Previewing the six by-elections of 16th November 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Six by-elections on 16th November 2023, and it’s a bit of a local special with one defence each for the Conservatives, Labour, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National Party, and two open seats — one vacated by an independent councillor, the other by a localist party. We have a hugely varied selection of areas and there will be something this week for everyone to enjoy. Let’s start on the outskirts of the Greatest Town in the Known Universe:
Kearsley; and
Westhoughton North and Hunger Hill
Bolton council, Greater Manchester; caused respectively by the resignations of One Kearsley councillor Paul Heslop and Conservative councillor Bernadette Eckersley-Fallon.
“Between Manchester and Bolton the ugliness is so complete that it is almost exhilarating. It challenges you to live there.”
Challenge accepted. That was J B Priestley, writing in the 1930s in his wildly-influential book English Journey. As well as becoming the template for a whole genre of “it’s grim up north” travelogues which authors from George Orwell to Stuart Maconie have enthusiastically mined ever since, Priestley’s journey was influential on the domestic politics of the late 1930s and 1940s. Along with follow-up work by Priestley, this book has been credited with helping Labour’s win in the 1945 general election.
Well, let’s look at what Priestley might have seen between Manchester and Bolton ninety years ago. This isn’t too difficult for your columnist. Twelve minutes’ brisk walk from my house brings me to Nob End, at the end of Little Lever (for where else would you expect to find Nob End?) Here the land suddenly falls away towards the River Irwell, a long way below. So what do we see from this vantage point?
A set of derelict canal locks tumbles steeply down towards Prestolee Aqueduct, from where it’s an easy walk along the canal towpath to the village of Prestolee. We’re less than eight miles from central Manchester here, but Prestolee is one of the most isolated places you’ll ever see in a metropolitan county. Effectively it’s an island between the Irwell and the canal, with the only good road in and out being a bridge over the Irwell. On the rare occasions that your columnist ventures down here, the air always seems to be filled with the chimes of an ice cream van which I have never yet tracked down.
Perhaps it’s a mark of just how isolated Prestolee is that we can still find here something that was once ubiquitous in the Manchester area: a cotton mill. Kearsley Mill is an enormous structure which dominates this corner of the Irwell valley, built in 1905–06 over several stories with 240,000 square feet of floor space. It is listed at Grade II, and some of its space is still in use today for textile manufacturing.
Continuing to walk along the canal towpath with the sounds of the Phantom Ice Cream Van in the air, we come to the tiny settlement of Ringley. There’s not much here: a pub called the Horseshoe which used to stand on the canal bank, and the church of St Saviour where, many years ago, your columnist was baptised. The riverside view from the Ringley Old Bridge (now a footbridge only) is rather pleasant; but this wasn’t the case in Priestley’s day when pedestrians crossing the bridge could admire the chimneys and cooling towers (one of which was reputedly the tallest in the world when it was built) of the coal-fired Kearsley Power Station. This generated electricity for the local area from 1929 to 1980, and in its early days was noted for the efficiency of its power. The only trace of it in the landscape today is the high-voltage power lines which still converge on the power station’s former location.
On the south side of the Irwell we find the main population centres of this ward: Stoneclough in the river valley, and Kearsley itself above it. (Pronunciation guide: the first syllable of Kearsley is “curs”, not “Keir’s”.) Kearsley is notable as the location of England’s only Schoenstatt Shrine, a small Catholic chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. There are around 200 Schoenstatt Shrines around the world, all of which are copies of the original chapel in the German village of that name.
The power station may be long gone, but there is still electricity coming into the grid from Kearsley thanks to a large solar farm next to the M61 motorway, which generates power during daylight hours. (This doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it never stops raining.) The adjacent road holds the title of being the UK’s largest motorway, with at its widest point seventeen running lanes and eight hard shoulders spread across a number of parallel carriageways. Which your columnist can admire at leisure when the whole thing jams to a halt every morning.
The main public transport link for the area is the publicly-controlled Bee Network number 8 bus route, which runs through Kearsley along the Devil’s Highway — the A666 — on its way from Bolton to Manchester. Kearsley railway station has a much less frequent service (and is closed on Sundays), with most trains running through here non-stop. The Bolton to Manchester line saw a major upgrade in the last decade, with electrification and the complete rebuilding of the Farnworth railway tunnel resulting in better trains and higher speeds on this route.
However, the Bolton railway electrification was delivered late and over budget, partly due to the collapse of its main contractor Carillion with the work part finished. Exactly the same thing has happened to the next stage of rail upgrades in this area, the electrification of the line from Bolton to Wigan through Westhoughton: this was knocked off course when its contractor Buckingham Group went bust over the summer with the work part finished, and the latest estimate is that electric trains will not run through Westhoughton until the summer of 2025 — a year later than originally planned.
Which brings us to Westhoughton, a town located in the terra incognita that lies beyond the Chequerbent roundabout. Of the towns in Bolton borough, Westhoughton is the odd one out: it’s separated from Bolton town by high ground and the M61 motorway, has rather more in common with the neighbouring towns in Wigan borough, and has Wigan telephone numbers. Westhoughton’s economy was also traditionally based on coalmining rather than textiles.
This had consequences, as a walk along the town’s high street will tell you. Several buildings on the high street bear memorial tablets with lists of names: victims not of the First World War, but of the Pretoria Pit disaster. Just before dawn on 21st December 1910, a huge underground explosion at the Pretoria Pit, or Hulton Colliery to give it its proper name, wiped out 344 of Westhoughton’s men and boys. This remains the third-worst mining disaster in the UK.
The Pretoria Pit explosion killed a large number of the players and half of the committee of one of Lancashire’s most famous brass bands. The remaining members of Wingates Band were rather busy at funerals for some time afterwards, with the mourning music of choice being the Dead March from Handel’s oratorio Saul.
Wingates are still very much in business within the top rank of British brass banding, and they are celebrating their 150th anniversary this year. Their next gig is a Christmas concert, taking place on 12th December at St John’s Westhoughton.
We can’t talk about Keawyed City without mentioning the local yokel legend. No, not the Houghton Weavers: I mean the old story about a local farmer who found that one of his cows had got its head stuck in a five-barred gate. Said farmer then proceeded to free the cow from the gate by cutting the cow’s head off. And ever since “Keawyed” has been a rather derogatory term for Westhoughtoners.
There’s still a fair amount of countryside around. Pretoria Pit is long gone, and its site is located within Hulton Park which is an area of country park to the east of Westhoughton. But perhaps not for much longer. In 2010 Hulton Park was sold by the Hulton family who had owned it for centuries; the purchasers were Peel Group, who want to redevelop the park for housing and a championship-standard golf course capable of hosting the Ryder Cup. This has been extremely controversial in Westhoughton, and it’s fair to say that Bolton council’s planning committee were very unhappy that their rejection of Peel’s plans was overruled by a central government planning inspector.
From 1885 to 1983 Westhoughton was the centre of its own parliamentary seat, which covered the small mining towns between Bolton and Wigan. This was one of the few constituencies which voted Labour at every election in the inter-war years, even in the disaster of 1931. So it might come as a bit of a surprise to learn that the present seat covering Westhoughton, Bolton West, is the safest Conservative seat in Greater Manchester. This says a lot about how far the Tory vote has shrunk in traditional middle-class areas of the county like Altrincham and Cheadle, but it also helps that Bolton West includes extremely affluent Bolton suburban wards like Heaton and Smithills which were not in the old Westhoughton seat. Tory backbencher Chris Green has been the MP for Bolton West since 2015.
Kearsley has had a Labour MP continuously since 1935, except for a period between 1981 and 1983 after the Farnworth MP John Roper defected to the SDP. Until quite recently Kearsley’s secondary school was named after George Tomlinson, who was MP for Farnworth from 1938 until his death in 1952 and served for more than four years as education secretary in the Attlee cabinets.
There’s an excellent archive of the 1938 by-election which elected Tomlinson thanks to Mass Observation, which was active up the road in Bolton at the time and whose archives are now held by Bolton council. The council have put up a series of Mass Observation photographs at boltonworktown.co.uk, and this photograph of polling day in the Farnworth by-election — 27th January 1938 — is the wallpaper on your columnist’s laptop. The location is the Moor Hall on Church Street in Farnworth, which no longer exists today but was just about within the boundaries of the modern Kearsley ward.
The Farnworth constituency was split up in 1983 and Kearsley was placed within the new seat of Bolton South East; this has been represented since 2010 by Labour’s Yasmin Qureshi, who was until yesterday the shadow minister for women and equalities. For the next general election Qureshi’s seat will be substantially redrawn to become something similar to the Farnworth constituency of old, but with the new name of Bolton South and Walkden. Readers of a sensitive disposition are advised not to find out what the local pronunciation of “Walkden” is.
The local authority here is Bolton council, which in recent elections has been notable for the presence of a large number of “hyperlocal” political parties: effectively these function as pressure groups for the forgotten towns outside Bolton itself. In March 2018 I covered a by-election in the former Farnworth ward and I wrote (Andrew’s Previews 2018, page 98):
… the Bolton News have been giving some prominence to a new localist party, Farnworth and Kearsley First — and it’s surprising in retrospect that nobody has previously tried to form a localist party in Bolton borough given its residents’ reputation for insularity.
Well, I had not anticipated just how much hyperlocalism would take off here. Labour lost their overall majority on the council in May 2018, and a Conservative minority administration took over with the support of UKIP, the Lib Dems and the localist groups.
By 2023 — when Bolton council held a whole-council election on new ward boundaries — there were at least six different localist parties standing candidates, and three of them contested Kearsley ward. This ward has swung back and forth in seemingly-bizarre directions over this century: Kearsley was a strong Lib Dem area until the advent of the Coalition, then voted Labour, then voted 45% UKIP in 2016. Farnworth and Kearsley First won all three seats easily over the period 2018–21; but by 2022 the localists here had split. The outgoing FKF councillor stood for re-election as a joint candidate of Bolton for Change and Reform UK, finishing fifth; Farnworth and Kearsley First placed second, and former Labour councillor Debbie Newall topped the poll for a new localist group, “One Kearsley”. (Because God forbid there’s more than one Kearsley.)
One Kearsley did OK in the all-up 2023 election, topping the poll and taking all three seats in Kearsley ward with 46% of the vote. Farnworth and Kearsley First placed second on 24%, and Labour were third with 14%.
The localist parties have not had as much success in Westhoughton, which already had a lively political scene. The former Westhoughton North and Chew Moor ward had elected councillors from all three main parties since 2015, and also had the unusual distinction of voting for a transgender councillor. Zoë Kirk-Robinson, who topped the poll here in 2015, was (and, I think, still is) the only openly-trans candidate ever to be elected on the Conservative ticket. She served one term before losing her seat to the Liberal Democrats’ Bernadette Eckersley-Fallon in 2019.
Boundary changes for the 2023 election transferred the village of Chew Moor out of the ward and forced a name change to “Westhoughton North and Hunger Hill”, the latter being a village on the main road towards Bolton which is outside the Westhoughton parish boundary. This boundary change might have slightly weakened the Conservative position, and the 2023 elections here turned in a very close result. Top of the poll was essentially a tie between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives; both slates polled 30%, with the Lib Dems winning one seat and the Conservatives two. Eckersley-Fallon, who had defected from the Liberal Democrats to the Conservatives in 2021, won the final seat with a majority of just one vote over her running-mate Andrea Finney. Labour came in third with 20%, while the Westhoughton First Independents candidate had 10%.
Overall the 2023 Bolton elections returned 26 Labour councillors, 17 Conservatives, 6 Lib Dems, 6 councillors for Horwich and Blackrod First, the 3 One Kearsley candidates, and two seats for Farnworth and Kearsley First. There were no longer the votes for the Conservative minority administration to continue. The Labour group leader became Leader of the Council (with One Kearsley voting in favour and Horwich and Blackrod First abstaining), and Labour now run the council as a minority.
The Labour position here improved last month when the One Kearsley group suddenly dissolved. That party’s leader Paul Heslop resigned from the council in October, and his two ward colleagues Debbie Newall and Melanie Livesey then joined the Labour group bringing their numbers up to 28. Like Eckersley-Fallon, who resigned the following day, Heslop had served since 2019 and had changed parties during his time on Bolton council; he was one of the founders of Farnworth and Kearsley First, and was first elected on their ticket. If Labour can gain both of these by-elections, they will have half of the seats on the council.
Westhoughton North and Hunger Hill is the only seat the Conservatives are defending this week. Their candidate is Andrea Finney, who won the previous Westhoughton North and Chew Moor ward in 2021 before losing re-election here by one vote in May. The Lib Dems have selected Deirdre McGeown, who lost out by 13 votes in Westhoughton South ward in May; she is a Westhoughton town councillor representing Daisy Hill, which is not part of this ward. Standing for Labour is Karen Millington, who wasn’t much further off being elected for Westhoughton South ward six months ago. Jack Speight, who has contested this ward and its predecessor at every election since 2018, stands again for the Westhoughton First Independents; he is the Westhoughton town councillor for Chequerbent. Also standing are Jeff Armstrong as a joint Reform UK and Bolton for Change candidate, and Wendy Shepherd for the Green Party. Bernadette Eckersley-Fallon had been elected in third place in May, so the winner of this by-election will not serve for long before needing to seek re-election in May 2024.
The implosion of One Kearsley means that the party are not defending the Kearsley by-election. We have a free-for-all, I repeat we have a free-for-all! The runner-up from May’s election is back for another go: she is Tracey Wilkinson, who represented this ward as a Farnworth and Kearsley First councillor from 2021 to May 2023. Labour have selected Jackie Schofield, who was a close runner-up in the neighbouring Farnworth South ward in May. The Conservatives, who placed fourth here in May with 9%, have selected Malaika Dean who was wasn’t far off election in Breightmet ward in May; she is hoping to join her father Mudasir Dean on the council. Also standing are Dale Gregory for Reform UK and Bolton for Change, Charles Cooper for the Lib Dems and Alan Johnson for the Green Party. The winner of this by-election will serve until 2026; and with One Kearsley’s 46% of the vote up for grabs, expect some wild swings in the vote shares.
Kearsley
Parliamentary constituency: Bolton South East
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Bolton South and Walkden
ONS Travel to Work Area: Manchester
Postcode districts: BL4, M26
Charles Cooper (LD)
Malaika Dean (C)
Dale Gregory (Reform UK and Bolton for Change)
Alan Johnson (Grn)
Jackie Schofield (Lab)
Tracey Wilkinson (Farnworth and Kearsley First)
May 2023 result One Kearsley 1350/1343/1121 Farnworth and Kearsley First 686 Lab 411/385/357 C 270/221/127 Reform UK and Bolton for Change 180 LD 28/26/14
Previous results in detail
Westhoughton North and Hunger Hill
Parliamentary constituency: Bolton West
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Bolton West
ONS Travel to Work Area: Manchester
Postcode districts: BL3, BL5, BL6, WN2
Jeff Armstrong (Reform UK and Bolton for Change)
Andrea Finney (C)
Deirdre McGeown (LD)
Karen Millington (Lab)
Wendy Shepherd (Grn)
Jack Speight (Westhoughton First Ind)
May 2023 result LD 1135/1049/981 C 1111/1065/1064 Lab 759/716/644 Westhoughton First Ind 393 Reform UK and Bolton for Change 192 Grn 173
Previous results in detail
Aberystwyth Penparcau
Ceredigion council, Mid and West Wales; caused by the resignation of Plaid Cymru councillor Steve Davies.
For our Welsh by-election this week we have come to Penparcau. This is a large village which effectively functions as a suburb of Aberystwyth; it is located to the south-east of the town centre, between the two rivers which flow into Cardigan Bay at Aberystwyth — not just the Ystwyth as you’d expect from the town’s name, but also the Rheidol. All traffic entering Aberystwyth from the south will pass through Penparcau before entering the town centre.
Aberystwyth is the largest town in the Welsh county of Ceredigion, a generally rural and strongly Welsh-speaking area. This is fertile territory for the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, who hold the Ceredigion seat at both Westminster and Senedd levels. Elin Jones MS has represented the area continuously since the creation of the original Welsh Assembly in 1999 and she is currently the Llywydd, or presiding officer, of the Senedd. Ben Lake has been the Plaid MP for Ceredigion since 2017, when he gained the seat from the Liberal Democrats; his seat will be expanded into northern Pembrokeshire for the next general election, with the new name of Ceredigion Preseli.
The local authority here is Ceredigion council, which has a small majority for Plaid Cymru — currently 20 out of 38 seats plus this vacancy. Plaid have held at least one of the two seats in Aberystwyth Penparcau ward since 2008, and the Plaid slate won both seats in 2012 and 2022 — on the latter occasion defeating former Lib Dem councillor Glyndwr Edwards, who unsuccessfully sought re-election as an independent. The headline shares of the vote here last year were 47% for the Plaid Cymru slate, 28% for Labour and 14% for Edwards.
The outgoing Plaid Cymru councillor Steve Davies had represented this ward since 2012 and had also served as Mayor of Aberystwyth. Despite that, in 2022 he scraped re-election by the skin of his teeth, winning the second seat with a majority of just 30 votes over Labour and polling far below his running mate. This suggests that Davies’ personal vote was either negligible or negative, which is pretty unusual for a sitting councillor.
Well, Steve Davies has been in trouble for some time: a number of complaints have been made about his conduct since 2020. Davies was suspended from Plaid Cymru in January, and in July the Public Service Ombudsman for Wales suspended his membership of both Ceredigion council and Aberystwyth town council, pending a full investigation into alleged incidents of inappropriate behaviour towards a number of women. Aberystwyth Town FC have reportedly banned him from their social club. Davies eventually resigned his seat in October, telling the local press he had been advised to do so by Ceredigion council’s legal department; one suspects he was about to be disqualified under the six-month non-attendance rule.
So we have a by-election. Defending the seat for Plaid Cymru is Shelley Childs, who is heavily involved with Aberystwyth’s cycling community; his day job is selling bicycle tyres. Labour have reselected their runner-up candidate from last time Alex Mangold; he is a German lecturer at Aberystwyth University. S4C football commentator Tomi Morgan is standing as an independent candidate: he is a former striker and manager with Aberystwyth Town who now coaches Penparcau FC, and last year he came out of retirement and scored a hat-trick for Penparcau — at the age of 65. Also standing are Bryony Davies for the Lib Dems and Ewan Lawry for the Conservatives.
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Ceredigion
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Ceredigion Preseli
ONS Travel to Work Area: Aberystwyth
Postcode district: SY23
Shelley Childs (PC)
Bryony Davies (LD)
Ewan Lawry (C)
Alex Mangold (Lab)
Tomi Morgan (Ind)
May 2022 result PC 515/338 Lab 308 Ind 157 LD 127
Previous results in detail
Wrington
North Somerset council; caused by the resignation of independent councillor Steve Hogg.
For our rural by-election of the week we travel into the Mendip hills, a few miles to the south-west of Bristol. This brings us to a ward containing five villages of which Wrington — with 1,832 electors on the roll — is the largest. Wrington is located off the A38, which was the main road going south-west from Bristol until the M5 motorway was completed.
The A38 is now the main transport link for the ward’s largest employer. Bristol Airport is ranked as the UK’s eighth busiest airport, handling around 8 million passengers a year — and that’s before an expansion plan that should be just about starting to get underway, rather in the teeth of local opposition. The airport is a base for a number of low-cost carriers, and its busiest route — with 361,000 passengers in 2022 — is to Alicante.
Which makes this area an appropriate political base for one of the more notorious jetsetters in recent UK politics. Wrington is part of the North Somerset constituency, which has been represented since 1992 by the former defence secretary and international trade secretary Liam Fox. He has a safe seat.
The same used to be said of North Somerset council, which is larger than the constituency of the same name and also takes in the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare. However, the North Somerset Conservatives have crashed and burned in recent council elections: the Tories fell from 36 seats in 2015 to just 13 in 2019, and a rainbow coalition of all the other parties took control. The May 2023 council elections turned in a very similar result to 2019: 13 Conservatives, 10 Labour, 9 Lib Dems, 8 independents, 7 Greens and three Portishead localists were elected. The rainbow coalition is continuing, under a Lib Dem leader.
It’s fair to say that Wrington ward has not looked favourably upon the Conservatives in recent local elections. In 2015, the first contest on the current ward boundaries, the ward narrowly returned a Lib Dem councillor who subsequently stood down after one term. Wrington was then gained by independent councillor Steve Hogg, who won in both 2019 and 2023 with very large majorities. The May 2023 election here was a straight fight between Hogg and the Conservatives, with Hogg prevailing by 78–22. In his first term Hogg had briefly served on North Somerset council’s cabinet, with the highways and transport portfolio.
Steve Hogg tendered his resignation in October because he has moved away from the district — he is now resident in Wells, which is outside the North Somerset council area. There is no independent candidate standing to replace him, so we have this week’s second free-for-all! The Conservatives have selected Annabel Tall, a chartered engineer who is a former North Somerset councillor (Yatton ward, 2011–15) and came close to winning here in 2015. To take the other candidates in ballot paper order, the Green candidate Thomas Daw is a parish councillor in nearby Congresbury who works at McDonalds; the Labour candidate is Steven Lister, who contested Portishead South ward in May; and the Lib Dems have selected Samantha Louden-Cooke, a former mayor of Kenilworth in Warwickshire who now lectures in international relations and politics at the University of Gloucestershire.
Parliamentary constituency: North Somerset
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): North Somerset
ONS Travel to Work Area: Weston-super-Mare
Postcode districts: BS40, BS48, BS49
Thomas Daw (Grn)
Steven Lister (Lab)
Samantha Louden-Cooke (LD)
Annabel Tall (C)
May 2023 result Ind 944 C 268
May 2019 result Ind 1180 C 220 Lab 105
May 2015 result LD 1168 C 1119 Lab 246
Previous results in detail
Rossington and Bawtry
Doncaster council, South Yorkshire; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Barry Johnson.
Back to the North Country for this week’s Labour defence. We’ve come east of the Pennines to reach a mining centre of rather recent vintage. New Rossington is a village just to the south of Doncaster, which was called into existence in the 20th century to house workers at Rossington Main Colliery when it was sunk in the 1910s. Rossington Main was one of the UK’s last deep pits, finally closing in 2007 although coal volumes in its final years were much reduced from the colliery’s heyday. The pithead site has now been redeveloped for housing.
New Rossington and its older twin village of Rossington lie either side of the East Coast Main Line just to the south of Doncaster, but there is no station here. Neither is there a station at Bawtry, an old market town which used to straddle the Yorkshire-Nottinghamshire border: this was once a Roman settlement on Ermine Street, then it became an inland port on the River Idle, while Bawtry’s location on the Great North Road means that its town centre has a fair number of old coaching inns.
Although the rivers draining this area are the Idle (at Bawtry) and the Torne (at Rossington), we are in a parliamentary seat named after a different river: the Yorkshire Don. Don Valley was one of the constituencies in the canonical Red Wall, and it voted Conservative in December 2019 for the first time in its history; former Labour Cabinet minister Caroline Flint lost her seat to Bawtry resident Nick Fletcher MP. Fletcher’s seat will be heavily redrawn for the next election as “Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme”, which should give him a better chance of re-election: the Isle of Axholme is rural Lincolnshire territory which would be expected to vote heavily Conservative.
The Conservatives are, however, very weak in Rossington and Bawtry ward which tends to vote heavily for Labour or independent candidates, although UKIP did win one of the three seats here in 2015. Doncaster council has a non-standard electoral cycle, holding elections for the mayor and council in county council election years; accordingly the most recent local elections here were in 2021, when the Labour slate polled 46% of the vote against 26% for long-serving independent councillor John Cooke (who lost his seat) and 20% for the Conservatives. The elected mayor of Doncaster is Labour’s Ros Jones, and Labour have a majority of Doncaster councillors to go with that.
This by-election is defended by Labour following the retirement of Barry Johnson, who was first elected for the former Rossington ward in 2006, retired in 2014 and returned in 2021. Johnson was also a long-serving member of Rossington parish council, and the archives of the Election Court feature a case which he brought concerning the 1999 parish council election in Rossington West ward. The Court found that there had been a counting error, overturned the result and declared that Barry Johnson had been duly elected.
Defending for Labour is Ken Guest, a former miner who is the chair of Rossington parish council. Rossington parish councillor and taxi driver John Cooke, the independent councillor who lost his seat in 2021, is seeking to return. The Conservatives have selected Carol Greenhalgh, who works in research alongside teaching music and volunteering as a Cub Scout leader. Completing the ballot paper is Reform UK’s Surjit Singh Duhre.
Parliamentary constituency: Don Valley
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme
ONS Travel to Work Area: Doncaster
Postcode districts: DN4, DN10, DN11
John Cooke (Ind)
Surjit Singh Duhre (Reform UK)
Carol Greenhalgh (C)
Ken Guest (Lab)
May 2021 result Lab 1999/1794/1414 Ind 1147/573 C 878/877/564 Grn 335
May 2017 result Lab 1823/1497/1368 Ind 1645 C 1039 UKIP 937 TUSC 159
May 2015 result Lab 2653/1744/1611 Ind 2233/1242/828 UKIP 1885/1593 C 1714 Grn 1047
Previous results in detail
Motherwell South East and Ravenscraig
North Lanarkshire council, Scotland; caused by the resignation of Scottish National Party councillor Agnes Magowan.
It’s now time to start winding down the electoral year. We are now out of time for new by-elections to be scheduled before Christmas, so today’s poll in Scotland will be the last Scottish electoral event of 2023.
You can’t talk about Motherwell for long without mentioning the metal that made the town what it is today. For a century this was Scotland’s premier steelworking town, its economy and landscape dominated by the Dalzell steelworks founded in 1872 by David Colville and Sons. By 1914 Colville’s works were the UK’s largest single steelworks.
In the 1950s Colville’s, with government subsidy, opened the massive Ravenscraig steelworks which essentially filled an enormous space to the east of Motherwell town centre. But by the 1980s Ravenscraig was in decline; it posseesed western Europe’s largest hot strip steel mill, but the loss of important local customers and industrial unrest had taken their toll. The Ravenscraig steelworks closed in 1992 with the loss of 770 jobs, and were demolished soon afterwards.
Where Ravenscraig once stood is now one of Europe’s largest brownfield sites. There are grand plans for regeneration, and some houses have been built together with the striking Regional Sports Facility, an impressively large leisure centre which opened in 2010. But Ravenscraig New Town is very much a work in progress, and there is plenty of space for more developments yet.
In the meantime, Ravenscraig is part of an electoral ward which runs from Motherwell town centre along the road to Wishaw, almost as far as Wishaw town centre. This ward was drawn up in 2007 and modified in 2017, and returns four members of North Lanarkshire council by proportional representation.
The initial 2007 election here was an oddity. Labour won two seats; the SNP polled enough votes to win two seats, but only had one candidate; the beneficiaries of this, in a result which can only be described as bizarre, were the Conservatives. Even more bizarrely, the Conservative candidate Linsey McKay won her seat in the final round of counting, by overtaking the third Labour candidate on transfers when the Scottish Socialist Party was eliminated. It was the only seat the Conservatives won on North Lanarkshire council that year, and there was some ironic press comment at the time that this win came in Ravenscraig of all places.
The Conservatives lost this rather flukish seat to Labour in 2012, but got it back in 2017; Labour in fact lost two seats that year, one to the Conservatives and the other to the SNP who took over first place in the ward. The 2022 Scottish council elections here gave 43% of the first preferences to the SNP, 31% to Labour and 17% to the Conservatives, with the seat count remaining at 2 SNP, 1 Labour and 1 Conservative.
Overall the 2022 North Lanarkshire council elections were good for the SNP, who finished in first place on the council with 36 seats; Labour won 32, the Conservatives 5, independent candidates 2, and one each for the Greens and the British Unionist Party — who, despite the name, are effectively a localist party for the Shotts area. The SNP’s Jordan Linden became the first Nationalist leader of the council at the age of just 27, but was then forced to resign almost immediately over sexual harassment claims. This led to a major split in the SNP group, and Labour are now back running the council again as a minority administration. Linden resigned from the council earlier this year, and the resulting by-election in Bellshill ward last June was an impressive Labour gain.
That Bellshill by-election was the first electoral event in Scotland after Humza Yousaf took over as First Minister from Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP are still looking for their first by-election win of the Yousaf era. They do represent this area at both Westminster and Holyrood as part of the Motherwell and Wishaw constituency; the Westminster seat will be redrawn from the next election with the new name of “Motherwell, Wishaw and Carluke”.
And the SNP have to defend this by-election following the resignation of councillor Agnes Magowan for family health reasons; Magowan had represented the ward since 2017, and topped the poll at both the 2017 and 2022 elections. On paper, this should be one of the easiest SNP defences of the Yousaf era so far; as stated the party led Labour 43–31 on first preferences in 2022, and Allan Faulds of Ballot Box Scotland (link to his preview) has crunched the numbers and found a 55–45 lead for the SNP on a two-party preferred basis.
Defending for the Scottish National Party is Rosa Zambonini, whom readers with long memories might recall has appeared in this column before: she won a by-election to the neighbouring Wishaw ward in August 2015, holding the seat which had been vacated by SNP councillor Marion Fellows after her election as MP for Motherwell and Wishaw. Zambonini stood down from the council in 2017 but is now seeking to return. That description also fits the Labour candidate Kaye Harmon, who was a councillor for this ward from 2007 to 2017 and topped the poll here in the 2012 election. The Conservative candidate is Oyebola Ajala, who is a financial services professional. Also standing are Derek Watson for the Scottish Green Party, Neil Wilson for UKIP (who finished seventh and last here in 2022), Billy Acheson for the British Unionist Party, Robert McGeorge for the Liberal Democrats and Mark Shields for Alba.
Westminster constituency: Motherwell and Wishaw
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Motherwell, Wishaw and Carluke
Holyrood constituency: Motherwell and Wishaw
ONS Travel to Work Area: Motherwell and Airdrie
Postcode districts: ML1, ML2
Billy Acheson (British Unionist Party)
Oyebola Ajala (C)
Kaye Harmon (Lab)
Robert McGeorge (LD)
Mark Shields (Alba)
Derek Watson (Grn)
Neil Wilson (UKIP)
Rosa Zambonini (SNP)
May 2022 first preferences SNP 2594 Lab 1893 C 1010 Grn 472 Scottish Family Party 54 UKIP 40
May 2017 first preferences SNP 2471 Lab 1424 C 1188 Ind Alliance N Lanarks 325 Ind 186 Grn 145 Ind 131 UKIP 68 Solidarity 25 Ind 21
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). The 2022 edition is out now! You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale