Previewing the Lancaster and Wiltshire local by-elections of 14th March 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Just two by-elections on 14th March 2024, with the Greens and the Liberal Democrats defending one seat each. Let’s start with the Green seat:
Castle
Lancaster council; caused by the resignation of Green Party councillor Shelagh McGregor.
We’ll start the week in one of the UK’s most ancient cities. Lancaster was founded by the Romans, who erected a Roman fort in the first century AD on a hill overlooking the lowest crossing-point of the River Lune. The Roman fort’s name is lost to history. It was rebuilt a number of times and its only surviving section — the Wery Wall, a lump of rubble identified as part of the fort in 1950 — dates from the 4th century. Roman bathhouses have been excavated nearby, and in 2023 a group of Lancaster University students on a geophysics training exercise found evidence for what is thought to be a Romano-Celtic temple.
Most of the Roman fort’s site is now occupied by Lancaster Castle, which is often referred to locally as John o’ Gaunt’s castle but dates from earlier than his time: the building goes back to at least the thirteenth century and may well be older than that. It saw action during a Scottish invasion in 1389 and was besieged in the English Civil War, but Lancaster Castle is best known to history as Lancashire’s traditional centre for law and justice. The castle was used as a prison up to 2011, and it is still home to Lancaster crown court to this day; because the prison and court were both within the castle walls, Lancaster was a popular venue for trials which required high security. Among those who have had justice meted out to them here were the ten Pendle Witches, who were sentenced to death for witchcraft in this castle in 1612. Today the Duchy of Lancaster, which owns the castle, provides guided tours for casual visitors.
Lancaster Castle lies on the western edge of the city centre, whose area forms Castle ward. Lancaster was once a port, and there are still some fine Georgian buildings at St George’s Quay on the riverside which date from that era; the old custom house is now home to the Lancaster Maritime Museum. In more recent years the city’s economy has been supported by Lancaster University, a plate-glass 1960s institution. The university has its own dedicated campus on the southern edge of the city which this column has visited on a number of recent occasions, but a number of its departments and many of its students are based in the city centre. In the 2021 census Castle ward made the top 60 wards in England and Wales for the 18–29 age bracket (46.4%) and for those with A-level or equivalent qualifications but not (yet) further (35.3%); 43% of its adults were full-time students, and 22% worked in the education sector. Students travelling to Lancaster will often arrive or pass through here: the city’s intercity railway station, on the West Coast main line, lies within the Castle ward boundary and was once known as Lancaster Castle.
This youthful demographic leads to left-wing politics. But Lancaster council isn’t just the city proper: it also takes in the faded seaside resort of Morecambe, the ferry port of Heysham, the small railway town of Carnforth and a large rural hinterland, resulting in the council being more or less permanently hung. The 2023 Lancaster elections returned 24 Labour councillors, 21 Greens, 7 Lib Dems, 5 Conservatives, 3 Morecambe Bay Independents and 1 other independent; a traffic-light coalition is in place under a Labour leader.
Castle ward is safely in the Green column in city council elections: in 2023 the Green Party slate beat Labour here 59–29. At county council level the ward is split between the Lancaster Central division, which is safe Green, and Lancaster East which is a Labour-Green marginal; confusingly, the city centre is in Lancaster East rather than Lancaster Central. The ward is currently part of the Lancaster and Fleetwood parliamentary seat, a marginal constituency which has been represented since 2015 by Labour backbencher Cat Smith; but the forthcoming boundary changes will transform her seat into Lancaster and Wyre, transferring Fleetwood out and strongly Tory areas around Garstang in. Projections are that this wipes out the small Labour majority: Lancaster and Wyre is projected to be notionally Conservative, so Cat Smith will have to gain her seat all over again if she wants to stay in Parliament.
Lancaster city council has had quite a lot of by-elections in recent years, so it’s not too surprising for this column to find itself back in the city within 12 months of the last ordinary election. This time we are finding a replacement for Green councillor Shelagh McGregor, who resigned from the council after less than a year in office. She is returning to her former home in East Yorkshire to care for family members. There is another by-election pending on the city council, following the recent death of a Labour councillor for Carnforth, so Andrew’s Previews will be back in this area again in the not too distant future.
This by-election features an all-student ballot paper of four candidates. Defending for the Green Party is Izzy Metcalf-Riener, who graduated from Lancaster University last summer with a degree in geography and Spanish; she is now reading for a Masters in environment, culture and society. The Labour candidate is Emily Jones, who is an undergraduate student reading history and politics. Also standing are Daniel Kirk for the Conservatives and Cormac Evans for the Liberal Democrats.
Parliamentary constituency: Lancaster and Fleetwood
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Lancaster and Wyre
Lancashire county council division: Lancaster East (most), Lancaster Central (part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Lancaster and Morecambe
Postcode districts: LA1, LA2
Cormac Evans (LD)
Emily Jones (Lab)
Daniel Kirk (C)
Izzy Metcalf-Riener (Grn)
May 2023 result Grn 767/711/657 Lab 383/362/320 C 93/82/75 LD 66
Previous results in detail
Cricklade and Latton
Wiltshire council; caused by the death of Liberal Democrat councillor Bob Jones.
And now for something completely different, as we travel to the northern border of Wiltshire. This lies in the Thames valley, and Cricklade is described as the highest town on the Thames: it is located at the point where the Roman Ermin Way crossed the river. The ward straddles both sides of the Thames, with Cricklade itself to the south of the river and the village of Latton and the parish of Marston Meysey to the north; both of the latter form salients of Witlshire which are surrounded on three sides by Gloucestershire. Marston Meysey is effectively an exclave of Wiltshire, because all communication links from here either go through Gloucestershire or the Swindon council area; that parish is itself divided into two parts by the runway of RAF Fairford, whose western end is within this ward.
Cricklade’s strategic location made it important enough to be an ancient borough which elected two MPs to Parliament. A reform in 1684 granted the right to vote in Cricklade to those holding a tenement in the borough freely, by copy, or by a lease for three years or longer. This unique franchise doubled the electorate to around 130 and may have been an attempt to head off a contested election.
If so, the law of unintended consequences now got to work. Cricklade was one of six “freeholder” boroughs in England, and it was the only one of those where nobody owned enough property to control the borough. As a result, elections in Cricklade over the next century became notorious for their venality and corruption. The franchise and borough boundary were ill-defined, and regular attempts were made to control the electorate by buying and/or building tenements or by good old-fashioned bribery. The lordship of the manor became very valuable because this came with the right to appoint and control the returning officer for Cricklade, who was regularly accused of misconduct and partiality. It’s not a coincidence that seven of the eleven Parliaments from 1718 to 1780 included the lord of the manor of Cricklade or a close relative among their MPs.
From 1761 onwards disputes over Cricklade’s elections got so bad that they regularly spilled over into Parliament, which resolved such disputes itself in those pre-Election Court days. The 1774 and 1775 elections in Cricklade were both voided by Parliament due to concerns over partiality and malpractice by the returning officer. On the second occasion Samuel Petrie, standing on a platform of being “the champion of pure elections”, polled just six votes.
The 1780 election in Cricklade then returned two East India Company nabobs, John Macpherson and Paul Benfield. Benfield, who was in the UK at the time defending himself from a scandal over vast sums of money which he had lent to the Nawab of the Carnatic, had bought the title of lord of the manor of Cricklade and he spent freely during the election. Macpherson’s campaign had the backing of the equally free-spending Henry Herbert, who entered the Lords that year with the title of Lord Porchester and ended up as the first Earl of Carnarvon. Samuel Petrie trailed in a long way behind with eleven votes, and then launched legal action alleging bribery. The lawsuit led to 113 of Cricklade’s voters being tried at Salisbury assizes for corruption: 83 voters, the returning officer and Macpherson’s election agent were eventually found guilty of bribery.
This was the final straw for Parliament, and the House now decided not only to unseat John Macpherson but also to punish Cricklade for its corruption. Disenfranchisement was apparently out of the question, so the answer was to flood the constituency with new voters to dilute the influence of the old corrupt voters. An Act of 1782 meant that the Cricklade borough had its franchise extended to all forty-shilling freeholders in the hundreds of Highworth, Cricklade, Staple, Kingsbridge and Malmesbury, increasing the electorate to around 800. This democratic homeopathy effectively turned Cricklade into a county constituency.
Unfortunately this was not a happy ending for Samuel Petrie. Having seen off the nabobs he stood here in the 1782 by-election and the 1784 general election, but he could not compete against the independent country gentlemen who were now the main players in Cricklade’s expanded electorate. Ironically, most of Petrie’s votes on those occasions came from the corrupt voters of Cricklade town, who were now so thoroughly outnumbered. To the insult Petrie received we can add injury in a 1782 duel with Lord Porchester, who would eventually manage to control one of the expanded Cricklade’s two parliamentary seats.
From 1782 on the Cricklade parliamentary borough’s area included a small village called Swindon, which grew rapidly in population during the nineteenth century when it became the centre for the locomotive works of the Great Western Railway. Sir Daniel Gooch, the GWR’s chairman, served as a Conservative MP for Cricklade from 1865 until the borough was finally disenfranchised in 1885; however, Cricklade lived on as a county constituency name until 1918.
The local MP here now is James Gray, who has been the Conservative MP for North Wiltshire since 1997. This seat will disappear at the next election, at which Cricklade will transfer into a new South Cotswolds parliamentary seat straddling the Gloucestershire-Wiltshire boundary. Like the old North Wiltshire this is projected to be a safe Conservative seat, and Gray will seek re-election there within the next year.
In local government Wiltshire county council is under Conservative control, but Cricklade is not part of their majority. Instead, the modern Cricklade and Latton ward has been in Liberal Democrat hands since Wiltshire’s local government was reorganised in 2009. Bob Jones MBE had been the local councillor since 2013, after coming a close second as an independent candidate in 2009. He was re-elected for his third and final term of office in 2021, winning a straight fight with the Conservatives by an increased majority of 62–38: we fight our political duels with votes these days rather than with pistols. Jones, who suffered a fatal heart attack in January, was also a Cricklade town councillor and vice-chairman of the Dorset and Wiltshire Fire Authority.
A hard act to follow for the new Lib Dem candidate Nick Dye, who is a business analyst and Cricklade town councillor. The Conservatives have reselected their losing candidate from 2021 Luke Jowett, who works as a customer services professional for Thames Water. There will not be a straight fight this time, as also standing are John Barnes for Labour and Anna Marie for the Green Party.
Parliamentary constituency: North Wiltshire
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): South Cotswolds
ONS Travel to Work Area: Swindon
Postcode districts: GL7, SN5, SN6
John Barnes (Lab)
Nick Dye (LD)
Luke Jowett (C)
Anna Marie (Grn)
May 2021 result LD 1224 C 776
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
