Previewing the Lewisham mayoral by-election and the three local by-elections of 7th March 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Four by-elections on 7th March 2024, and yet again we start with the big one:
Mayor of Lewisham
Lewisham council, London; caused by the resignation of Labour mayor Damian Egan.
We’ve seen some big parliamentary by-elections over the last month in the constituencies of Kingswood, Wellingborough and Rochdale. Well, now it’s time to go to another level with the biggest by-election of the year so far. To start the week we have a Mayoral Special, with an entire London Borough going to the polls — an area covered by nearly three parliamentary seats. On the December 2022 electoral register, the number of people eligible to vote here was around 199,000.
There has been a Lewisham borough since 1900, when the County of London had its local government reorganised from parishes into Metropolitan Boroughs. The 1900 reorganisation created a Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham, essentially as a merger of the former Lee and Lewisham parishes; and a Metropolitan Borough of Deptford, covering the former parish of Deptford St Paul.
Deptford was an old industrial town thanks to its frontage on the River Thames, with busy and prosperous dockland. In 1900 Lewisham still had large areas of open space, but these were quickly filled in with privately-built suburbs and then with the large council-built Downham estate. Before the First World War Deptford and Lewisham had one MP each; Deptford had no room to expand, but by 1950 the population of Lewisham had grown enough for it to be divided into three constituencies.
In parliamentary elections, the Deptford constituency voted Conservative until 1900 and then Labour from 1906, with the sole exception of the 1931 landslide. Lewisham returned Conservative MPs up until 1945, after which Lewisham South became safe Labour (thanks to the inclusion of the Downham estate) while the rest of the borough was marginal and closely fought. A number of MPs for Lewisham in the postwar years were or became famous on the national stage: in that list we can count Herbert Morrison (Lab, Lewisham East 1945–50 and Lewisham South 1950–59), Christopher Chataway (C, Lewisham North 1959–66) and John Gummer (C, Lewisham West 1970-Feb 74).
The area has clearly swung to the left over the last half-century and has had a full slate of Labour MPs since 1992. Lewisham’s parliamentary delegation is currently all-female, with Vicky Foxcroft representing Deptford since 2015, Ellie Reeves taking on West and Penge (which also covers areas of the neighbouring Bromley borough) in 2017 and Janet Daby being elected for East at a 2018 by-election. Foxcroft and Daby both have junior roles on the Labour frontbench team, while Reeves is the younger sister of the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and is the party’s deputy national campaign coordinator. Ellie Reeves’ seat will be extensively redrawn for the next general election to become Lewisham West and East Dulwich, while the Boundary Commission have chosen to break with 139 years of history and remove Deptford from the parliamentary map at the next general election: Foxcroft’s seat will be renamed as Lewisham North. None of these changes should give the borough’s Labour MPs anything to worry about.
In the 2021 London mayoral election the borough as a whole gave 51% to Labour’s Sadiq Khan, 21% to the Conservatives’ Shaun Bailey and 11% to the Greens’ Siân Berry. The London Members ballot, which determines the overall composition of the London Assembly, had 48% for Labour, 17% for the Greens and 16% for the Conservatives. The Greater London returning officer has previously published ward-level breakdowns for all of these votes, but that will not happen for the 2024 elections to the London Mayor and Assembly and we will only get breakdowns to borough level. With the abolition of the two-round system for the mayoral election, it may well be that those votes will now be counted by hand rather than scanned into a computer system.
The modern London Borough of Lewisham was created in 1965 by merging the former Deptford and Lewisham boroughs. In local elections it has normally proven to be safe Labour: of the sixteen Lewisham council elections to date, fourteen have returned Labour majorities, one (the Labour disaster year of 1968) a Conservative majority and one (2006) a hung council. The 2018 and 2022 council elections returned the entire Labour slate with 54 councillors out of a possible 54; the 2022 council vote shares in this one-party state were 52% for Labour, 22% for the Green Party and 13% for the Liberal Democrats.
This redwash also extends to the borough’s mayor, because Lewisham was one of the first boroughs to adopt the elected mayoral system. All six mayoral elections to date have returned the Labour candidate, and the elections from 2014 to 2022 were not required to go to a runoff under the then rules because the Labour candidate polled over 50% of the vote in the first round.
The first elected mayor of Lewisham was Steve Bullock, who was first elected to the council in 1982 and rose to become leader of the council before stepping down in 1998. He then returned in a 2001 by-election, and was elected as mayor in 2002 with a 71–29 lead over the Conservatives in the runoff. Bullock went on to win four terms of office, and he was knighted in 2007 for services to local government.
Sir Steve Bullock retired in 2018 after being drawn into a controversy over redevelopment plans for the area around Millwall FC’s New Den ground, which is within the borough. The Labour nomination went to Damian Egan, who had represented Lewisham Central ward since 2010 and was the council’s cabinet member for housing, and Egan was duly elected in 2018 in the first round with 55% of the vote against 13% for the Conservatives and 10% for the Greens. He won a second term in 2022 with an increased vote share, by 58–16 over the Greens.
Damian Egan is Irish by birth but grew up in the north-east suburbs of Bristol, where he started his political career at the age of 21 by being elected to Downend and Staple Hill parish council. He stood for Parliament twice before being elected to Lewisham council, as Labour candidate for Weston-super-Mare in 2005 and for Beckenham in 2010. Egan’s parliamentary ambitions were clearly not over, and in 2023 he applied for and won the Labour selection for the new parliamentary seat of Bristol North East — defeating the unpopular elected mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, for that nomination.
In January 2024 Chris Skidmore, the Conservative MP for Kingswood, resigned his seat in the House of Commons over the Conservatives’ policy on North Sea oil and gas. The forthcoming Bristol North East constituency will take the most Labour-voting parts of the Kingswood seat when it is abolished at the next general election, and Egan was the obvious choice to be adopted as the Labour candidate for last month’s Kingswood parliamentary by-election. He resigned as mayor of Lewisham when his nomination papers went in for that poll, and was duly elected as MP for Kingswood three weeks ago — gaining that seat from the Conservatives.
For the resulting mayoral by-election Labour have selected Damian Egan’s former deputy, who is already doing his old job on an acting basis. Brenda Dacres is the Lewisham cabinet member for housing development and planning. She has worked in IT since 1991 and was called to the Bar in 2006; in 2014 she was elected to Lewisham council, initially representing New Cross ward before transferring to Deptford ward in 2022 following boundary changes. Should Dacres be elected, her council seat would be vacated and this column would quickly return to Deptford ward — which was profiled here last November — for the third entry in a chain of by-elections.
The Green Party are defending second place and hoping for more with their candidate Mike Herron. He is an academic who has lived in the borough for 30 years.
Third here last time were the Conservatives, who polled 11.6%. There is a famous name in the list of former Conservative candidates for Mayor of Lewisham: the Home Secretary James Cleverly, who was born in the borough, stood here in 2010 when he was merely the London Assembly member for Bexley and Bromley. He also finished in third place. This time the Lewisham Conservatives have selected Siama Qadar; she is an entrepreneur who has previously worked in City finance and now runs a vegetarian fashion brand.
The Lib Dems finished fourth here in 2022 with 9.8%; they have readopted as their candidate Chris Maines, a former Lewisham councillor and former Bromley councillor who has previously stood for Mayor of Lewisham in 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022. Another returning candidate from last time is Maureen Martin of the Christian Peoples Alliance, who is standing an an anti-knife crime ticket and whose 2022 campaign (1.5%, sixth out of seven candidates) led to trouble for her personally: Martin was sacked from her job at a housing association after the management objected to her manifesto opinion that marriage should be between a man and woman, and she subsequently extracted an undisclosed but substantial sum from her former employers for unfair dismissal.
Like the 2022 election, the Lewisham mayoral ballot paper has a total of seven candidates. John Hamilton has been nominated by the Workers Party of Britain, George Galloway’s outfit, but he has a long electoral history here: Hamilton has stood for mayor of Lewisham on four previous occasions as the candidate of a local left-wing slate, Lewisham People Before Profit, with previous vote shares of between 5% and 9%. There is also an independent candidate, Nick Long, who is standing on a ticket of abolishing the mayoralty.
Parliamentary constituencies: Lewisham Deptford, Lewisham East, Lewisham West and Penge (part)
Parliamentary constituencies (from next general election): Lewisham East, Lewisham North, Lewisham West and East Dulwich (part)
May 2022 result Lab 39966 Grn 10987 C 7980 LD 6736 TUSC 1620 CPA 1009 Ind 549
May 2018 result Lab 39951 C 9790 Grn 7649 LD 6065 Ind 5480 Lewisham People Before Profit 4193 Democrats and Veterans Party 445
May 2014 result Lab 36659 C 8041 LD 7234 Grn 7224 Lewisham People Before Profit 6014 UKIP 5684 TUSC 1354
May 2010 result Lab 47861 LD 26445 C 16276 Grn 6560 Lewisham People Before Profit 5964 BNP 2904 EDP 1559; runoff Lab 52531 LD 36446
May 2006 result Lab 22155 LD 12398 C 10790 Grn 7168 Ind 4823 Lewisham Peoples Alliance 1366; runoff Lab 25129 LD 18889
May 2002 result Lab 20011 C 8004 LD 7276 Grn 5517 Local Education Action by Parents 3710; runoff Lab 24520 C 9855
Previous results in detail
May 2021 GLA result (includes postal voters)
Mayor: Lab 44420 C 17922 Grn 9851 LD 3394 Omilana 1440 Reclaim 1425 Women’s Equality 1264 Count Binface 1187 London Real Party 981 Rejoin EU 891 Let London Live 759 Animal Welfare 508 Obunge 445 UKIP 436 Heritage Party 392 Farah London 350 SDP 310 Burning Pink 261 Renew 223 Fosh 186
London Members: Lab 42116 Grn 15140 C 14177 LD 5255 Women’s Equality 3206 Rejoin EU 1590 Animal Welfare 1362 CPA 1201 UKIP 785 Reform UK 735 London Real Party 583 Let London Live 537 Heritage Party 502 TUSC 480 Comm 367 SDP 288 Londonpendence 224 Nat Lib 69
Upper Yeo and Taw
Mid Devon council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Stuart Penny.
Now for something completely different: an escape to the country. It’s certainly rather nice countryside here in the centre of Devon, as we come to a ward of eight parishes named after the two rivers which drain it. The Taw flows north from Dartmoor to reach the sea at Barnstaple, and it is one of the two rivers in the story of Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson. As a result of this, the railway line from Exeter to Barnstaple — much of which runs through the Taw valley — is marketed as the Tarka Line. The Lapford Yeo is a tributary of the Taw; it was once called the Nymet, a name which seems to come from a Celtic word for “shrine” and which may indicate that this area was seen as sacred.
Well, archaeologists have found the remains of a woodhenge to the west of the village of Bow, which lies on the Yeo about 15 miles north-west of Exeter. This is effectively a failed town. There are market charters from the 1250s which gave the local Norman squire, Henry de Tracey, the right to hold a weekly market and an annual three-day fair at Martinmas; to service this market the village of Bow grew up on the main road between Crediton and Okehampton. However, the market and fair have been defunct for over a century, and Bow never achieved greatness.
Instead the major settlement in this ward is Copplestone, which grew up in the Taw valley around an ancient granite pillar which still stands in the centre of the village. Copplestone is located on the main road between Exeter and Barnstaple and has a railway station on the Tarka Line. Morchard Road railway station is also within the boundary; Eggesford station (one of two passing places on the line) is just outside the ward boundary but serves the village of Eggesford, which is part of this ward.
This area is part of the Central Devon parliamentary seat, which was created in 2010 and has been represented since then by Conservative MP Mel Stride. He is a Cabinet minister, having served throughout the Sunak administration to date as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
Only a minority of the Mid Devon district is part of Stride’s Central Devon constituency. The district council is based in Tiverton, and the 2023 local elections here were seriously affected by the 2022 by-election in the Tiverton and Honiton parliamentary seat; a Conservative MP resigned after being caught watching pornography in the House of Commons, and the resulting by-election was gained by the Liberal Democrats.
At the time of that by-election Mid Devon council was hung and very messy, with a 2019 result of 18 Conservatives, 12 Lib Dems, 10 independents and 2 Greens resulting in a series of unstable independent-led administrations for the following four years. This merry-go-round came to a stop after the 2023 elections, when the Lib Dems followed up on their parliamentary by-election success by winning a massive majority on the council: 33 seats against 5 Conservatives, 3 Greens and just one independent.
The remaining Conservative councillors are concentrated in the Central Devon wards, and Upper Yeo and Taw was one of three wards where the Conservatives topped the poll. Only just, though; the Conservatives’ lead over the Lib Dems was 43–41, with the two parties winning one seat each. Upper Yeo and Taw is a new ward created by boundary changes last year; it takes in territory which was previously in Taw ward (the northern villages, including Eggesford), Upper Yeo ward (Bow) and Yeo ward (Copplestone). The Conservative-LD split is also reflected in the 2021 Devon county council results: Bow and Copplestone are part of the Crediton county division which is Lib Dem-held, while the northern villages are in the safe Conservative county division of Creedy, Taw and Mid Exe.
Top of the poll here in 2023 was the Conservatives’ Stuart Penny, who had first been elected in 2023 as one of the two councillors for Yeo ward. He had briefly served in the Mid Devon cabinet during his first term, with the housing and property services portfolio. Penny left the Conservative party last August and sat as an independent for a while, before submitting his resignation from the council in January for personal reasons.
Defending for the Conservatives is Peter Heal, who has appeared in this column before: he won a by-election in the former Taw ward for the Conservatives in May 2021, but finished as runner-up in this ward and lost his seat in 2023. The Lib Dem candidate is another former councillor for the area: Alex White represented Upper Yeo ward from 2019 to 2023, when his seat disappeared in boundary changes, and he briefly served as Mid Devon’s cabinet member for finance. Also standing are Labour’s Hayden Sharp, who lives within the ward in the wonderfully-named village of Zeal Monachorum, and the Greens’ Mark Scotland.
Parliamentary constituency: Central Devon
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Central Devon
Devon county council division: Creedy, Taw and Mid Exe (part: Brushford, Coldridge, Down St Mary, Eggesford and Zeal Monachorum parishes), Crediton (part: Bow, Clannaborough and Copplestone parishes)
Peter Heal (C)
Mark Scotland (Grn)
Hayden Sharp (Lab)
Alex White (LD)
May 2023 result C 591/524 LD 561/382 Lab 208
Previous results in detail
Aberkenfig
Bridgend council, Glamorgan; caused by the resignation of Plaid Cymru councillor Ellie Richards.
We now travel north from Devon over the Bristol Channel, and come to South Wales. Here we find Aberkenfig, a village just to the north of Bridgend located at the confluence of three watercourses: the Ogmore, the Llynfi and a stream called the Cynffig or Kenfig all meet here. The village has effectively merged with Sarn to the east and with Tondu to the north. Its proximity to the M4 motorway (which is the ward’s southern boundary) has encouraged some commuters to settle here: not just for Bridgend, but also for places further afield like Port Talbot, Cardiff and Swansea.
Aberkenfig lies within the community of Newcastle Higher. The Aberkenfig ward also takes in the community of Llangynwyd Lower to the north, whose main settlement is the village of Coytrahen in the Llynfi valley — a slightly curious arrangement, because all communication links between Aberkenfig and Coytrahen pass through Tondu which is in a different ward. The northern boundary of the ward passes through the middle of the Bridgend Paper Mill, which is next to the site of the former coal-fired Llynfi power station; rather cleaner energy from this ward is now exported from the Cwm Risca wind farm. Also here is the farm of Cefn Ydfa, which in the eighteenth century was home to a maid called Ann Maddocks; according to legend, she was forced to marry the wealthy Anthony Maddocks against her wishes, and she died in 1727 pining for her true love Wil Hopcyn.
The local authority here is Bridgend council, which currently has a small Labour majority. In the 2022 local elections Labour won 27 seats against 21 independents, 2 for Plaid Cymru and a single Conservative — the Tories lost 12 of their 13 council seats at the last election. One of the Labour councillors for Bridgend Central resigned immediately to take up a well-paid job with the council, and the resulting by-election was won by an independent — reducing the Labour council majority to one seat.
Aberkenfig ward is currently part of the Ogmore constituency, which covers the valleys to the north of the town. It has been represented continuously since its 1918 creation by Labour. The current MS for the seat is Huw Irranca-Davies, who was elected as the MP for Ogmore in a 2002 by-election but resigned his Westminster seat in 2016 to successfully seek election to the Senedd. The resulting Westminster by-election, held simultaneously with the 2016 Senedd election, was won by Chris Elmore.
Elmore’s Westminster seat will disappear at the next general election, at which Aberkenfig will transfer into the Bridgend constituency. This was a Conservative gain at the 2019 general election for Jamie Wallis, who has been a somewhat controversial figure during his time in office. He came out as transgender in 2022 (“or to be more accurate, I want to be”, to quote from his statement at the time) and has been described as the first openly-trans MP. He continues to use male pronouns as far as I am aware. Wallis also hit the headlines that year over a court appearance, which followed an arrest in 2021 after he crashed his car into a lamppost and then fled the scene. Cardiff magistrates found him guilty of failing to stop and report an accident and leaving his car in a dangerous position; the district judge said he “didn’t find the defendant credible in the evidence he gave”, and Wallis was fined £2,500 and banned from driving for six months. Jamie Wallis will stand down at the next general election, a decision which deprives us of an MP versus MP contest against Labour’s Chris Elmore who is seeking re-election in the Bridgend constituency.
Rallings and Thrasher have projected that the Conservative majority in the redrawn Bridgend has notionally increased from 1,157 to 2,553 votes, so a win for Elmore will be counted as a Labour gain even though he is an incumbent. This notional calculation seems rather counter-intuitive given the demographic nature of the areas moved in and out of the Bridgend seat; however, the commuter villages north of Bridgend are places where Labour has long underperformed in local elections. Aberkenfig ward, for example, has never returned a Labour candidate to Bridgend council. It was held by an independent councillor for eighteen years from 1999, then won by Plaid Cymru in 2017 and 2022. Plaid enjoyed a 54–29 lead here over Labour two years ago.
Plaid councillor Ellie Richards was just 23 at the time of her election, when he she was one of just two Plaid Cymru Bridgend councillors alongside Llangynwyd ward councillor Malcolm James. They are grandfather and granddaughter. Unfortunately, Richards has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and is suffering targeted harassment. She submitted her resignation from the council in January to concentrate on her health, both mental and physical.
The resulting by-election has a candidate list which is curiously short. Plaid Cymru are not defending their seat, meaning that they have lost group status on Bridgend council and this by-election is a free-for-all for an open seat. Neither is there a Conservative candidate; the Tories have never previously contested this ward in local elections, but it is part of a marginal Westminster seat which they will be looking to defend very soon. Instead we have a straight fight for the vacant belt between Labour’s Gary Haines, who has lived in Aberkenfig for over fifty years and was a community councillor here many years ago; and between independent Luke Richards, a former medical delivery driver and former community councillor in Tondu who is turning his life around after being homeless for much of the last two years. Richards has been endorsed by the main opposition group on the council, the Bridgend County Independents.
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Ogmore
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Bridgend
Gary Haines (Lab)
Luke Richards (Ind)
May 2022 result PC 426 Lab 230 Ind 139
Previous results in detail
Hillhead
Glasgow council, Scotland; caused by the death of Labour councillor Hanzala Malik.
We finish for the week in the very trendy West End of Glasgow. And when I say very trendy, that’s an understatement. The first time your columnist visited the Great Western Road I thought I’d died and gone to hipster heaven.
The Hillhead ward runs from the Woodlands area on the edge of Glasgow city centre, just outside the M8 motorway, up the Great Western and Maryhill Roads. The ward’s western boundary is the Byres Road, where we find Hillhead itself: this is an area of upmarket housing to the west of the River Kelvin, which was once the western boundary of Glasgow city. Hillhead was an independent burgh until 1891.
One of the reasons for all this youthful trendiness quickly becomes apparent from a walk through Hillhead. This brings you to the University of Glasgow, the fourth-oldest university in the Anglosphere (after Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews), which was founded by a papal bull in 1451. Glasgow has educated three Prime Ministers (Viscount Melbourne, Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Andrew Bonar Law), three First Ministers (Donald Dewar, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf) and a number of Nobel laureates. William Thomson, the first scientist to make it to the House of Lords, was a Glasgow University professor for 53 years; he became the first Lord Kelvin in 1892, taking his title from the nearby river, and the SI unit of temperature — the kelvin — was named in his honour.
The Glasgow University campus also takes in the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, which originated as the private collection of the anatomist and physician William Hunter before being donated to the university on his death in 1783. The gallery includes the Mackintosh House, a recreation of the former house at 78 Southpark Avenue which once belonged to Charles Rennie and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and which was demolished to make way for the university’s expansion. If you’re not a fan of interior design, then a visit to the Mackintosh House might well change your mind: it simultaneously looks both like a work of art and like somewhere you might want to live.
A quick walk over the river brings us to the green open spaces of Kelvingrove Park and to some more art. The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is run by the council from a grand building in the park, and its excellent collection includes one of the UK’s great municipal artworks. In 1952 Glasgow council bought the copyright to Salvador Dalí’s painting Christ of St John of the Cross for £8,200, an investment which has proven to be a nice little earner over the years. (Fun fact: the model for this painting was Gene Kelly’s stunt double in Singin’ in the Rain.)
We can’t leave the Kelvingrove Art Gallery without giving you some music. This building is not just about art and artifacts: the gallery also has a seriously large and impressive pipe organ overlooking its main hall, and organ recitals are given on weekdays and Saturdays at 1pm and on Sundays at 3pm. Today’s organist is scheduled to be Gordon Cree, of Renfield St Stephen’s Church in Glasgow. The organists’ programmes here can be a bit more varied than the sort of fare you might get in a religious building.
I should also mention the pipe tune “The Rose of Kelvingrove”, which my military band will play in a concert if you ask us nicely enough.
The Hillhead ward is linked together by the Glasgow Subway, with its tiny underground narrow-gauge trains connecting Hillhead ward with the city centre and the south of the river. Hillhead, Kelvinbridge and St George’s Cross subway stations all lie within the ward boundary.
St George’s Cross is the main subway station serving the Woodlands area just to the north-west of the city centre. In the days when Scottish council elections used single-member wards the councillor for Woodlands ward was Hanzala Malik, who was a local boy born to a Pakistani father and Scottish mother. He enjoyed large majorities from his first election in 1995, as nearly all Glasgow Labour candidates did in those days.
In 2007 Malik’s ward was swallowed up into a larger Hillhead ward, which then returned four councillors by proportional representation. Its four seats split four ways at the inaugural election, with one each going to Labour, the SNP, the Green Party and the Lib Dems. The SNP councillor died in 2011 and the party narrowly held the resulting by-election.
By this point Hanzala Malik had been elected to greater things. He had been placed at the top of the Labour Party list for the Glasgow region at the 2011 Holyrood election, in what was thought to be an unwinnable position given that Labour had traditionally dominated the constituencies in Glasgow. Slightly arrogantly, Scottish Labour thought that this would continue and decided that their Glasgow MSPs, including a number of the party’s frontbench team, would seek re-election only as constituency candidates — which backfired badly when the Labour vote collapsed across Scotland in 2011 and the SNP won five of Glasgow’s constituencies, including the Glasgow Kelvin seat which covers Hillhead ward. Across the city Labour polled 35% of the list vote, entitling them to seven out of 16 MSPs; because the party had only won four constituencies, Hanzala Malik found himself propelled into the Scottish Parliament for the 2011–16 term. He served during that time as deputy convenor of the Parliament’s European and external relations committee.
As a result, Hanzala Malik stood down from Glasgow council in 2012. He was not re-elected to Holyrood in 2016, and returned to the council chamber the following year as the Labour councillor for a rather different Hillhead ward to the one he had left. The boundaries had significantly changed, removing Hyndland and adding North Kelvinside and the seriously upmarket Park District around Kelvingrove Park, and Hillhead ward now had three councillors rather than four. On these boundaries those three seats have split one each to the Greens, the SNP and Labour at both the 2017 and 2022 Glasgow elections.
Shares of the vote in Hillhead ward two years ago were 36% for the Scottish Green Party, 29% for the Scottish National Party and 22% for Malik, who started 200 votes short of the 25% quota and easily made the shortfall up from Green transfers. This was the only Scottish ward where the Greens topped the poll in 2022. Overall, the 2022 Glasgow elections returned 37 Scottish National Party councillors, 36 for Labour, 10 for the Greens and 2 Conservatives; the SNP run the city as a minority, with Green support.
Hillhead used to be a famous constituency name in the days when Glasgow’s Westminster seats had names rather than compass points. The Hillhead constituency had just three MPs in the 49 years before its abolition in 1997: Tam Galbraith of the Conservatives represented the seat from a 1948 by-election until his death in 1982, the resulting by-election was a famous victory for Roy Jenkins of the SDP, and Jenkins lost his seat in 1987 to a young thirtysomething Labour candidate called George Galloway who was setting out on a long and winding Parliamentary career that brought him to Rochdale last week. (Presumably he’s clocked by now that Rochdale isn’t quite as trendy as the West End of Glasgow.) Galloway continued to represent Hillhead and its successor Glasgow Kelvin until that Westminster seat was abolished in 2005.
Glasgow Kelvin still exists for Holywood elections, where it has voted SNP since 2011. In 2021 the Scottish Greens contested it, something which they rarely do in Holyrood elections, and the party’s co-leader Patrick Harvie finished second with 25% of the vote. He lost to new SNP candidate Kaukab Stewart, who recently became the first female non-white Scottish Minister with her appointment as minister for culture, Europe and international development.
The next Westminster boundary changes will unite Hillhead ward within the Glasgow North constituency, which has been held since 2015 by Patrick Grady of the SNP. He served for several years as the party’s chief whip at Westminster, but stood down from that role in 2021 following a complaint of sexual misconduct, and lost the party whip for a time in 2022 before being readmitted. Glasgow loses a seat in the boundary changes, and the SNP have ensured that Grady will be the one who loses out even though it’s not his seat which is abolished. The party’s candidate in the next Westminster election will be Alison Thewliss, the SNP’s home affairs spokesman in the Commons, who currently represents the Park District as part of the doomed Glasgow Central seat.
Hanzala Malik’s death in December sets up a tricky by-election defence for Labour. They will need to improve on their 2022 vote share of 22% just to make the final two, and even that’s no guarantee of winning. Allan Faulds of Ballot Box Scotland has crunched the numbers and reckons that a two-candidate runoff in 2022 would have been Green versus SNP, with the Greens taking it by 3,386 votes to 2,312 after transfers, or 59–41; a Green versus Labour runoff would have seen a wider Green margin. So the likelihood is that we will see a change of council composition here.
Defending for Labour and top of the ballot paper is Ruth Hall, who contested Govan ward over the river in 2022. The Greens have selected Seonad Hoy, a Glasgow University alumna who works in social housing. Standing for the SNP — who are still looking for their first election win of any kind in the Humza Yousaf era — is Malcolm McConnell, who commutes into the area for work from his home in North Lanarkshire; he’s not alone in that, because three of the seven candidates give addresses outwith the city. Also standing are Faten Hameed, who was the Labour candidate for Glasgow Central at the 2017 and 2019 Westminster election but now has the Conservative nomination, Daniel O’Malley for the Liberal Democrats, Alistair McConachie for his own far-right party which has the only slightly misleading name “Independent Green Voice”, and independent candidate Ryan McGinley.
Westminster constituency: Glasgow North (most areas), Glasgow Central (Park District and Kelvingrove Art Gallery)
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Glasgow North
Holyrood constituency: Glasgow Kelvin
Ruth Hall (Lab)
Faten Hameed (C)
Seonad Hoy (Grn)
Alistair McConachie (Ind Grn Voice)
Malcolm McConnell (SNP)
Ryan McGinley (Ind)
Daniel O’Malley (LD)
May 2022 first preferences Grn 2507 SNP 1984 Lab 1532 C 464 LD 377 Freedom Alliance 61
May 2017 first preferences SNP 2491 Grn 1718 Lab 1457 C 680 LD 298 Ind 34 Libertarian 26
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
