Previewing the local by-elections of 8th December 2022
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
There are eight polls taking place on 8th December 2022, so let’s dive straight in as we start in the West Country:
Landkey
North Devon council; caused by the resignation of former Conservative councillor David Luggar.
This week the focus of Andrew’s Previews is mainly on independent councillors. There were originally eleven seats up for election today, of which three are in the City of London which is a non-partisan body, and six others were previously held by independent councillors. There is one defence for Labour and two for the Conservatives. You’ll note that those figures add up to twelve rather than eleven: that’s because one of the two previous Conservative councillors, North Devon councillor David Luggar, had left the party during his term to become independent. We elect councillors and not parties, and councillors can and sometimes do change their party affiliation while they are in office.
Luggar had served since 2007 as one of the two councillors for what was then called Landkey, Swimbridge and Taw ward. This is a rural area immediately to the south-east of Barnstaple, with Landkey and Swimbridge being close to the North Devon Link Road which connects Barnstaple to Tiverton and the motorway network.
Landkey is a village of Celtic origin: it has a Cornish name referring to the church of St Kea, a Celtic saint of the 5th century. Kea is a very obscure figure, and Landkey’s church has since been rededicated to St Paul. Swimbridge is notable as the birthplace of the Jack Russell terrier; the original John Russell, after whom the breed is named, was the vicar of Swimbridge during the nineteenth century, and he was a founding member of the Kennel Club.
Boundary changes for the 2019 election cut the western boundary of this ward back to the River Taw and simplified the ward name to Landkey, even though Swimbridge and Bishop’s Tawton are still part of the area. Bishop’s Tawton lies in the Taw valley, south of Barnstaple on the main road towards Exeter. The village is overlooked by Codden Hill, which has a prominent sculpture on its summit; this is a permanent memorial to Caroline Thorpe, the first wife of the former Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe. Jeremy and Caroline had been married for just two years when she was killed in a car crash in 1970.
Thorpe represented this area, as part of the North Devon constituency, in the Liberal interest for almost 20 years, and that seat was also held by the Liberal Democrats from 1992 to 2015 before going to the Conservatives. During this period the Lib Dems didn’t always have it their own way on North Devon council, which has the same boundaries as the constituency: North Devon returned a Conservative majority at the 2007 local elections, and the council has been hung since 2011.
The May 2019 North Devon elections saw the Liberal Democrats win 21 of the 42 seats on the council. However, the poll in Chittlehampton ward, just to the south of here, had to be postponed until June after the outgoing independent councillor Walter White died during the election campaign. With an open seat the Lib Dems had an opportunity for majority control if they could win the postponed poll, but it didn’t happen: Chittlehampton voted Conservative in June 2019 (Andrew’s Previews 2019, page 173). Nonetheless, the Liberal Democrats are able to get their programme through via the casting vote of Julie Hunt, the council chair. The opposition councillors elected in 2019 were 12 Conservatives, 7 independents and 2 Greens.
Landkey ward had already voted Conservative the previous month although rather narrowly so, with Luggar and his running-mate Glyn Lane polling 42% of the vote against 35% for the Lib Dems and 15% for the Green Party. Both Lane and Luggar subsequently quit the Conservatives, and Lane was an independent candidate for the local Devon county council division (Chulmleigh and Landkey) in May 2021. He finished second as the Conservatives easily held that seat. Lane remains on the council, sitting in the “North Devon Independent” group with another ex-Conservative defector.
Following Luggar’s resignation no independent candidate has come forward, so there will be a change to council composition here. The Conservatives will want their marginal seat back and they have selected David Hoare, who is a staffer for the local Conservative MP Selaine Saxby. With majority control of North Devon council up for grabs the Lib Dem candidate is again Victoria Nel, who was runner-up here in May 2019 and finished third in the Chittlehampton postponed poll a month later; Nel, who lives in Landkey, is a qualified solicitor and Barnstaple town councillor. Also returning is the Green candidate Mark Haworth-Booth, who has stood here at every local election since 2011. Haworth-Booth is apparently notable enough for Wikipedia: before retiring to Devon he was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for 34 years, and he was appointed OBE in 2015 for services to museums. Nicholas Agnew completes the ballot paper for Labour.
Parliamentary constituency: North Devon
Devon county council division: Chumleigh and Landkey
ONS Travel to Work Area: Barnstaple
Postcode districts: EX32, EX37
Nicholas Agnew (Lab)
Mark Haworth-Booth (Grn)
David Hoare (C)
Victoria Nel (LD)
May 2019 result C 558/533 LD 475/453 Grn 208/188 Lab 103
Previous results in detail
Wish
Brighton and Hove council, East Sussex; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Garry Peltzer Dunn.
The other Conservative defence this week is a rather different prospect. We exchange rural Devon for an urban landscape in Sussex, houses on a grid pattern of streets running down to the sea. It’s a time for Christmas wishes to be made, so let’s answer them by travelling to Wish ward.
Wish ward takes in the eastern part of Portslade-by-Sea and the western part of Aldrington. This area was filled with houses decades ago thanks to its good rail links to Brighton, having previously been rather abandoned; the coastline here has changed over the centuries, and the River Adur used to flow into the sea here whereas now its mouth is several miles to the west. Even now, the coastline of Wish ward is mostly cut off by water: the eastern end of Shoreham Harbour, and the Hove Lagoon.
We can get some idea of the area’s pre-housing use from the fact that Portslade-by-Sea, when it became an urban district in 1896, took over an area previously known as “Copperas Gap”. In other words, it was a place where the main industry was turning iron pyrite (or fool’s gold) from the local rocks into copperas.
Despite the name, copperas has no copper in it; it’s an iron compound known to chemists as iron(II) sulphate or ferrous sulphate. The main users of copperas were traditionally the textile industry, where it’s in demand as a dye fixative; it’s also prescribed by doctors to treat iron deficiency. Because of its green colour when dissolved in water, copperas was also known in antiquity by the name of green vitriol.
Green vitriol is also a feature of this area’s politics, because the local authority here is the city of Brighton and Hove. This has been a hung council since 2003 and has settled down into a pattern where the council is divided between large Labour, Conservative and Green Party groups, none of which are strong enough to reach a majority. The standard arrangement here over the last two decades is that the largest party on the council forms a minority administration, which is how Brighton and Hove became the first council in the UK to be run entirely by the Green Party from 2011 to 2015.
The Greens also polled the most votes across the city in the 2019 Brighton and Hove elections, but Labour won the most seats. In the final reckoning there were 20 Labour councillors, 19 Greens, 14 Conservatives and an independent. The Labour group subsequently split leaving the Greens as the largest party; accordingly another Green minority administration took over the city in 2020.
During this century Wish ward has been a Conservative versus Labour battleground with the Conservatives generally having the edge: in the five elections since 2003 Labour have won only one seat, in 2011 when the ward’s two seats were split. Shares of the vote here in May 2019 were 37% for the Conservatives, 31% for Labour and 23% for the Green Party.
The ward’s other Conservative councillor, Robert Nemeth, was their candidate in the local parliamentary seat of Hove Actually in December 2019; he got a small swing in his favour, but Labour still enjoyed a majority of over 30 points. The Labour MP here since 2015 has been Peter Kyle, who is currently in the Shadow Cabinet as shadow Northern Ireland secretary. The days when Hove was a safe Conservative parliamentary seat are long, long gone.
One of the last local links with that golden age of Hove Conservatism has now been broken with the passing of Garry Peltzer Dunn in September at the age of 79. Peltzer Dunn had been heavily involved in local politics for nearly his entire career. He was one of the few remaining councillors to have served before the reorganisation of 1974, having got onto the local government ladder by being elected to Hove borough council in 1971. Peltzer Dunn twice served as leader of Hove council, and following the merger of Hove with Brighton in the 1990s he was mayor of Brighton and Hove in 2008–09. He will be a hard act to follow.
Trying to follow this for the Conservatives in Wish ward is their defending candidate Peter Revell, whom the local party website succinctly describes with the three words “Deputy Chairman Political”. The local press have more detail: Revell is a retired solicitor, who has previous local government experience as an Essex county councillor in the 1990s. Labour have selected Bella Sankey, a human rights campaigner who is a director of a charity supporting people held in immigration detention. Standing for the Greens is Ollie Sykes, who was their parliamentary candidate for Hove in December 2019; Sykes is seeking to return to Brighton and Hove council after standing down in May 2019. Also on the ballot paper are Stewart Stone for the Lib Dems and a former national party leader: that’s the UK Independence Party candidate Patricia Mountain, who had her 15 minutes of fame as interim leader of UKIP in 2019–20 and led that party’s 2019 general election campaign.
Parliamentary constituency: Hove
ONS Travel to Work Area: Brighton
Postcode districts: BN3, BN41, BN42
Patricia Mountain (UKIP)
Peter Revell (C)
Bella Sankey (Lab)
Stewart Stone (LD)
Ollie Sykes (Grn)
May 2019 result C 1531/1421 Lab 1275/1107 Grn 973/521 LD 262 UKIP 121
May 2015 result C 2102/2054 Lab 1856/1764 Grn 819/457 LD 308 UKIP 300/219 Ind 183/108
May 2011 result Lab 1348/1144 C 1310/1183 Grn 540/299 Ind 301/244 LD 170/119 UKIP 100
May 2007 result C 1596/1523 Lab 814/801 Grn 458/271 LD 269/250 Protest Vote 229
May 2003 result C 1616/1522 Lab 1368/1242 LD 454/296 Grn 324/215
Previous results in detail
Peninsula
Medway council, Kent; caused by the death of independent councillor Mick Pendergast.
(Just an aside here before we start. PENINSULA (as in the name of this ward) is a noun. PENINSULAR (as in Peninsular War) is an adjective. It really annoys me when I see PENINSULAR used as a noun.)
We stay on the coast of south-east England, but the Peninsula ward of Medway is a very different place to urban Hove. This is the desolate landscape of the Kentish marshes, where the wetlands merge imperceptibly into the Thames estuary on the north side and the Medway estuary on the south side. Much of this remains little-visited by humans, and a large section of this ward’s land area is in the hands of the RSPB as a sanctuary for wetland birds. The village of High Halstow, next to the RSPB reserve, advertises itself as the “Home of the Heron”. Birds aren’t the only flying things here: the marshes generate lots of mosquitoes, and this area was the site of Britain’s last recorded malaria outbreak in 1918.
The lack of development here is interesting, given that this rural area has been under the greedy eyes of proponents for other flying things for a very long time. As early as the 1940s there were proposals to develop the south coast of the Thames estuary here as an airport for London, and in the early 20th century proposals for new airports at Cliffe (just outside this ward) and on the Isle of Grain (a version of the so-called “Boris Island”) were seriously considered before being rejected by government.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t industry here. Oh no. The so-called Isle of Grain, at the end of the peninsula, was home to a large oil refinery until the 1980s; the refinery site was subsequently used by a factory making lining segments for the Channel Tunnel, and then redeveloped as London Thamesport which has become one of the UK’s largest terminals for container ships.
Containers may now be the Peninsula’s largest export, but previously this was a major source of the UK’s energy. Well into the 2010s Grain Power Station, next to the refinery, burnt oil while Kingsnorth, further up the Medway estuary, burnt coal to supply electricity to the National Grid. Kingsnorth has now gone; Grain has however been redeveloped as a gas-fired plant, joining the 1990s Medway power station on the Isle of Grain.
The village of Grain was once known as St James, and a number of villages in this ward also have religious names: Allhallows on the Thames bank, St Mary Hoo and Hoo St Werburgh. The latter is the main population centre in this ward, with its three polling stations serving over 8,000 electors. We saw the broken remains of St Werburgh’s shrine in Chester Cathedral last week; she was a Mercian princess of the late 7th century, and was a nun for most of her life. The village named after her is not that far from the Medway town of Strood, which may account for its strong population growth in recent years.
This ward is part of the Rochester and Strood parliamentary seat, and politics in the area has never been quite the same since the defection of the seat’s Conservative MP Mark Reckless to UKIP and, in particular, his decision to successfully seek re-election in a November 2014 by-election under his new political colours. He wasn’t the only one. Chris Irvine had previously been one of the three Conservative councillors for Peninsula ward, which had until then been a safe Conservative seat; he defected to UKIP with Reckless, and he also sought re-election in a by-election on the same day as the Rochester and Strood parliamentary by-election. Like Reckless, he won.
At the 2015 Medway council elections six months later Irvine left this ward to stand in Rochester East, unsuccessfully. However, UKIP built on their by-election performance to gain a second seat from the Conservatives in Peninsula ward, which split its three seats: two went to UKIP, the Conservatives held one.
The newly-elected UKIP councillors were Roy Freshwater and Mick Pendergast. Pendergast was the landlord of the Nags Head in Lower Stoke, one of the smaller villages within this ward, and he successfully campaigned to stop the village’s primary school being merged with the primary school for Allhallows.
Mick Pendergast left UKIP during his first term, and he sought re-election as an independent candidate in 2019. Top of the poll that year was another independent, Ron Sands, who won in Peninsula ward at the fourth attempt: he had previously contested the ward for the English Democrats in 2011, for the Conservatives in the 2014 by-election and as an independent in 2015. Long-serving Conservative councillor Phil Filmer was re-elected in second place, and Mick Pendergast was re-elected in third and final place with a majority of 123 votes over his former UKIP colleague Roy Freshwater. Shares of the vote are a little difficult to calculate here given the pattern of candidates, but the Local Elections Archive Project quotes 32% for independent candidates, 26% for the Conservatives, 22% for UKIP and 10% each for Labour and the Greens.
Medway council is independent of Kent county council, so there have been no local elections here since May 2019. The Rochester and Stood parliamentary seat was recovered for the Conservatives by Kelly Tolhurst at the 2015 general election. Tolhurst has had a number of junior government roles in the seven years since, including replacing the disgraced Chris Pincher as deputy chief whip in July 2022; however, there is currently no place for her in the Sunak government.
This by-election is to replace independent councillor Mick Pendergast, who passed away in October at the early age of 63. No fewer than three independent candidates have come forward to replace him. One of those independents, Chris Spalding, also stood here in 2019 and can be taken as the continuity candidate: he had formed the “Medway People’s Voice” party with Pendergast in January 2019, but they never filed the paperwork with the Electoral Commission to stand under that description. Of the other independent candidates, George Crozer is the chairman of High Halstow parish council while Sharon Jackson, who lives in Hoo, is an adoptive mum of five children with special educational needs. The Conservatives have reselected Harold Ogunfemi, who stood here in 2019; he is an Isle of Grain parish councillor. The Labour candidate is David Hodges, who lives in Strood and is a business studies and economics teacher. Julian Sutton, the Green candidate, describes himself as a small business owner and expert adviser to the building industry. Completing a ballot paper of seven candidates is the ward’s first Lib Dem candidate since the 2014 by-election, Ben Rist. This column likes to highlight pubs which do their bit for democracy by serving as polling stations, so a shoutout is due to the Fenn Bell Inn in St Mary Hoo.
Parliamentary constituency: Rochester and Strood
ONS Travel to Work Area: Medway
Postcode district: ME3
George Crozer (Ind)
David Hodges (Lab)
Sharon Jackson (Ind)
Harold Ogunfemi (C)
Ben Rist (LD)
Chris Spalding (Ind)
Julian Sutton (Grn)
May 2019 result Ind 1413/1125/734/512 C 1157/834/792 UKIP 1002 Lab 449/399/298 Grn 446/442/371
May 2015 result UKIP 2866/2610/2310 C 2722/2461/2440 Lab 1200/1091/931 Ind 691 TUSC 147
November 2014 by-election UKIP 2850 C 1965 Lab 716 Grn 314 LD 60
May 2011 result C 2557/2307/2125 Lab 975/898/879 EDP 535/476 Grn 351 LD 298/282
May 2007 result C 2396/2054/2036 Ind 1376 Lab 1376/561/511 UKIP 427 LD 251/122/94
May 2003 result C 2640/2503/2451 Lab 776/658/621 LD 195/182/169 UKIP 159
Previous results in detail
Aldgate;
Farringdon Without; and
Queenhithe
City of London Corporation; caused respectively by the resignations of Aldermen Susan Langley, Greg Jones and Alistair King.
We now travel to the ancient City of London for three elections to the City’s bench of senior councillors, the Court of Aldermen. Aldermen of the City are technically elected for life, but they are expected to seek re-election at least every six years. We have here three Aldermen who have done just that.
Sitting Aldermen who seek re-election aren’t often challenged for their seats, and indeed two of this week’s Aldermanic elections were unopposed. Alistair King, a solicitor who lives in a Thames-side flat in his Queenhithe ward, which is possibly the UK’s smallest electoral unit by area, is one of the Sheriffs of the City for 2022–23. The City elects two Alderman each year as Sheriffs, and you have to serve a year as Sheriff in order to become Lord Mayor. King was first elected to the Aldermanic bench in November 2016 by a margin of 122 votes to 3, and nobody has challenged him this time.
Gregory Jones, who is a KC at the Temple, is also unchallenged as Alderman for the ward of Farringdon Without on the western edge of the City, which he has served as Alderman since February 2017. Farringdon Without is the City’s largest ward, stretching from the Temple to Smithfield Market and electing ten of the 100 Common Councilmen. Since the 2017 City elections the localist slate of “Temple and Farringdon Together” has held all ten seats in the Court of Common Council, and Jones has been re-elected as Alderman with the nomination of that localist slate. King and Jones were formally declared re-elected yesterday at their respective Wardmotes, the eve-of-poll public meetings which officially kick off the City’s electoral process. This column sends its congratulations to them.
That leaves one contested election, where two other candidates are contesting the re-election of sitting Alderman Susan Langley in Aldgate. She was first elected in July 2018 (Andrew’s Previews 2018, page 246), defeating the previous Alderman Peter Hewitt by 174 votes to 54. Accordingly Langley is seeking re-election rather early. One wonders if she’s angling for high City office in the near future and the election timetable might interfere with that: Langley is apparently in line to be a Sheriff next year, and I suppose it’s possible that she might be considered for Lord Mayor not too long after that. The Lord Mayoralty has been going for 833 years but in that time only two women have served in the job, Dame Mary Donaldson (later Baroness Donaldson of Lymington) in 1983–84 and Dame Fiona Woolf in 2013–14.
The name of Aldgate refers to one of the gates in the old London Wall, which led onto the old Roman road towards Colchester. Queen Matilda of Scotland, wife of Henry I, founded an Augustinian priory here, Holy Trinity Aldgate; Geoffrey Chaucer had an apartment above the gate itself; and the ward was a centre of historical London’s Jewish population, with the capital’s first synagogue opening in 1698 on Bevis Marks. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which was the UK’s oldest manufacturing company until its 2017 closure, started life in Aldgate ward in 1420.
This being the City, it’s business voters that will elect the new Alderman. In Aldgate ward insurance is the main business in town. Within the ward boundaries lie the “Gherkin” at 30 St Mary Axe, once named after Swiss Re and still home to their UK offices; the Gherkin occupies the site formerly occupied by the old Baltic Exchange building which was destroyed in an IRA bombing in 1992. Despite that the Baltic Exchange is still located on St Mary Axe, while at the other end of the ward is 71 Fenchurch Street, home to the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping.
Susan Langley is described on the City Corporation’s website as “the Non-Executive Chairman for Gallagher UK, the Senior Independent Director for UKAR (Northern Rock Asset Management & Bradford and Bingley), the Lead Non-Executive Director for the Home Office and a Board Trustee for Macmillan Cancer”. In 2015 she was appointed OBE for services to women in business. She is challenged by two candidates. Elizabeth Lange gives an address in Upminster at the far end of the District Line and appears to be fighting her first City election. Shai Umradia, who commutes from Stanmore in north-west London, has served since March as one of the five Common Councilmen for Aldgate ward and is president of the City Livery Club and the Aldgate Ward Club.
Aldgate
Parliamentary constituency: Cities of London and Westminster
London Assembly constituency: City and East
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: E1, EC3A, EC3M, EC3N
Elizabeth Lange (Ind)
Susan Langley (Ind)
Shai Umradia (Ind)
Highwoods
Colchester council, Essex; a double by-election caused by the resignations of independent councillors Beverley and Gerard Oxford.
We now travel east along the Roman Road from Aldgate to reach one of the newest parts of England’s self-proclaimed oldest city. The Highwoods ward covers a lot of rather new housing on the northern edge of Colchester, running along the main road towards Ipswich and centred on the Gilberd School. This secondary school was named after William Gilberd (or Gilbert), a sixteenth-century physicist who did a lot of important early work on magnetism.
Famous former pupils of the Gilberd include the former Norfolk county councillor and Blur drummer Dave Rowntree and the portrait painter Richard Stone. You’ve probably seen some of Stone’s work recently: specifically, his 1992 portrait of Elizabeth II, which was commissioned by Colchester council to mark the 800th anniversary of the royal charter granted to the town by King Richard the Lionheart. It’s the picture the BBC chose for their death announcement three months ago.
The Gilberd School is a lot older than the housing around it, with much of this ward’s housing dating from the 1980s, the 1990s or the 21st century. We can see this in the age profile of the 2011 census return for Highwoods ward, which has large peaks in the under-16 and 30–44 age groups: this is a ward of young families in new-build homes.
One family who have dominated the area’s politics since before a lot of the houses here were built is the Oxfords. Gerard Oxford was elected in 2000 as a councillor for the Mile End ward of Colchester, which covered this area until Highwoods became a ward of its own in 2002. In that year he was joined on the council by his wife Beverley. Originally they were Liberal Democrat councillors, but later in 2002 the Oxfords left that party and went independent. In 2007 they were joined on the council by their son Phil, and for the following 15 years Highwoods ward was represented by a full slate of Oxfords.
The Oxfords often found themselves holding the balance of power on Colchester council, which has been hung since 1998 apart from a single year of Conservative majority control in 2007–08. The Conservatives have been the largest party on the council since 2015, but for much of that period they were shut out of power by a coalition arrangement between the Lib Dems, Labour and the Oxfords. In 2021, however, the Oxfords changed horses and formed a coalition with the Conservatives which controlled a bare majority on the council: 26 of the 51 seats.
At other levels of government this area has split representation. Highwoods ward is part of the Colchester parliamentary seat, which has been held by the Conservatives since 2015; this is a seat which has only voted Labour once, in 1945, and was Lib Dem-held from 1997 to 2015, but will likely be on Labour’s target list for the next general election. The ward is represented by the Lib Dems on Essex county council, as part of the Mile End and Highwoods division.
2022 marks the end of the era of Oxford dominance of Highwoods’ local elections. Phil Oxford stood down at this year’s local elections after fifteen years in post. His open seat surprisingly went to Labour, who had never previously finished higher than third in this ward: shares of the vote were 41% for Labour, 38% for the Conservatives and 21% for the Lib Dems. The retirement of Phil Oxford and four seat losses for the Conservatives in May ended the Conservative-Oxford coalition: the composition of the council now stands at 19 Conservatives, 14 Lib Dems, 13 Labour, 2 Greens, 1 ex-Green independent and 2 Oxfords. A traffic-light coalition led by the Lib Dems is now running England’s oldest city.
Gerard and Beverley Oxford subsequently resigned from the council in October in a dispute with the council over disability access to the town hall. Gerard is a wheelchair user; he is concerned about the state of the town hall’s passenger lift, and accused the council of failing to move meetings to accommodate his disability. In a statement the council disputed the latter allegation, and stressed that the lift in question is working and has been certified as safe.
Whatever the truth of the matter, we now have a free-for-all for two open seats on Colchester council. There are no new Oxfords or other independent candidates. Labour, who will become the largest party in the ruling coalition if they win both seats here, have secured the top two slots on the ballot for their candidates Pauline Bacon and Catherine Bickersteth; Bacon describes herself on Twitter as a UNISON equality activist, while Bickersteth is a former school headteacher who contested the last Colchester by-election in Lexden and Braiswick ward, in July. Standing on the Conservative slate are David Linghorn-Baker and Richard Martin, both of whom were unsuccessful candidates for Colchester council in other wards in May. The Lib Dem slate consists of Alison Jay and Chantelle-Louise Whyborn; Jay is the chair of the community council for Myland parish, which covers part of this ward, while Whyborn has previously stood in Colchester council elections for the party. Those six candidates are chasing two seats, so electors may vote for up to two candidates.
Parliamentary constituency: Colchester
Essex county council division: Mile End and Highwoods
ONS Travel to Work Area: Colchester
Postcode district: CO4
Pauline Bacon (Lab)
Catherine Bickersteth (Lab)
Alison Jay (LD)
David Linghorn-Baker (C)
Richard Martin (C)
Chantelle-Louise Whyborn (LD)
May 2022 result Lab 833 C 773 LD 435
May 2021 result Ind 780 C 664 Lab 401 LD 188 Grn 131 Reform UK 64
May 2019 result Ind 1119 C 409 Lab 247 LD 196 Grn 155
May 2018 result Ind 926 C 563 Lab 314 LD 161 Grn 75
May 2016 result Ind 1126/1038/954 C 690/588/522 Lab 287/285/283 LD 273 UKIP 251 Grn 139/92/91
Previous results in detail
Spalding West
Lincolnshire county council; and
Spalding Monks House
South Holland council, Lincolnshire; both caused by the death of independent councillor Angela Newton.
Our final two independent defences of the week come in the utterly flat landscape of the Lincolnshire fens. This was once known as the Parts of Holland, and the Dutch connection is obvious: the land is close to or in some cases below sea level, and tulip-growing is a major local industry along with other flowers and vegetables.
Holland has only two large towns, the port of Boston and the inland town of Spalding which is the centre of the South Holland district. The so-called Heart of the Fens, Spalding grew up around the River Welland which flows north through to the town on its way to the Wash. It has maintained a rail link, with trains going south to Peterborough and north to Sleaford and Lincoln. The town’s agricultural links used to be celebrated with the annual Flower Parade, a carnival of floats decorated with tulips which ran each year from 1959 to 2013; a comeback for the Flower Parade is planned for May 2023.
The agricultural landscape of the Fens has led to rather a lot of immigration in recent years, as people from Eastern Europe leave behind their roots and come to work in the UK’s food industry. And it’s not just out in the fields where this provides jobs: Spalding has a number of large food-processing factories. The 2021 census revealed that South Holland district had one of the UK’s largest Lithuanian communities, with 12% of the population overall having been born in an EU state outside the UK. For now, these people are eligible to vote in UK local elections under retained EU law; changes to the franchise in this matter made by the Elections Act 2022 are yet to come into force.
Two people who started their career in Spalding’s agriculture sector were Angela Newton and her partner Alan Porter, who in 1984 launched a business auctioning small livestock, fruit and vegetables. AP Sales grew into a prominent estate agents in Spalding. Porter and Newton sold the firm in 2012 and, now happily retired and with the time to do these things, they finally got married in 2014.
Angela Newton, however, kept her maiden name for professional use. For decades she has been a prominent local politician in Spalding, and by 2014 she was the leader of the opposition group on South Holland council facing the council leader, Gary Porter of the Conservatives (no relation to her husband). Changing her name to Mrs Porter might have been confusing.
Indeed Angela Newton had been a member of South Holland council continuously since it was created in 1974. She was originally elected with the Labour nomination before joining the SDP on its creation. In 1981 Newton was elected to Lincolnshire county council as an SDP councillor for Spalding North West; she stood down from the county council in 1993, before returning in 2013 as county councillor for Spalding West. All her elections from 1991 onwards have been as an independent candidate. In the 2021 Birthday Honours Newton was appointed MBE for voluntary services in Lincolnshire. She passed away in August, aged 76,
The local parliamentary seat of South Holland and the Deepings is one of the safest Conservative seats in the land, and has returned Sir John Hayes as its MP at every election since it was created in 1997. South Holland council has had a Conservative majority since 1999 apart from a brief hung interlude in 2002–03, and Gary Porter, now Lord Porter of Spalding, has been the council leader for almost 20 years.
South Holland hasn’t elected a Lib Dem councillor this century and has been a Labour-free zone since 2007. Apart from two UKIPpers who served from 2015–19, the opposition on the council has instead come from independent councillors. The 2019 local elections returned a reduced Conservative majority of 24 Conservative and 13 independent councillors, which looks comfortable enough until you realise that the Conservatives won five seats unopposed and had another nine seats guaranteed through not enough opposition candidates standing. Once you take that into account, suddenly having 13 independent councillors opposite starts to look a bit more worrying from the Conservative point of view.
Angela Newton, as you might expect for a councillor with almost half a century of serivce, had a massive personal vote. In the 2019 local elections she scored twice as many votes as any other candidate in Spalding Monks House ward, on the western edge of the town; the independent lead over the Conservatives was 63–24. At her last county election in May 2021 Newton polled 81% of the vote in a straight fight with the Conservatives in Spalding West. In March 2021 the independent group on South Holland council registered as a political party with the Electoral Commission, under the name of “South Holland Independents”, and Newton’s final re-election came with their nomination. As can be seen, her passing leaves a huge number of votes up for grabs.
Both the county and district by-elections arising from Newton’s death are straight fights between the South Holland Independents and the Conservatives. I’ll take the South Holland Independents as the defending party in both polls, and interestingly they have nominated two ethnic minority candidates. The district by-election pits the South Holland Independents’ Sam Chauhan, who works in youth development and has previously worked for the council in housing, against the Conservatives’ Stephen Timewell who is one of the people behind the forthcoming revival of the Spalding Flower Parade. Both candidates for the county by-election are sitting South Holland district councillors: Manzur Hasan of the South Holland Independents topped the poll in Spalding St John’s ward in 2019, while Paul Redgate was returned unopposed that year as a Conservative candidate for the rural Whaplode and Holbeach St John’s ward.
Spalding West
Parliamentary constituency: South Holland and the Deepings
South Holland council wards: Spalding Wygate, Spalding St John’s (part), Spalding Monks House (part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Spalding
Postcode district: PE11
Manzur Hasan (South Holland Ind)
Paul Redgate (C)
May 2021 result South Holland Ind 1627 C 390
May 2017 result Ind 1026 C 976 Lab 221
Previous results in detail
Spalding Monks House
Parliamentary constituency: South Holland and the Deepings
Lincolnshire county council division: Spalding West (part), Spalding South (part), Spalding Elloe (part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Spalding
Postcode district: PE11
Sam Chauhan (South Holland Ind)
Stephen Timewell (C)
May 2019 result Ind 889/438 C 336 Lab 116/68 Grn 80/56
May 2015 result Ind 1398 C 1026 UKIP 817
May 2011 result Ind 955 C 697 Lab 402
May 2007 result Ind 726 C 501/477 Lab 297
Previous results in detail
Mid Galloway and Wigtown West
Dumfries and Galloway council, Scotland; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Sandy Whitelaw.
We finish for the week north of the Border with a ward which appeared in this column back in 2020 (Andrew’s Previews 2020, page 18). Let’s travel to a large and remote area in the far south-west of Scotland.
You’ve probably heard of Iona, the island where the former Labour leader John Smith lies in eternal rest, as a centre of early Christianity in Scotland. But contrary to what you might have heard, Iona was not Scotland’s first Christian site. Let’s backtrack 150 years before St Columba’s time to the end of the fourth century AD, while the Romans were still guarding the west end of Hadrian’s Wall and looking out from the coast on the far side of the Solway Firth.
At this point St Ninian came to the coast of Galloway, and he established a church known by the Latin name of Candida Casa — the White House. This was a centre of learning, a beacon within the Dark Ages. Eventually, at a location now called Whithorn, there was a cathedral, a monastery and a shrine to St Ninian. Through many unstable centuries of history, this religious complex attracted pilgrims and sent forth missionaries to preach the Holy Word all over what’s now Scotland and Ireland.
The White House may have been important in early mediaeval times, but Whithorn has now declined in importance. The main centre of population here these days is Newton Stewart, a town of just over 4,000 souls at the lowest crossing-point of the River Cree which is recognised by the ONS as the centre of its own Travel to Work Area. The name here is apt: this is a proper New Town (from the 17th century) founded by William Stewart, a son of the Earl of Galloway. Newton Stewart’s traditional industries were textiles and mining (the local granite is much in demand); today there is some passing trade on the road from Dumfries and England to the Northern Irish ferries at Stranraer, and some tourists are drawn here by the proximity of the Southern Uplands and the filming locations for the famous 1970s horror film The Wicker Man, which may have been set on some remote Scottish island but was nearly all filmed in Galloway. What St Ninian would have thought about The Wicker Man is thankfully not recorded.
Some miles north of Newton Stewart is Merrick, which at 843 metres is the highest point in the Southern Uplands. It’s theoretically visible from Snowdon, 144 miles to the south: that’s thought to be the longest possible line of sight in the British Isles. The name Merrick comes from the Gaelic word for “finger”, referring to its location in the intriguingly-named Range of the Awful Hand.
In between Newton Stewart and Whithorn lies Wigtown. This was designated in the 1990s as Scotland’s National Book Town, drawing inspiration from the second-hand bookshops of Hay-on-Wye, in an attempt to regenerate a town which had just lost both its major local employers (although the Bladnoch Distillery, Scotland’s southernmost whisky producer, is now back in business here). Wigtown was once important enough to give its name to the county of Wigntownshire, which occupied the south-west corner of Scotland.
Following the wipeout of the Scottish Conservatives in the 1997 general election, this was the point where their revival started with the election in 2001 of Peter Duncan as Tory MP for the constituency then known as Galloway and Upper Nithsdale. That seat and its successor of Galloway and West Dumfries has returned Conservatives to the Scottish Parliament continuously since 2003. Boundary changes for the 2005 Westminster election, which moved Dumfries town into the seat, did for Duncan’s chances, and the new constituency of Dumfries and Galloway returned a Labour MP — Russell Brown — until the SNP landslide of 2015. The Nationalists’ Richard Arkless was defeated in 2017 by Allister Jack of the Conservatives, who was the first MP from the 2017 intake to make it to Cabinet rank: he has now served as Scottish secretary under three Prime Ministers in as many years.
Scottish local councils went over to proportional representation in 2007, at which point this area was mostly part of the Mid Galloway ward. In the 2007 election this was one of only two wards in Dumfries and Galloway with the SNP carried; its three seats went to the SNP’s Alistair Geddes, new Tory candidate Graham Nicol and the Lib Dems’ Sandra McDowall. McDowall retired at the 2012 election and the Lib Dems haven’t been seen here since; her seat went to independent candidate Jim McColm.
There were boundary changes for the 2017 election which brought in a large rural area on the road towards Stranraer, which had previously been part of Wigtown West ward. This area is sparsely populated but does have enough people in it to warrant a fourth councillor for the ward and, rather more dubiously, a name change (the old Wigtown West ward included much of the Rhins of Gallwoay and was far more worthy of the compass point). The Conservatives did very well in the 2017 Scottish local elections and topped the poll in the new ward of Mid Galloway and Wigtown West, taking 39% of the vote and winning two out of four seats; the other two seats went to the SNP (who polled 24%) and McColm (18%). Conservative councillor Peter Nicol passed away at the end of 2019, and the Conservatives held the resulting by-election in January 2020 by the massive margin of 62–26 over the SNP.
The 2022 local elections here turned in an intriguing result. The Conservatives topped the poll with 50%, while the SNP ran second with an improved score of 31%. Perhaps not surprisingly after their drubbing in the 2020 by-election, the SNP had only stood one candidate. Less fathomably after that performances, the Conservatives hadn’t tried for three seats. With four seats available and three candidates from the top two parties, one seat had to go somewhere else: slightly by default it went to Labour, who polled 11% of the first preferences and held the Greens off by 80 votes in the final count. With the Conservatives on 2.51 quotas, the SNP on 1.52 and Labour on 0.56 this isn’t an indefensible result, but it does represent a missed opportunity for both the Conservatives and the SNP: with extra candidates, good balancing, favourable transfers and a bit of luck, either of them could have squeezed Labour out and won an extra seat.
One gets the impression that the winning Labour candidate, Sandy Whitelaw, didn’t really see this coming. He quit the council in October for personal reasons, forcing a by-election which will be extremely difficult for Labour to defend, given that they only had 11% of the vote seven months ago.
Nevertheless this difficult task falls to Labour candidate John McCutcheon, who contested the neighbouring ward of Stranraer and the Rhins in May; McCutcheon works on the railways as a conductor with Scotrail, and he is a branch chair for the RMT union. In a ward with no railway station (the line from Stranraer to Dumfries is long gone) that working background might be less politically toxic than average. The Conservative candidate is Richard Marsh, who is a community councillor for the village of Kirkcowan on the main A75 road. The SNP have nominated Ian Gibson. Completing an all-male ballot paper are Daniel Hooper-Jones for the Greens and Iain McDonald for the Lib Dems. For the last time this year, I have to read out the normal Scottish local by-election instructions at this point: Votes at 16 and the Alternative Vote are in use here.
Mid Galloway and Wigtown West may be the last Scottish poll of the year, but there are two more editions of Andrew’s Previews remaining for 2022. Next week’s column will be a big one, featuring the Parliamentary Special in Stretford and Urmston. Stay tuned for that.
Parliamentary constituency: Dumfries and Galloway
Scottish Parliament constituency: Galloway and West Dumfries
ONS Travel to Work Area: Newton Stewart; Stranraer
Postcode districts: DG7, DG8, DG9
Ian Gibson (SNP)
Daniel Hooper-Jones (Grn)
Richard Marsh (C)
John McCutcheon (Lab)
Iain McDonald (LD)
May 2022 first preferences C 2493 SNP 1505 Lab 559 Grn 405
January 2020 by-election C 2177 SNP 898 Grn 225 Lab 220
May 2017 first preferences C 2126 SNP 1273 Ind 976 Ind 475 Lab 368 Grn 116 Ind 48
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
