes a ballot paper of three candidates.
Coming up next week, we have five local by-elections to bring you in South Wales, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and Hull — and, of course, the Parliamentary Specials in Kingswood and Wellingborough. Stay tuned for those.
Parliamentary constituency: South Northamptonshire
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Northampton South
ONS Travel to Work Area: Northampton
Postcode district: NN4
Clare Robertson-Marriott (Lab)
Daniel Soan (C)
Carl Squires (LD)
May 2021 result C 1923/1878/1715 Lab 911 LD 848/792
May 2017 result C 1801 Lab 557 LD 265 UKIP 258 Grn 140
May 2013 result C 1126 UKIP 773 Lab 474 Grn 191 LD 172
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
