Previewing the Rochdale parliamentary by-election and the five local by-elections of 29th February 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
According to the Met Office, it’s the last day of winter. Spring is just around the corner. Before then there are six by-elections taking place on 29th February 2024, and we start with the big one:
Rochdale
House of Commons; caused by the death of Labour MP Sir Tony Lloyd.
Travellers entering Rochdale from the south, via the A627(M) motorway, will pass under this railway bridge just before reaching the Sudden Roundabout. (Or, as it now is, the Sudden Traffic Lights.) Rochdale is very proud of its history as the birthplace of the co-operative movement. Quite how this happened is a story worth telling.
It was December 1844, four days before Christmas. Lancashire was in the grip of the industrial revolution: the mills were mechanising, the textile trade was booming, but prices for the finished cloths were coming down and wages were tumbling with them. Skilled workers in the textile industry were falling into poverty. Basic foodstuffs were expensive, and were often adulterated by unscrupulous shopkeepers.
In response to this, a group of 28 people, about half of whom were Rochdale-based weavers, decided to form a co-operative. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers raised £28 of capital over four months, and in that winter of 1844–45 a new store opened at 31 Toad Lane, on the edge of Rochdale town centre, with a rather small stock of butter, sugar, flour, candles and oatmeal. High-quality, unadulterated products at affordable prices.
The Rochdale Pioneers’ store thrived, and became the model which the modern co-operative movement built on. The original building at 31 Toad Lane still exists and can be visited; the original shop has been recreated in the front room, while behind lies a museum that is well worth a visit. This part of Toad Lane has somehow escaped subsequent redevelopment which has left it sandwiched between a notably dated shopping mall and covered market, an arterial road which has severed Toad Lane into two parts, and seven tower blocks erected by the council in the 1960s. The Seven Sisters, as they are known, are visible from miles around although possibly not for much longer, as some of them are slated for demolition.
More recent redevelopment attempts in Rochdale have seen the Metrolink tram network extended to the Esplanade, a public space in the town centre created by culverting the River Roch. Since 2014 trams from Oldham, Manchester and beyond have terminated here, next to a shiny new bus station and an equally shiny new shopping and entertainment centre. This is known as the Riverside, after the River Roch — which flows out of sight underneath the tram stop and the Esplanade. The Roch’s culvert was once listed by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s widest bridge, which invites some obvious argument as to exactly what the difference between a bridge and a tunnel is.
Thankfully, the redevelopment attempts have left untouched Rochdale’s crowning glory: the Victorian-era town hall. The council modestly describe Rochdale Town Hall as “widely recognised as being one of the finest municipal buildings in the country”. This column would go much further than that: there is no finer municipal building in the UK. Rochdale Town Hall is a thing of beauty throughout, and for the first time in many years the general public are about to get a chance to see its beauty: the building is just about to emerge from a refurbishment which has taken several years, with the official reopening date set for this coming Sunday. Black Dyke Band have been booked for the reopening concert in the Great Hall next week, but if you don’t already have a ticket I’m afraid you’re out of luck: both nights are completely sold out.
Your columnist has had the privilege of playing music in Rochdale Town Hall. The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (Lancashire) Band used to have a regular booking for the town’s Festival of Remembrance each November, and I’ve had a few memorable experiences there. If you don’t believe me, here’s a very rare picture of your columnist in the band’s changing area — the Rochdale council chamber, pre-refurbishment. Order, order.
It shows just how Rochdale grew during the nineteenth century that the town fathers were able to commission a building so impressive that a long-standing legend holds that Hitler would have had Rochdale Town Hall re-erected in Germany given the chance. This is not a town of long standing: before the Industrial Revolution, there was very little in this particular corner of the Pennine foothills.
One of the first acts of the Industrial Revolution was to link Rochdale to the outside world. The Rochdale Canal, which officially opened in 1804, was built to link Manchester to Sowerby Bridge. It passes through Rochdale and Littleborough before going through a Pennine pass and descending into Todmorden and Hebden Bridge. The Rochdale Canal was the first transpennine route which could handle heavy goods traffic, and its broad locks and lack of tunnels meant it could handle boats which were too large for other canals. The canal fell into disuse between the wars, but restoration work in the late 20th century resulted in the Rochdale Canal being reopened for navigation in 2002. However, in most respects it has been superseded by the Manchester to Leeds Railway, which is a busy Northern Rail route from Manchester Victoria to Todmorden and beyond. This railway line has stations within the constituency at Rochdale, Smithy Bridge and Littleborough before leaving the area through Summit Tunnel, which when it opened in 1841 was the longest railway tunnel in the world at 1 mile and 1,125 yards.
The need to supply water to the Rochdale Canal’s summit pound north of Littleborough resulted in the construction of a reservoir to the east of that town. Opened in 1800, Hollingworth Lake is one of Greater Manchester’s busiest tourist attractions: back in the 1860s there were three steamers operating on the lake and a number of inns and hotels catering to day trippers, and the lakeside still has the air of a seaside resort. The boating rights are now held by the council, which has turned the area around the lake into a country park. The viaduct you see at the back of the picture is the Rakewood Viaduct, which carries the M62 motorway on its climb to the Pennine summit.
The bulldozers are currently at work along the road from Hollingworth Lake down to Littleborough. A new housing estate with 126 homes is being built here on a brownfield site which was once occupied by an Akzo Nobel chemicals factory, but which has lain derelict for over a decade.
The canal and railway line go north from Littleborough: travellers who wish to go east directly towards Halifax must contend with the climb of Blackstone Edge, which is the spine of the Pennines and rises to over 1,500 feet in altitude. The Pennine Way footpath and the Lancashire-Yorkshire boundary run along the summit of the Edge. Those who make the climb under their own steam can stop off at the White House on the main road, which commands a seriously impressive view: on the clearest of days Snowdonia, 90 miles away to the west, can be seen. Not far to the south of the White House is the Blackstone Edge Long Causeway, a curious road over the moor paved with flagstones which might or might not be Roman.
To the west of Littleborough we find further moorland and the town of Wardle. [No, Google, that is not a typo for Wordle.] Wardle was an independent town up until the reorganisation of 1974, which is not bad going given that this is a remote place with only one road in and out: there is no way north, south or east from here unless you fancy hiking. The local secondary school, Wardle Academy, is noted for the exceptionally high quality of its school brass band; Wardle Academy can regularly be found among the prizes not just in the Whit Friday youth section but also at European level. Here’s their performance at the 2019 European Youth Brass Band Championships in Montreux, which won the competition’s Development section.
The other town in the Rochdale constituency is Milnrow, which lies at the foot of the M62 motorway’s climb to the top of the Pennines. This is a bit of a commuter centre, not just with the motorway but also thanks to its location on the Rochdale to Oldham tram line — which was a railway line before the Metrolink took it over. Milnrow has its own brass band, which is in the top rank of British banding — the Championship section. As you can hear from this performance, which won second prize at the Delph Whit Friday contest in 2018.
Next to Milnrow we have something very new: the Kingsway Business Park, developed very recently on a site to the north of the motorway and with direct access to both it and the trams. It’s full of grey metal warehouses, all of which have gone up in the last decade, from which stock is distributed to more public-facing places. Asda and JD Sports are just two of the many large firms with a presence here.
Wardle, Littleborough and Milnrow between them account for three of the Rochdale constituency’s ten electoral wards. The other seven wards cover most of Rochdale town itself, with the main omission being the affluent middle-class western suburbs of Norden and Bamford — those are in the Heywood and Middleton constituency at present. The neighbouring Spotland and Falinge ward, around Rochdale FC’s Spotland stadium in the north-west of the town, will take part in this by-election but will then be moved out of the Rochdale parliamentary seat at the next general election to become part of a renamed Heywood and Middleton North constituency. This leaves six working-class wards, two of which have very heavy Muslim populations. Central Rochdale ward, which covers the sort of area you might guess from the name, is 65% Muslim; Milkstone and Deeplish ward, which lies to the south of the town centre around the railway station, is 72% Muslim. Milkstone and Deeplish makes the top 20 wards in England and Wales not just for that religion but also for those employed in the wholesale and retail sector (26.6%) and for those who have never worked or are long-term unemployed (26.7%, most of whom are “looking after home or family”).
It wasn’t just the subcontinent which provided immigrants to Rochdale, though. The town has the UK’s largest Fijian community outside of London, a result of the Rochdale Hornets rugby league side recruiting a number of Fijian players in the 1960s. In recognition of this, Fiji’s national rugby league side played a group-stage game at Spotland as part of the 2013 Rugby League World Cup, beating Ireland 32–14.
Rochdale was one of the great industrial towns which were enfranchised by the Great Reform Act of 1832, and there has been one MP for Rochdale ever since. The Rochdale of 1832 was much smaller than it is today, and its administration was complicated by the town being divided between three townships — Castleton, Spotland and Wardleworth — which all met in the middle of the pre-Esplanade bridge across the River Roch. The boundary-drawers of the First Reform decided to ignore this administrative tangle completely and drew a line which was curious for its sheer simplicity. The Rochdale parliamentary borough was originally defined as everything within three-quarters of a mile from the old marketplace.
In the days of that circular boundary Rochdale often returned Whigs and Radicals to Parliament; a win for the Conservatives’ John Entwistle in 1835 was very much out of character, and the first Rochdale by-election of 19th April 1837 after Entwistle’s death saw the seat revert to type with a Whig win by 44 votes, 383 to 339. The seat’s second Conservative MP was Sir Alexander Ramsay, 3rd Baronet, who won here at his third attempt in 1857 by gaining Rochdale from the Radicals; however, in 1859 he gave his seat up without a contest to the celebrated free trader and Corn Law reformer Richard Cobden, who won the 1859 general election here unopposed as a Liberal candidate. Cobden died in 1865, and the resulting second Rochdale by-election of 15th April 1865 was won by his protégé Thomas Potter, who served as Liberal MP for Rochdale for thirty years afterwards. His constituency was expanded in size by the second Reform Act in 1868, and left unchanged by the 1885 redistribution.
Upon Potter’s retirement in 1895 the radical vote was split between the Liberal candidate William Leatham Bright, who was the son of the local Radical John Bright and had previously served as MP for Stoke-upon-Trent; and the seat’s first Independent Labour Party candidate George Barnes, who would go on to briefly serve as leader of the Labour Party some years later. This vote split allowed Colonel Clement Royds to come through the middle and beat Bright by 4,781 votes to 4,359, a majority of 422, to become only the third Conservative MP for Rochdale. Royds was re-elected in 1900 with a majority of just 19 votes over the Liberals; again the left wing was split, thanks to journalist C Allen Clarke standing for the Labour Representation Committee.
Royds was swept away in the Liberal landslide of 1906 by Gordon Harvey, who had come so close six years earlier. Harvey was a cotton mill owner and alderman of Lancashire county council, where he was chair of the education committee; he was described as a benevolent employer, and some of his public works still survive in Littleborough. He was re-elected in both 1910 elections, rather narrowly on the second occasion.
Rochdale’s status as a county borough, with a population close to the right size for a single MP, meant that for many years the parliamentary boundary drawers preferred to place its satellite towns within a different parliamentary seat. Those seats could be very bizarrely drawn. In the 1885 redistribution all of Littleborough, Milnrow and Wardle were placed within the Middleton constituency, which also included Castleton and two places which never made it into Greater Manchester: those were Whitworth (which remains part of the Lancashire county council area), and the Lancashire half of Todmorden (which was transferred to the West Riding in 1888).
The Middleton constituency of 1885–1918 proved to be a closely-fought marginal seat. Its first MP was the Liberals’ George Salis-Schwabe, who was a partner in the family calico printing works at Rhodes near Middleton. Salis-Schwabe had made his career as a senior Army officer: he was commanding officer of the 16th Lancers for a while and served with distinction in the Zulu War. His German name came from his father, a Westphalian Jew who had come to England in the early nineteenth century.
When the Liberal party split in advance of the 1886 election over Home Rule for Ireland, Salis-Schwabe joined the anti-Home Rule Liberal Unionists. He didn’t seek re-election in Middleton, and the pro-Home Rule Middleton Liberals selected Charles Hopwood, a senior barrister and Recorder of Liverpool. Hopwood had previously served for eleven years as MP for Stockport, but had lost his seat in 1885. The Middleton Conservatives reselected Thomas Fielden, who had fought the seat in 1885; the Fielden family controlled local politics in Todmorden, where they were major employers. Thomas’ grandfather John Fielden had been a Radical MP for Oldham from 1832 to 1847, initially being elected alongside the Radical William Cobbett; and Thomas’ father Joshua Fielden had been a Conservative MP for the West Riding of Yorkshire from 1868 to 1880. Thomas Fielden’s business interests included the railways: he was a director of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, whose lines linked the Middleton constituency together.
The stage was set for three rounds of Fielden v Hopwood. Thomas Fielden won the first contest, in 1886, by a majority of 318 votes; Hopwood reversed that in 1892 to win by 116 votes; and Fielden prevailed in 1895 with a majority of 865.
Thomas Fielden died in 1897 at the age of 43, suddenly taken ill while shooting grouse in Scotland. The resulting Middleton by-election of 4th November 1897 resulted in yet another seat change, as it was won by the Liberal candidate James Duckworth. Having started work in Rochdale’s cotton mills at the age of six-and-a-half, Duckworth had founded and built up a large chain of grocery stores in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. He used that as a springboard to enter politics. Duckworth had been a Rochdale councillor since 1887, and had already served the first two of his four terms as mayor of Rochdale; he was also the Lancashire county councillor for Castleton and Milnrow, and had contested the 1895 parliamentary by-election in Warwick and Leamington (losing to one of the greatest sportsmen of the age, Alfred Lyttelton, who was the first man to represent England in both football and cricket before he came a Conservative MP). Duckworth beat the Conservative candidate William Mitchell by 5,964 votes to 5,664, a majority of 300.
James Duckworth, however, went on to lose the 1900 election in Middleton to the Conservatives by an even smaller margin of 136. The new Tory MP was Edward Fielden, brother of the late MP Thomas Fielden. Edward was a civil engineer, and like his brother he was a Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway director.
Edward Fielden didn’t seek re-election in 1906, and the Liberal landslide produced the seventh consecutive seat change in Middleton. The new Liberal MP was Ryland Adkins, a barrister and Northamptonshire county councillor, who won a majority of 1,533 votes over the Conservatives. It was Adkins who broke the mould and became the only MP for the Middleton constituency ever to be re-elected, a feat he managed on three occasions: in both 1910 elections and in a subsequent by-election.
The 2nd August 1911 Middleton by-election came about because Sir Ryland Adkins (as he had now become) had been appointed as Recorder of Nottingham. Under the law as it applied at the time, this meant he had to seek re-election to the House of Commons. As in December 1910, his opposition came from William Hewins who stood as a Liberal Unionist candidate: Hewins was an economist who had served as the first director of the London School of Economics, but he had left academia to campaign for tariff reform. A vigorous campaign by Hewins on the issue of National Insurance proved not to be enough, and Sir Ryland Adkins prevailed with a reduced majority of 411 votes.
Adkins’ Middleton constituency was abolished by the 1918 redistribution, and the small towns east of Rochdale — Wardle, Littleborough and Milnrow — now became part of a newly-drawn Royton constituency. This seat wrapped around Rochdale on two sides, as it also included Royton, Whitworth, and Norden and Bamford which were still independent towns until the 1930s. The Rochdale constituency expanded to take in Castleton, which had been incorporated into the borough in 1900. The outgoing Rochdale Liberal MP Gordon Harvey retired at the 1918 election on health grounds, while Middleton’s Liberal MP Sir Ryland Adkins successfully sought re-election in the new seat of Middleton and Prestwich, so this area had a clearout of its representation at this time. It also switched from Liberal to Conservative, because in both Rochdale and Royton the coalition government’s coupon went to Conservative candidates.
In Rochdale the coalition government endorsed Conservative candidate Alfred Law, a local manufacturer who was easily elected here in 1918. In a three-way marginal result Law then lost his seat in 1922 to Stanley Burgess, an official with the Amalgamated Engineering Union who became the first Labour MP for Rochdale. Another three-way marginal result in 1923 saw Burgess lose his seat to the Liberal candidate Ramsay Muir, a historian who had recently left academia to try his luck in politics. Muir stood for Parliament eight times, but this was his only win.
Following those consecutive wins for three different parties, the 1924 general election in Rochdale produced an almost perfect three-way split. In third place with 14,112 votes was the Conservative candidate Thomas Jesson. Ramsay Muir, seeking re-election as the Liberal candidate, finished second with 14,492 votes. Winning with 14,609 votes and a majority of 117 was William Kelly, the Labour candidate. Kelly was a London-based organiser for the Workers’ Union and he had fought the Yeovil constituency four times in the previous six years; Rochdale was better territory for him. He was re-elected in 1929 with an increased majority of 5,103.
William Kelly was swept away in the Conservative landslide of 1931 by Tory candidate Thomas Jesson, but got his seat back in 1935 when Jesson retired. He resigned from the Commons in 1940, and under the wartime political truce the resulting third Rochdale by-election of 20th July 1940 returned the Labour candidate Hyacinth Morgan unopposed. Morgan was a doctor from an Irish family. He had sat in Parliament before, representing Camberwell North West from 1929 to 1931.
The Royton constituency of 1918–50 was much more politically right-wing than Rochdale, thanks to the seat including the strongly middle-class Rochdale suburbs of Norden and Bamford. Royton’s first MP was Wilfred Sugden, who was elected here in 1918 as the Conservative candidate with the Coalition’s coupon. Prior to 1918 he had been serving in the Royal Engineers and had a career as a constructional engineer.
Royton was Sugden’s first parliamentary contest in a long and winding political career: he later represented the two Hartlepools and then Leyton West in Parliament, and he contested a number of other constituencies in Lancashire and London. He was set on that convoluted path in 1923 by losing Royton to the Liberals’ William Gorman, who had lost the 1922 election by 1,093 votes and this time enjoyed a majority of 2,516. The son of a Wigan shopkeeper, Gorman was at this point near the start of a long and illustrious legal career: he is probably best known as the judge in the A6 murder trial, who pronounced the death sentence on James Hanratty.
William Gorman’s legal career may have been long, but his Parliamentary career was short. Although the Liberals never fell out of the top two in this seat, he was the only Liberal MP for Royton. He lost his seat in the 1924 election to the Conservatives’ Arthur Davies, a long-serving surgeon and medical practitioner who had recently given up his medical practice in Shaw and Crompton. Davies was re-elected in 1929 thanks to a left-wing vote split.
Arthur Davies became seriously ill in 1930, and the Conservatives selected a new candidate for the 1931 general election in Royton. Harold Sutcliffe went on to serve as MP for the area for 24 years; an Old Harrovian, he was well-suited for the area as an expert in the cotton trade. He enjoyed large majorities in the 1931 and 1935 elections, and during the Second World War he got onto the lower rungs of the ministerial ladder as a junior Home Office minister. Despite this, his Times obituary described Sutcliffe as “never a very conspicuous figure at Westminster”.
The 1950 redistribution transferred Heywood into the Royton constituency, and renamed that seat as Heywood and Royton. In compensation for this the Bamford and Norden areas, which had been incorporated into Rochdale county borough in 1933, were transferred from the Royton seat into the Rochdale constituency. Norden and Bamford form a middle-class enclave with some of the most exclusive and expensive housing in south-east Lancashire, and Rochdale’s Labour MP Dr Hyacinth Morgan was clearly unhappy with this boundary change. He did the chicken run to the safer seat of Warrington. To replace him in Rochdale the Labour Party selected Bolton councillor and engineer Joseph Hale, who held the new seat with a majority of 4,276 at the 1950 general election. It wasn’t enough; despite a Liberal withdrawal at the 1951 election Joseph Hale lost his seat by 27,797 votes to 27,343, a majority of 454.
The new Conservative MP was Wentworth Schofield, a cotton mill owner from Oldham with an interest in foreign affairs. He was on the UK committee of the International Chamber of Commerce. Schofield had served with distinction in the Second World War, commanding a Royal Tank Regiment battalion and reaching the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was re-elected in 1955 with an increased but still small majority of 1,590 over Labour candidate Jack McCann.
Wentworth Schofield died in December 1957 at the age of 66. The resulting fourth Rochdale by-election on 13th February 1958 broke the mould of politics, because the local ITV franchise Granada TV decided to televise it. This had never been done before, and Rochdale 1958 was the first British by-election to receive extensive TV coverage. Granada produced two candidate debates and broadcast live from the count, while the BBC stuck their oar in with a number of vox pops with the voters. From the broadcasters’ point of view, the experiment was a success; they didn’t get prosecuted under the Representation of the People Act, and our elections have never been the same since. From the Tories’ point of view, the by-election was less of a success; they fell to third place and lost their seat, and indeed Rochdale has never voted Conservative since or come close to doing so. Their 1958 by-election candidate Tom Normanton subsequently served as MP for Cheadle from 1970 to 1987 and MEP for Cheshire East from 1979 to 1989. Second place went to the experienced broadcaster and journalist Ludovic Kennedy, standing as the Liberal candidate in his first parliamentary campaign. However, the by-election was won by Labour’s Jack McCann, who enjoyed a majority of 4,530 over Kennedy.
Jack McCann had been an engineer before entering Parliament, and he had cut his political teeth in municipal politics: he was Mayor of Eccles in 1955–56. After seeing off Ludovic Kennedy again in 1959 by a reduced majority of 2,740, his seat was safe enough thereafter. Much of his parliamentary career was spent in the Whips’ office, as an opposition whip from 1961 and then as a Government whip from 1964 to 1969.
McCann died in July 1972 at the age of 61. The resulting fifth Rochdale by-election on 26th October 1972 broke the mould again. Finishing in fourth place was independent candidate Jim Merrick standing on an explicit anti-immigration ticket: he polled 9% and lost his deposit. Third with 18% of the vote was the Conservative candidate, Rochdale councillor David Trippier who subsequently became MP for Rossendale (1979–92). Second with 31% was NUM figure and future Leigh MP Lawrence Cunliffe, who on this occasion lost the Labour seat to the Liberals. The winner was Liberal candidate Cyril Smith, who polled 42% of the vote and enjoyed a majority of 5,093.
Smith had left school during the Second World War for his first job in the Rochdale tax office, but was forced to leave the Revenue at 16 after giving a speech in support of the Liberal candidate Charles Harvey (a descendant of the former Rochdale MP George Harvey) at the 1945 general election. It was the start of a life spent in politics. Smith was elected to Rochdale council in 1952 on the Labour ticket and rose through the ranks to become Mayor of Rochdale in 1966, still in his 30s. His mayoral year was filmed for a BBC documentary, and saw Smith appointed MBE, be elected as chairman of the council’s education committee, and leave the Labour party in a dispute over council house rents. He subsequently joined the Liberals.
The Rochdale by-election brought Smith to the national stage as, according to repute, the heaviest MP of all time: he stood 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed almost 30 stone. Although he was subsequently re-elected as MP for Rochdale five times and served in Parliament for twenty years, the only office he ever held in the parliamentary party was Liberal chief whip for a brief period in the 1970s. He opposed the Liberal party’s alliance with the SDP, and didn’t seek re-election in 1992 after the merger which created the Liberal Democrats.
Meanwhile, from the 1950 redistribution the Rochdale constituency was surrounded on three sides by the Heywood and Royton constituency in an arrangement akin to a pair of earmuffs. As well as the eponymous towns, Heywood and Royton took in Shaw and Crompton, Milnrow, Littleborough, Wardle and Whitworth. Given the very poor connections between Heywood and Whitworth (never mind the other towns in the seat), this has to rank among the more curious decisions taken by the Boundary Commissions over the years.
The outgoing Conservative MP for Royton, Sir Harold Sutcliffe, took the Heywood and Royton seat over: he weathered the loss of Norden and Bamford to prevail in 1950 with a majority of 2,036 over Labour. He retired in 1955 and passed the seat on to the Conservatives’ Tony Leavey, who ran a number of weaving and matchmaking firms in East Lancashire. Leavey had served with distinction in the Second World War: he was one of the last soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, and went back to France after D-Day. Since the war Leavey had become a director of the engineering firm Smith and Nephew, where his father was chairman. This was his third go at getting into Parliament, after losing two contests to Barbara Castle in Blackburn East.
In Parliament Leavey was a fairly high-profile backbencher, gaining public attention for campaigns on subjects as varied as topless women (he wanted them arrested), Latin teaching in schools (he was against) and flying saucers over Lancashire. He served as secretary to the backbench 1922 Committee. However, his seat had swung to Labour in 1959 against the national trend, and the Labour party had Heywood and Royton in their sights. Tony Leavey was unable to take much of a part in the 1964 election campaign as he was recovering from a major operation, and he lost Heywood and Royton by 816 votes.
The first and only Labour MP for Heywood and Royton was Joel Barnett, who went on to win six terms in the constituency. An accountant and former Prestwich councillor who had fought Runcorn in 1959, Barnett has attained political immortality through his eponymous formula for dividing public spending between the four nations of the UK. The Barnett Formula came about while Barnett was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, a post he held throughout the 1974–79 Labour government. During his final term in the Commons he had the high-profile position of chair of the Public Accounts Committee.
Joel Barnett retired to the Lords in 1983 when the Heywood and Royton constituency was broken up — a decision which was forced on the Boundary Commission because one of its component parts, Whitworth, had been left outside Greater Manchester. The main successor to his old seat didn’t include either Heywood or Royton: it ran along the western side of the Pennine spine to take in Littleborough, Wardle, Milnrow, Shaw and Crompton, and the Saddleworth area which had been transferred into Greater Manchester from Yorkshire in 1974. Fifty years on, some Saddleworthians are still unhappy about that.
The new constituency of Littleborough and Saddleworth was projected to be a safe Conservative seat, and its Tory nomination was won by Geoffrey Dickens who was the outgoing MP for the abolished seat of Huddersfield West over the hills. Described as “a moral populist, especially on sex crimes, and a devotee of the thé dansant”, Dickens won three terms as MP for Littleborough and Saddleworth, with the Liberals or Liberal Democrats in second place on each occasion. In 1992 the Tory majority was cut to 4,494 and the seat became marginal.
Meanwhile back in Rochdale, in 1992 the Liberal Democrats had managed to do something which has often proved a problem for them: passing a constituency on from one MP to the next. Sir Cyril Smith retired as MP for Rochdale in 1992, and the Liberal Democrats held the seat with a reduced majority of 1,839 votes over Labour. Their new MP was Liz Lynne, a speech consultant and former actress: her acting career had included appearing on the West End stage in Agatha Christie’s long-running play The Mousetrap.
Littleborough and Saddleworth’s Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens died from liver cancer in 1995, sparking a by-election at the nadir of the Major government. The Tories had rotten luck with by-elections in the 1990s, and “Little and Sad” was no exception in that regard. When the seat went to the polls on 27th July 1995 the defending Conservative candidate John Hudson won only 24% of the vote, just over half of what Dickens had got three years earlier, and finished in third place. In second place with 34% was Labour candidate Phil Woolas, a former president of the NUS who was head of communications for the GMB trade union, and had previously been a TV producer for Newsnight and Channel 4 News. Woolas subsequently served as Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth from 1997 until he was unseated by the Election Court in 2010. Other candidates included future UKIP MEP John Whittaker, a spoiler “Conversative” candidate, and the noted child-scarer Mr Blobby, all of whom were beaten by Screaming Lord Sutch. The Liberal Democrats had got up the noses of both major parties during the campaign, with the Conservatives upset that they had started hitting the pavements while Geoffrey Dickens was still on his deathbed, and Labour attacking the Lib Dem candidate for high-tax and pro-drug policies; but it wasn’t enough to stop Chris Davies winning the by-election for the Lib Dems with 39% of the vote and a majority of 1,993.
The 1997 redistribution split the town of Rochdale between two constituencies for the first time: the Rochdale seat lost Norden and Bamford to the west and gained Littleborough and Wardle to the east. Milnrow became part of the redrawn seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth, which as stated voted Labour in the period 1997–2010. The changes to the Rochdale constituency were projected to reduce Lib Dem MP Liz Lynne’s already small majority to almost nothing, and in the event she lost her seat to Labour by 4,545 votes. Lynne was subsequently elected to the European Parliament, serving from 1999 to 2012 as the Lib Dems’ MEP for the West Midlands.
The new Labour MP for Rochdale was Lorna Fitzsimons, who was 29 at the time of her first election but already had a political profile, having served from 1992 to 1994 as president of the National Union of Students. (Her successor in that role, Jim Murphy, later became leader of the Scottish Labour Party; her predecessor, Stephen Twigg, went on to have his Portillo moment.) Immediately before entering Parliament Fitzsimons had been working in the advertising industry. She was re-elected in 2001 with an increased majority.
The Liberal Democrats hadn’t given up in Rochdale, and they defeated Fitzsimons at the 2005 election. The new MP was Paul Rowen, a former leader of Rochdale council and a former secondary school science teacher. He won by the narrow margin of 16,787 votes to 16,345, a majority of 444 votes.
The 2010 redistribution gave the Rochdale metropolitan borough two whole seats of its own, with Milnrow transferring into the Rochdale constituency from Oldham East and Saddleworth. The boundary changes notionally wiped out Rowen’s majority. Rochdale came to prominence in the closing stages of the 2010 election campaign after the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was taped referring to a blameless Rochdale woman whom he had met on the campaign trail as “bigoted”. Despite this and the national Liberal Democrat surge, Paul Rowen lost his seat to the Labour candidate Simon Danczuk, who won by 16,699 votes to 15,810, a majority of 889.
At this point in the story we need to return to Sir Cyril Smith, who died later in 2010 at the age of 82. Some of the shine had come off Smith’s reputation in 2008 with revelations that he had improperly lobbied in Parliament for an asbestos company with a factory in his constituency. This, it turned out, was only the tip of the iceberg. Back in 1979 the Rochdale Alternative Press, a local magazine, had published a story alleging that in the 1960s Cyril Smith had abused teenage boys in a hostel he had co-founded, and that the police had investigated and taken no action. Private Eye had picked up and repeated the allegations at the time. Smith never publicly commented on the story. After Smith’s death, the lid came off this particular can of worms with a large number of victims of abuse coming forward. The matter was taken up by Simon Danczuk, and it is now accepted that Cyril Smith was a prolific serial sex offender against children.
While this was emerging, the urban Liberal Democrat vote was falling apart nationally as a result of the formation of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. The combined effect of this and the Cyril Smith revelations was that the Liberal Democrats ceased to be a force in Rochdale politics. In the years 2006–08 they had won 33 seats on Rochdale council out of a possible 60; after the 2014 election the Lib Dems had one seat left and Labour had an impregnable majority on the council. Simon Danczuk was re-elected in 2015 for a second term with a majority of 12,442 over UKIP, at the time the largest majority in the history of the Rochdale constituency.
Ironically given his work unpicking the legacy of Cyril Smith’s child sexual abuse, Danczuk’s political career was effectively over by the end of 2015 after it emerged that he had exchanged explicit messages with a 17-year-old girl. He was not reselected as a Labour candidate for the 2017 general election which he contested as an independent, finishing fifth out of six candidates and coming nowhere near saving his deposit.
Danczuk’s replacement as Labour candidate in 2017 was a very long-serving and well-respected local politician. Tony Lloyd had first entered the Commons in 1983 as MP for Stretford, transferred to the Manchester Central constituency following boundary changes in 1997, and had recently finished a five-year term as Greater Manchester Police and Crime Commissioner. He won Rochdale in 2017 with an increased majority of 14,819 over the Conservatives. During the 2019 election campaign he was shadow Northern Ireland secretary, adding shadow Scottish secretary to that portfolio following the December general election.
Tony Lloyd was re-elected for his second term of office in Rochdale in December 2019 with a 52–31 margin over the Conservatives and a majority of 9,668 votes. His Labour party also controls the local council. Rochdale council currently has 46 Labour seats (one of which is vacant) against 9 Conservatives, 3 Lib Dems and 2 ex-Labour independents. Of the ten wards which roughly correspond to this constituency, one ward is safely Conservative (Wardle, Shore and West Littleborough), one is safely Lib Dem (Milnrow and Newhey), Littleborough Lakeside ward is marginal between the Conservatives and Labour but currently has a full slate of Labour councillors, and the other seven wards are now safe Labour — in some cases, extremely safe Labour. In May 2023 those ten wards had an aggregate vote of 56% for Labour, 21% for the Conservatives, and 18% for the Liberal Democrats who didn’t stand in Balderstone and Kirkholt ward. Ward boundary changes in 2022 mean that the constituency boundary doesn’t quite match up, but the differences are minor.
Rochdale may prove to be the last by-election of this parliament. It was nearly the first: in April 2020 Tony Lloyd was hospitalised with COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic. He survived that, but never returned to the front line of politics: once Lloyd was discharged from the Manchester Royal Infirmary, he stood down as shadow Northern Ireland secretary to concentrate on his health and his constituency work. He was subsequently knighted in 2021 for public service.
In January 2023 Sir Tony Lloyd announced that he was undergoing chemotherapy following a diagnosis of blood cancer, and that he would not attend Parliament or face-to-face meetings on medical advice. Sadly, the treatment was not successful. His leukaemia became aggressive and untreatable, and on 11th January 2024 Lloyd left hospital for the last time to spend “the time I have left with my family”. He passed away six days later, aged 73.
The resulting sixth Rochdale by-election falls on a very unusual date: 29th February 2024, this being a leap year. For decades parliamentary elections have been held on Thursdays by convention, and Thursday 29th February is a date which comes around every 28 years so the last one was in 1996. There were no local by-elections on 29th February 1996, nor have there been any 29th February polls in the six bissextile years since then.
If we look at the list of parliamentary by-elections, for which there are longer and better records, there was only one 29th February poll in the twentieth century. This came in 1944 in Bury St Edmunds, after Conservative MP Frank Heilgers was killed in a major train crash at Ilford the previous month. Like many MPs in those wartime days, Heilgers was serving in the forces: he was on the staff of the War Office at the time with the rank of lieutentant-colonel, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission counts him as a casualty of the war. The political truce meant that the Conservative candidate in the 29th February 1944 by-election wasn’t opposed by Labour or the Liberals, but the Tories’ Edgar Keatinge was run close by veteran Liberal candidate Margery Ashby who stood as an Independent Liberal: Keatinge won in the end by a 56–44 margin.
There were in all five 29th February parliamentary by-elections during the twentieth century, but the other four (Bolton, Chester and Droitwich in 1916 and Bewdley in 1908) weren’t contested and this column suspects that the date listed may have been the nomination deadline rather than the intended polling day. Whatever the truth of this, we have a famous name in that list: the future Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s long political career started with his unopposed election as MP for Bewdley on 29th February 1908.
So, for a proper party political contest on 29th February we have to go all the way back to 1888 following the resignation of Conservative MP William Evelyn. He was a descendant of the diarist John Evelyn and, appropriately enough, represented his ancestor’s old stomping ground of Deptford. William Evelyn had won two contests in 1885 and 1886 against the Liberals’ Lalmohun Ghose, a Bengali barrister who was the first Indian ever to seek election to the UK Parliament. The 29th February 1888 Deptford by-election pitted the Conservatives’ Charles Darling, who would later become a High Court judge, against the Liberals’ Wilfred Blunt — who at the time was incarcerated in Kilmainham prison in Dublin, for chairing a meeting in support of Irish Home Rule which had been banned by the Home Secretary. Darling won by 4,345 votes to 4,070, a reduced Conservative majority of 275 on a sharply increased turnout.
There has never previously been a Labour candidate in a 29th February parliamentary by-election. Whether there is one now is a matter for debate. A rather rushed Labour selection process for this by-election was won by Azhar Ali, who was leader of the opposition Labour group on Lancashire county council and was appointed OBE in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to the community in north-west England. Ali has stood for Parliament twice before, contesting the Pendle constituency in 2015 and 2019. He defeated Paul Waugh, a native Rochdalian and chief political commentator for the i newspaper, for the nomination; there was a third candidate on Rochdale Labour’s shortlist, a Wigan councillor, but she won very few votes.
Azhar Ali is the Lancashire county councillor for Nelson East. Local politics in Nelson, and in industrial East Lancashire generally, is a very strange subject where this column struggles to understand what’s going on; let’s just say it’s not necessarily representative of the rest of the country.
The latest East Lancs borough where strange things are happening is Hyndburn, which covers Accrington and its satellite towns. The formerly ruling Labour group in Hyndburn has suffered a massive split over the last few years which the local Conservatives have capitalised on, and following the 2023 local elections Labour and the Conservatives were tied on 16 seats each with two Greens and an independent holding the balance of power on Hyndburn council. Despite or perhaps because of the fact that all the crossbench councillors were originally elected on the Labour ticket, the Green Party group installed a Conservative minority administration. It definitely helped the Hyndburn Tory cause that they had gained Central ward, a heavily Muslim area, in May 2023: the Conservatives’ Mohammed Younis defeated Labour’s Mohammed Ayub by 1,043 votes to 959 on a massive turnout (in local election terms) of 52%. Clearly the Hyndburn branch of the Labour Party had reasons to be a bit worried about its Muslim support.
All of this happened before Hamas lit the blue touchpaper and provoked the latest war in the Middle East with their massacre of Israeli citizens last October. Shortly after those events Azhar Ali and the former Hyndburn Labour MP Graham Jones had been among those attending a meeting (the nature of which this column hasn’t quite been able to pin down) held in Hyndburn to discuss the Israel-Hamas war. During this meeting Ali claimed that the Israeli government had deliberately reduced its security to allow the 7th October massacre to happen. His remarks were taped and the recording found its way into the hands of the Mail on Sunday, which published them on 11th February 2024. Ali retracted the comments and apologised; after further revelations and some dithering the Labour party disendorsed him, but it was already too late to take him off the ballot paper on which he is listed as the official Labour candidate. Should Azhar Ali win the by-election, it seems unlikely that he would be admitted to the Labour whip.
The Conservative candidate is Paul Ellison, who runs a landscaping firm in the town and was instrumental in helping Rochdale to place highly in recent editions of the In Bloom awards. He was named Rochdale Man of the Year in 2020 for that.
Third here in December 2019 was the Brexit Party, who polled 8.2%. They are now Reform UK, and they have selected Simon Danczuk. Yes, that Simon Danczuk.
Fourth place in Rochdale last time went to the Lib Dems’ Andy Kelly, the “Man on the Telly”: this nickname comes not from Viz but from Kelly’s serial appearances on TV quiz shows, where his career winnings are well into 5 figures. He polled 7.0% in December 2019. This time the Lib Dem candidate is Iain Donaldson, a long-serving former Manchester councillor who is the party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Blackley and Middleton South.
The only other party to stand in Rochdale at the last general election was the Greens, who pooled 2.1%. They selected Guy Otten, a retired solicitor and tribunal judge who contested Littleborough Lakeside in last year’s local elections. Otten was subsequently disendorsed by the party over historic social media posts relating to Gaza and Islam, but it was too late to take him off the ballot paper on which he is listed as the official Green Party candidate.
This appears to have prompted the Rochdale branch of the party to endorse Mark Coleman, a retired vicar who served time in prison for a Just Stop Oil protest and is standing as an independent candidate on an environmentalist ticket. If the size of Coleman’s campaign team (who I ran into in Littleborough during my research trip) is any guide, he’s taking this poll seriously. The bookies’ favourite for this by-election at the time of writing is the Workers Party of Britain candidate George Galloway — yes, that George Galloway. There are two independent candidates called Howarth, which is not an uncommon surname in Rochdale: Michael Howarth runs a number of bars in the town, while William Howarth is a founder of “Parents Against Grooming” and is campaigning on issues related to child sexual abuse in Rochdale. The Official Monster Raving Loony Party have selected Ravin Rodent Subortna, who wants to make sure hedgehogs have lollipop signs to help them cross the roads and intends to campaign for the introduction of a 99p coin. And last on an all-male ballot of eleven candidates is independent David Tully, who runs a car repair firm in the town and is calling for the reinstatement of Rochdale’s maternity ward. It sums up how discordant this by-election has been that, on my research visit, Tully’s posters on the Rochdale Canal were surrounded by Canada geese having a noisy argument.
This is a by-election where much muck has been thrown around. And where there’s muck… So we’ll play out this Gothic horror of a campaign with a performance of Eric Ball’s arrangement of the Toccata from Léon Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique. It’s a favourite of brass band audiences, and the pupils of Wardle Academy are up to the challenge.
Before we leave this week’s Parliamentary Special to consider the five local by-elections which are also taking place this week, let me gently point out that these special editions of Andrew’s Previews take a lot of time and work to write. So, if you’ve enjoyed or learned something from this week’s column and would like to say “thank you” with a small financial donation, that would be greatly appreciated. Here’s the link.
Rochdale council wards: Balderstone and Kirkholt; Central Rochdale; Healey; Kingsway; Littleborough Lakeside; Milkstone and Deeplish (nearly all); Milnrow and Newhey; Smallbridge and Firgrove; Spotland and Falinge; Wardle, Shore and West Littleborough; Bamford (small part); Norden (small part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Manchester
Postcode districts: OL2, OL11, OL12, OL14, OL15, OL16
Azhar Ali (Lab)
Mark Coleman (Ind)
Simon Danczuk (Reform UK)
Iain Donaldson (LD)
Paul Ellison (C)
George Galloway (Workers Party of Britain)
Michael Howarth (Ind)
William Howarth (Ind)
Guy Otten (Grn)
Ravin Rodent Subortna (Loony)
David Tully (Ind)
December 2019 result Lab 24475 C 14807 Brexit Party 3867 LD 3312 Grn 986
June 2017 result Lab 29035 C 14216 LD 4027 UKIP 1641 Ind 883 Ind 242
May 2015 result Lab 20961 UKIP 8519 C 7742 LD 4667 Rochdale First 1535 Grn 1382 NF 433 Islam Zinda Baad Platform 191
May 2010 result Lab 16699 LD 15810 C 8305 NF 2236 UKIP 1999 Islam Zinda Baad Platform 545 Ind 313
Minster and Woodmansey; and
Tranby
East Riding council; caused respectively by the deaths of Liberal Democrat councillors Peter Astell and Viv Padden.
We’ll now turn our attention to the undercard of today’s Parliamentary Special, which features five local by-elections. Three of these contests are defended by the Liberal Democrats, two of those being in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
The East Riding’s county town is Beverley, which was an Anglo-Saxon town originally called Inderawuda — literally “in the wood of the Deira people”, Deira being an ancient kingdom which covered the east coast of Britain between the Tees and Humber. The name Inderawuda is tautological, because Deira’s name literally refers to oak trees — the Northern Irish city of Derry/Londonderry comes from the same, er, root. Deira itself subsequently merged with the kingdom of Bernicia to form Northumbria.
The first structure here was a church founded by John of Beverley, an eighth-century bishop of York who was subsequently canonised in 1037. St John’s remains still lie in Beverley Minster, which is one of England’s largest parish churches and is considered to be a Gothic masterpiece. It gives its name to Minster and Woodmansey ward, which covers the southern and eastern parts of Beverley (including some new development on the southern edge of the town) and most of the parish of Woodmansey to the south. Woodmansey is a village on the road between Beverley and Hull.
Tranby ward, which lies to the west of Hull, has the same boundaries as the parish of Anlaby and Anlaby Common. This is outer suburbia which is part of Hull’s urban area but has never been incorporated into the city, although it will form part of a Hull constituency (Hull West and Haltemprice) from the next general election. The name of Tranby ward refers to the country house of Tranby Croft, which is now home to a private school formed by the merger of the former Hull Grammar School and Hull High School for Girls.
Tranby Croft is a Victorian building which was built in 1876 for Arthur Wilson. He was a local shipping magnate and was a very rich man, who was acquainted with the Prince of Wales — the future Edward VII. In September 1890 the Prince travelled to Yorkshire for a few days to attend the St Leger race meeting at Doncaster, along with several members of his inner circle and their wives, and they stayed at Tranby Hall in the evenings. One of the attendees was Lt-Col Sir William Gordon-Cumming, a Scots Guards officer who had served in the Zulu, Anglo-Egyptian and Mahdist wars during his Army career; he also had a reputation as a womaniser, and had been described by Sporting Life as “possibly the most handsome man in London, and certainly the rudest”. The evenings’ entertainment included games of baccarat, a favourite card game of the Prince, which were played for high stakes: over two nights of play, Gordon-Cumming won a total of £225. He was then accused of cheating, and was forced to sign an agreement that he would never play cards again in return for the other guests keeping silent about what had happened.
Naturally, news of the whole affair was leaked shortly afterwards. Gordon-Cumming suspected that the leak had come from the Wilson family: he demanded a retraction, and then issued a lawsuit for slander. This went to trial at the High Court in London in June 1891. The Prince of Wales himself appeared in the witness box, giving evidence that he had not seen any cheating himself. Following what was widely thought to be a biased summing-up from the Lord Chief Justice, Gordon-Cumming lost his case after just 13 minutes of deliberations from the jury; he was dismissed from the Army the following day, and never re-entered polite society. (His former estate in Scotland is now Gordonstoun School.) The royal baccarat scandal, as it became known, took its toll on the Prince’s popularity, and he gave up the game thereafter — transferring his gambling to whist.
Both of the East Riding wards up for election today are currently represented by Conservative MPs. Tranby ward is in the Haltemprice and Howden constituency, which has been represented since its 1997 creation by former Cabinet member David Davis. This has been named by the Electoral Reform Society as the seat with the longest history of Conservative representation, having returned Conservative MPs continuously since 1837. However, this might change soon. For the next general election the Boundary Commission have transferred Tranby ward to Hull West and Haltemprice; this is the successor to the current Labour seat of Hull West and Hessle, but is projected to have voted Conservative on its new boundaries. Labour MP Emma Hardy, who is currently a shadow minister with the “environmental quality and resilience” portfolio, will have to gain her seat all over again if she wants to stay in Parliament. Graham Stuart, a junior minister in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, is the current Conservative MP for the safe seat of Beverley and Holderness which covers Minster and Woodmansey ward.
The local authority here is the large East Riding council, which covers nearly everything in the old East Riding outside Hull city. That includes a lot of very Tory countryside, but the Conservatives lost control of the council in 2023 and now run East Yorkshire as a minority. The latest composition has 29 Conservative councillors, 19 Lib Dems plus these two vacancies, nine independents, five Labour and three councillors from the regionalist Yorkshire Party.
In this century Minster and Woodmansey ward had traditionally been a tight Labour-Conservative marginal, with the Tories normally having the upper hand in recent years. So it’s a little surprising that the ward returned a full slate of Lib Dems in 2023, although the party had come a close third four years previously. Shares of the vote were 42% for the Lib Dems and 27% each for the Conservatives and Labour, whose lead candidates tied for the runner-up spot on 1,137 votes each.
Tranby ward has much more of a Lib Dem tradition, and the party has held at least one seat in this ward continuously since 2003: the other seat went to Labour in 2011 and to the Conservatives in 2015. The Tory candidate who failed to defend that seat in 2019 was Craig Ulliott, who was subsequently embroiled in his own cheating scandal: he was forced to step down as the party’s prospective candidate for the 2021 Humberside police and crime commissioner election following allegations that he had fraudulently exaggerated his police experience. In 2023 Tranby voted 51% for the Lib Dem slate, 21% for Labour and 20% for the Conservatives.
These by-elections are to replace two Lib Dem councillors who both passed away on the same day last year, 3rd December. Peter Astell of Minster and Woodmansey ward, who was aged 66, had been an East Riding councillor only since May 2023 but had fifteen years’ service on Beverley town council, including two terms as the town’s mayor. Viv Padden, who was 79, had served on Hessle town council before being elected to East Riding council in 2019; his pre-politics career was based on or around the sea, with service in the Royal Navy, spells on North Sea oil rigs and some years running a fish and chip shop.
The Tranby by-election has provoked a political row, after former Lib Dem group leader David Nolan produced leaflets for the campaign which were rejected by the party over comments about Yorkshire devolution. This was one of the matters which led Councillor Nolan to defect to Labour recently.
Defending Tranby for the Lib Dems is Ross Harrison, who is a Hessle town councillor and works as a management consultant for a Big Four accounting firm. The Labour candidate is Malcolm Stather, who contested the neighbouring ward of Willerby and Kirk Ella last year. Standing for the Conservatives is Michael Whitehead, who is a former president of the Hull and Humber Chamber of Commerce. There is a four-candidate ballot paper in Tranby, with Jane Robinson standing for the Greens.
The same four parties contest the Minster and Woodmansey by-election. Here the defending Lib Dem candidate is Tony Henderson, who is the finance director for the Cherry Tree Community Centre in Beverley. Both of the joint runners-up here in 2023 are back for another go: David Elvidge was previously a long-serving Conservative councillor for this ward, while Ron Laden is a teacher and former lieutenant-colonel in the Army. Jonathan Stephenson completes the Minster and Woodmansey candidate list for the Green Party.
Minster and Woodmansey
Parliamentary constituency: Beverley and Holderness
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Beverley and Holderness
ONS Travel to Work Area: Hull
Postcode districts: HU6, HU16, HU17
David Elvidge (C)
Tony Henderson (LD)
Ron Laden (Lab)
Jonathan Stephenson (Grn)
May 2023 result LD 1783/1764/1603 C 1137/1117/1104 Lab 1137/1131/996 Alliance for Democracy and Freedom 182
May 2019 result C 1584/1401/1390 Lab 1350/1292/1188 LD 1112/1106/1042
May 2015 result C 3050/2947/2469 Lab 2341/2256/2042 UKIP 1759 Beverley Party 1306/1021 LD 613/480
May 2011 result C 2075/2064/1764 Lab 1733/1559/1552 Grn 889 LD 857 Ind 689
May 2007 result C 1555/1518/1470 Lab 1483/1472/1337 LD 1068/938/800 Grn 611
May 2003 result Lab 1866/1645/1465 C 1127/1006/977 LD 785/618/524 Ind 574 Grn 319
Previous results in detail
Tranby
Parliamentary constituency: Haltemprice and Howden
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice
ONS Travel to Work Area: Hull
Postcode districts: HU4, HU5, HU10, HU14
Ross Harrison (LD)
Jane Robinson (Grn)
Malcolm Stather (Lab)
Michael Whitehead (C)
May 2023 result LD 1207/1115 Lab 496/423 C 467 Grn 201
May 2019 result LD 1034/1008 C 872 Ind 678 Lab 332
May 2015 result LD 2114/1607 C 1773/1424 Lab 1267/1058
May 2011 result LD 1093/1046 Lab 1077/1058 C 683/581 English Democrats 394/367
May 2007 result LD 1605/1557 C 618/607 English Democrats 612/544 Lab 202/183
May 2003 result LD 1544/1491 C 759/679 Lab 282/230
Previous results in detail
Central and Northgate
Great Yarmouth council, Norfolk; caused by the disqualification of Labour councillor Michael Smith-Clare.
Our Labour local by-election defence this week falls in Great Yarmouth, a town which has very little room to grow. It’s located on a narrow peninsula between the North Sea and the River Yare, which was once the boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. On the sea side is a wide, sandy beach. On the river side is a series of quays, which were once home to a herring industry and now service energy from the North Sea — whether in fossil or renewable form.
Central and Northgate ward covers the town centre together with the area around Northgate Street to the north. Also within the ward boundary is a large expanse of marshland to the west, nearly all of which is part of the Broads national park. The suburb of Runham Vauxhall, where Great Yarmouth’s railway terminus is located, is an enclave within the national park: travellers who cross the River Bure between the railway station and the town centre cross the park boundary twice in doing so.
Great Yarmouth has been a seaside resort for centuries, and this ward includes one of its attractions. Recently restored and reopened, the Venetian Gardens consists of formal gardens and canals on the seafront; pedalos are available for hire. Just outside the ward boundary is Joyland, which according to Google Maps is “temporarily closed”. No joy here, clearly.
Seaside resorts are not areas noted for their prosperity, and Central and Northgate ward’s census return paints an appropriate picture. It makes the top 60 wards in England and Wales for those educated to Level 1 — that is, 1–4 GCSEs or equivalent — and is in the top 80 wards for people in “routine” occupations (25.9%).
This normally produces a safe-Labour ward, but one which is under threat from the radical right. The UK Independence Party won Central and Northgate ward in the 2014 and 2016 elections; when Great Yarmouth moved off the thirds electoral cycle to whole-council elections in 2019, the three seats here split two for Labour and one for UKIP. UKIP didn’t defend their council seat in 2023 and it was easily gained by Labour; shares of the vote were 46% for the Labour slate, 25% for the Conservatives and 18% for the outgoing UKIP councillor Carrie Talbot, who unsuccessfully sought re-election as an independent. The ward is part of the Yarmouth North and Central division of the county council, which includes the more Conservative-inclined Yarmouth North ward and was a Conservative gain from Labour at the 2021 Norfolk county elections.
Great Yarmouth council as a whole is in a rather delicate balance. The 2023 elections returned 19 Conservative and 18 Labour councillors, with two independents holding the balance of power; the Conservatives run the borough as a minority. The borough has the same boundaries as the Great Yarmouth parliamentary seat, which the Boundary Commission have left unchanged: this seat has voted for the government at every general election from 1983 onwards, making it a bellwether. Since 2010 the MP for Great Yarmouth has been Sir Brandon Lewis, who has served in Cabinet under three prime ministers: he was party chairman under Theresa May, Northern Ireland secretary under Boris Johnson and Lord Chancellor for the five minutes that a fellow Norfolk MP, Liz Truss, had the top job.
In 2017 and 2019 Lewis was opposed by Labour parliamentary candidate Mike Smith-Clare, who has been the Norfolk county councillor for Yarmouth Nelson and Southtown since 2017 and has represented this ward on the borough council since 2018. In December he became deputy leader of the Labour group on Norfolk county council. Smith-Clare left Great Yarmouth council in January, with the local press initially swallowing the Labour group’s line that he had resigned for personal and health reasons (he was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder); however, it subsequently became clear that he had in fact been automatically disqualified for not attending any meetings of the council in six months.
Not an auspicious start to this by-election campaign for the defending Labour candidate James Dwyer-McCluskey, who is described as a local father and rugby player. He is top of a ballot paper of three candidates who all contested Yarmouth North ward last year. In that election Dwyer-McCluskey finished nine votes short of election, while the Conservative candidate Paul Hammond lost his council seat by just a single vote. Hammond had represented Yarmouth North since 2016, originally being elected for UKIP, and he has previously run a holiday business on the Yarmouth seafront. There is no independent candidate this time, so the Lib Dems’ Tony Harris completes the ballot paper.
Parliamentary constituency: Great Yarmouth
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Great Yarmouth
Norfolk county council division: Yarmouth North and Central
ONS Travel to Work Area: Great Yarmouth
Postcode districts: NR29, NR30, NR31
James Dwyer-McCluskey (Lab)
Paul Hammond (C)
Tony Harris (LD)
May 2023 result Lab 596/578/574 C 318/295/258 Ind 228 LD 153
May 2019 result Lab 528/485/438 UKIP 453 Ind 422 C 287/270/207
May 2018 double vacancy Lab 651/599 C 392/363 UKIP 246/175 Tribune Party 61
May 2016 result UKIP 602 Lab 523 C 247 LD 85
May 2015 result Lab 1141 UKIP 978 C 731 Grn 110 Patriotic Socialist 11
May 2014 result UKIP 858 Lab 588 C 303 Grn 104
May 2012 result Lab 755 C 317 UKIP 295 LD 36
May 2011 result Lab 960 C 651 LD 117
May 2010 result Lab 1256 C 1089 LD 484
May 2008 result Lab 636 C 560 UKIP 143 LD 135
May 2007 result Lab 659 C 492 UKIP 155 LD 150 Grn 99
May 2006 result Lab 688 C 522 LD 150 UKIP 122 Grn 96
June 2004 result Lab 773/746/736 C 719/632/538 LD 318
Previous results in detail
Henfield; and
Southwater North
Horsham council, West Sussex; caused respectively by the death of independent councillor Malcolm Eastwood and the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Mike Wood.
We’ll finish for the week in rural West Sussex with two by-elections to Horsham council. This covers a large swathe of inland Sussex running all the way down to the crest of the South Downs, and it’s in this rural area that we find the village of Henfield. Henfield lies about 16 miles south of Crawley, and is claimed to have one of the world’s oldest cricket clubs and the UK’s oldest Scout group.
Some miles to the north-west of here we find Southwater, a large village to the south of Horsham which used to be surprisingly industrial. Southwater is built on high-quality clay, and it became a centre for brickmaking. The old brickworks site is now a country park; the village around it has been almost entirely developed since 1970 and is still growing strongly. Southwater is now large enough that the A24 Horsham-Worthing road bypasses it.
The Southwater North ward ranks 3rd in England and Wales for people with Level 2 qualifications (5+ GCSE passes or equivalent) and makes the top 20 wards in England and Wales for people aged 16 or 17 (6.2% of the population). This is because of the presence here of Christ’s Hospital, a public school which was founded in 1552, received its first royal charter from Edward VI in 1553, and moved here from Newgate in the City of London in 1902. The school has its own railway station on the Arun Valley line, with hourly trains to Horsham and beyond to London. Since I’ve given you a lot of music in this week’s column, it’s only fair to highlight the school’s marching band: the Christ’s Hospital Band is a busy ensemble, with regular engagements including the Lord Mayor’s Show in London each November. (The march being played here is Kenneth Alford’s Eagle Squadron.)
The county of West Sussex currently has a full slate of eight Conservative MPs. Henfield is represented in Parliament by Andrew Griffith, who is the MP for Arundel and South Downs and is a junior minister in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Horsham’s MP Sir Jeremy Quin, who took over last month as chairman of the Defence select committee, represents Southwater North. Both of them have large majorities, as do the Conservative county councillors for the Henfield, and Southwater and Nuthurst divisions of West Sussex county council.
West Sussex’s district councils are quite another matter. The 2023 council elections here saw a Conservative bloodbath, and the only district in the county which still has a Conservative majority is Adur district — which didn’t hold elections last year. Horsham council is now run by the Liberal Democrats, who won overall control in May with 28 seats against 11 Conservatives, 8 Greens (who are concentrated in the district’s rural southern wards) and a single independent.
That independent councillor was Malcolm Eastwood, who was in his first term as a councillor for Henfield ward. He had been chairman of Henfield parish council for the previous six years, being elected to the council in 2015 after retiring from a 37-year career in banking. That included a year as CEO of the Kazakhstan operations of HSBC. Unfortunately Eastwood didn’t get as long a career in politics: he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour within a few months of his election to Horsham council, and he passed away in December.
Eastwood had topped the poll in Henfield last year in a close four-way result, polling 766 votes against 753 for Conservative councillor Josh Potts, 742 for the Green Party’s lead candidate Gill Perry and 590 for Labour’s Fiona Ayres. With two seats available, Eastwood and Potts were elected with majorities of 24 and 11 votes respectively. In percentage terms that works out at 25–25–24–19, although the partial slates from the Conservatives and Labour mean that percentage vote share calculations here are rather more unreliable than usual.
The Liberal Democrat councillors are concentrated in Horsham town and its immediate hinterland, which definitely includes Southwater North ward. This ward was a Lib Dem gain from the Conservatives in 2023, by the rather narrow margin of 44–38. Top of the poll here was Lib Dem candidate Mike Wood, who handed in his resignation from the council in January: he has been promoted at work into a role which will involve a lot of international travel, and which no doubt pays more than being a councillor.
Defending Southwater North for the Liberal Democrats is Gary Hayes, who previously fought this ward in 2019 and finished as runner-up. The Conservatives have selected Claire Vickers who lost her seat in this ward last year, a rather embarrassing loss given that she was leader of the council at the time; Vickers was first elected to Horsham council in 1991 and had continuous service in Southwater North and the previous Southwater ward (which this column wrote about some years ago in Andrew’s Previews 2016, page 286) from 2007 to 2023. Also standing here are Minty Barlow for Labour and Jennifer Nuin Smith for the Greens.
There is no defending independent candidate in Horsham, so we have a free-for-all! The Conservatives have selected another former district councillor who was defeated last year: Tim Lloyd was previously a Horsham councillor from 2015–23, most recently representing Steyning and Ashurst ward. The Green Party’s Gill Perry is back for another go after coming so close to election last year; she is a retired headteacher and Henfield parish councillor. Another Henfield parish councillor returning from the 2023 district election is Labour’s Fiona Ayres. The Lib Dems’ Nico Kearns completes the Henfield ballot paper.
Coming up next week, we have an unusual Wednesday by-election in Llanelli followed by four polls on Thursday, including a Mayoral Special in Lewisham. Stay tuned for that.
Henfield
Parliamentary constituency: Arundel and South Downs
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Arundel and South Downs
West Sussex county council division: Henfield
ONS Travel to Work Area: Crawley
Postcode districts: BN5, BN44
Fiona Ayres (Lab)
Nico Kearns (LD)
Gill Perry (Grn)
Tim Lloyd (C)
May 2023 result Ind 766 C 753 Grn 742/267 Lab 590 LD 193/83
May 2019 result Ind 1088 C 614/507 Grn 531 Lab 505
Previous results in detail
Southwater North
Parliamentary constituency: Horsham
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Horsham
West Sussex county council division: Southwater and Nuthurst
ONS Travel to Work Area: Crawley
Postcode districts: RH12, RH13
Minty Barlow (Lab)
Gary Hayes (LD)
Jennifer Nuin Smith (Grn)
Claire Vickers (C)
May 2023 result LD 732/730 C 633/605 Lab 155/126 Grn 151/149
May 2019 result C 842/814 LD 561/557 Lab 155/113
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
