Previewing the Kingstanding, Birmingham by-election of 30th May 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
One by-election on 30th May 2024:
Kingstanding
Birmingham council, West Midlands; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Rick Payne.
Today the electoral timetable for the 2024 general election officially starts, as Parliament is dissolved. All MPs’ terms of office officially come to an end today, and the frantic sound you hear emanating from Whitehall is the sound of every MP complaint on behalf of a constituent being officially closed down. The government will keep going and ministers will remain in office for the time being, but government business is now very much in caretaker mode for the next 25 working days. Anything that’s not urgent can be left for the next government and the next Parliament to sort out.
One MP whose term ends today is a figure whom I described in this column ten years ago, in February 2014, as “a party staffer who has fought the [Kingstanding] ward in the last four [Birmingham] elections but still qualifies for a Young Person’s Railcard”. Now 34 years old, Gary Sambrook went on to win the Kingstanding by-election and he remained on Birmingham city council until 2022 — by which point he had gone on to higher things. Sambrook was elected in December 2019 as the Conservative MP for Birmingham Northfield, and his first term saw him described as an influential backbencher with a place on the 1922 Committee. His majority in Northfield was just 1,640 votes, a figure which is notionally trimmed to 1,478 votes by the boundary changes, and his seat is number 12 on the Labour target list. Labour are having to reselect their parliamentary candidate for Northfield following a last-minute dropout, but our genial host’s Britain Predicts model gives Sambrook little chance of a second Parliamentary term.
What of Gary Sambrook’s old stomping ground in Kingstanding? This lies in the north of the city, at a location where Charles I reviewed his troops in 1642 during the Civil War. Originally this was a Staffordshire location — College Road, the south-eastern boundary of this ward, was the ancient Staffordshire-Warwickshire border — and Kingstanding remained rural until 1928, when Perry Barr urban district was abolished and most of its area was annexed by Birmingham. Birmingham Corporation lost no time in developing the whole area for housing to the best 1930s standards, and almost a century on around a quarter of the modern Kingstanding ward’s households are still socially rented.
This is a generally white working-class area of the city. Kingstanding was fertile territory for the British National Party back in the days when they were an electoral force to be reckoned with: the BNP were actually declared as winning a seat here in the 2006 local elections, but that was the result of a counting error and it was overturned by the Election Court. Gary Sambrook first contested the ward in 2008 when he was just 18 years old, and he came close to beating Labour several times in the following years before finally breaking through at the February 2014 by-election.
The modern Kingstanding ward dates from 2018, when Birmingham was moved to whole-council elections to try and sort out problems with its governance. The city’s subsequent bankruptcy suggests that this move might not have had the desired effect. As a result there have been no council elections here since May 2022, when Gary Sambrook stood down from the council and Kingstanding ward turned in a very close result: 45% for Labour and 43% for the Conservatives, with the two parties sharing the ward’s two seats. This represented a gain of one seat for Labour, but overall Labour went backwards on the city council to finish with a reduced majority of 65 seats out of a possible 101.
The new parliamentary boundaries unite Kingstanding ward within the Birmingham Erdington constituency, which has been in Labour hands for 50 years since its recreation in 1974. Labour’s Paulette Hamilton will shortly be seeking a second term of office in Erdington; she previously won a by-election here in March 2022, successfully holding a safe Labour seat following the death of Jack Dromey.
Birmingham Labour don’t have their troubles to seek right now, with the city’s parlous finances resulting in big council tax rises this year. But this by-election will be defended by the Conservatives, who have clearly gone backwards in national polling since early 2022 and will not be helped by this poll coming out of the Councillors Behaving Badly file. Rick Payne, who had represented Kingstanding ward since 2022, was dropped by the Conservative party and then quit the council in April after the anti-extremist group Hope Not Hate revealed that he had been tweeting racist and Islamophobic content from an anonymous social media account.
Defending this seat for the Conservatives is Clifton Welch, who fought Pype Hayes ward in north-eastern Birmingham in 2022. Labour have selected their unsuccessful candidate here from 2022 Naz Rasheed; she is a management accountant. Above Welch and Rasheed on the alphabetical ballot paper are Lucy Hayward for the Liberal Democrats, Patrick Lee for the Green Party, Kris O’Sullivan for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and Pete Higgins for the Workers Party.
Next week there will be a special Tuesday edition of Andrew’s Previews as we head to mid-Wales, so stay tuned for that.
Parliamentary constituency: Birmingham Erdington
ONS Travel to Work Area: Birmingham
Postcode districts: B42, B44
Lucy Hayward (LD)
Pete Higgins (Workers)
Patrick Lee (Grn)
Kris O’Sullivan (TUSC)
Naz Rasheed (Lab)
Clifton Welch (C)
May 2022 result Lab 1350/1221 C 1286/1274 LD 142 Grn 125/99 TUSC 50 We Matter 19
May 2018 result C 1745/1577 Lab 1465/1459 LD 97/89
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
