Previewing the six council by-elections of 7th September 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Regrettably, there has been a late change to today’s lineup of by-elections following the sad death late last month of Toby Murcott. He was an independent candidate for the Golden Valley South by-election of Herefordshire council, which was scheduled for today. That poll has now been postponed and will take place at a later date. This column sends its condolences to Mr Murcott’s family and friends.
That leaves six polls taking place on 7th September 2023:
Thorpe St Andrew North West
Broadland council, Norfolk; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Drew Moore.
Our first poll this week is in a ward which this column paid a visit to less than a year ago (Andrew’s Previews 2022, page 462), but where the political context has completely changed in the last eleven months. We’ve come to the big city of Norwich — or not, as the case may be. The Norwich city boundaries haven’t changed for a very long time, and many of the city’s northern suburbs actually lie within the Broadland district even though they are very much part of the city’s built-up area.
This includes Thorpe St Andrew, which lies immediately east of the city boundary on the north bank of the River Yare. We are literally over the road from the social housing and tower blocks of Norwich’s Heartsease estate; but Thorpe St Andrew North West ward, while not being a particularly middle-class area, is a lot higher on the social scale than the Heartsease.
Which perhaps explains why Thorpe St Andrew has been an area where the Conservatives have traditionally dominated. North West ward returned a full slate of Conservative councillors at every election from 2004 (when the current boundaries were introduced) to 2019 when the Conservative slate had a 56–29 lead over Labour. The Conservatives also hold the Woodside division of Norfolk county council, which covers this ward. The Parliamentary Boundary Commission have not been fooled by the fact that this ward is outside the Norwich city limits and they have sensibly placed the area within the Norwich North constituency; this has been held since a 2009 by-election by the Conservatives’ Chloe Smith.
All this is something which this column wrote in the 20th October 2022 edition. Five days later, my statement that Smith had “joined the Cabinet last month as Work and Pensions secretary” was out of date. We were at this point in the final throes of the Truss premiership; when Rishi Sunak took over as Prime Minister the following week, Chloe Smith went back to the backbenches. She will be standing down at the next general election, at which point Labour will certainly have their eye on gaining her Norwich North seat.
The by-election which I wrote about in October last year saw Labour overturn a Conservative majority of 27 percentage points in Thorpe St Andrew North West to win with a 52–38 margin, a swing of over 20% since 2019. We may well have been in the final throes of the Truss premiership at the time, but the national poll ratings for the Conservatives have not noticeably recovered and this proved to be a harbinger of things to come in the Broadland district.
In May 2023 the Tories lost their majority on Broadland council, falling from 33 to 21 seats out of a possible 47, and that cost them power. All the other councillors (14 Lib Dems, 8 Labour and 4 Greens) have joined together in a traffic-light coalition, under a Lib Dem leader. The result in Thorpe St Andrew North West was closer than in the October 2022 by-election, but a Labour lead of 48–42 was enough for Labour to take all three seats in the ward.
Eight weeks later, the Labour group found themselves a man down following the resignation of Labour councillor Drew Moore, who indicated that he could not balance his new democratic duties with a new job. Moore had won the final seat in the ward with a majority of just 33 votes over the lead Conservative Peter Berry, so Labour have work to do to hold this by-election.
Defending for Labour is Carol Ferris, who stood in the other Thorpe St Andrew ward (South East) in May; she was elected to Thorpe St Andrew town council, but missed out on a seat on Broadland council then. Another Thorpe St Andrew town councillor on the ballot is the Conservatives’ Peter Berry, who finished as runner-up in the 2022 by-election and the 2023 Broadland district election in North West ward. Completing the ballot paper is Victor Morgan for the Liberal Democrats.
Parliamentary constituency: Norwich North
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Norwich North
Norfolk county council division: Woodside
ONS Travel to Work Area: Norwich
Postcode district: NR7
Peter Berry (C)
Carol Ferris (Lab)
Victor Morgan (LD)
May 2023 result Lab 1129/1073/1022 C 989/947/934 LD 256/218/137
October 2022 by-election Lab 860 C 635 LD 165
May 2019 result C 1184/1068/1042 Lab 612/601/601 LD 313/309/302
May 2015 result C 2136/1844/1834 Lab 1450/1182/1156 UKIP 877 LD 490/472/358
May 2011 result C 1394/1313/1298 Lab 919/893/880 UKIP 288 LD 270
May 2007 result C 1325/1246/1210 Lab 648/634/582 LD 341/287/273
June 2004 result C 1121/1012/1001 Lab 864/800/797 LD 470/445/410
Previous results in detail
Bread Street
City of London Court of Aldermen; caused by the resignation of Alderman Sir William Russell.
We now come to the only local government unit in the UK which still has Aldermen, the City of London. There are 25 Aldermen of the City, one for each ward, who are the senior councillors from whose ranks the Lord Mayor of London is chosen.
Since the nineteenth century Lord Mayors of London usually serve for one year in the top role and that’s it. However, an exception was made in recent years for William Russell, the 692nd Lord Mayor, who had the bad luck to take the role on in November 2019. With the COVID pandemic striking shortly afterwards and preventing the City’s normal mayoral elections at Michaelmas 2020 from taking place, it was decided that the best option would be to re-elect Russell for a second term of office.
The last Lord Mayor to be re-elected was William Cubitt in 1860–62. Cubitt was an engineer, Conservative MP and architect whose surviving works in London include Fishmonger’s Hall in the City, the Covent Garden market building and the east London district of Cubitt Town, which is named after him. It remains to be seen what effect Sir William Russell, who was knighted in 2022 after his two years were finally over, will have on London. Sir William is a financier from a family with a long tradition of serving in the City’s government: four members of his mother’s Bowater family have been Lord Mayor, including Sir William’s grandfather Sir Ian Bowater (1969–70) and great-grandfather Sir Frank Bowater (1938–39). The actor Damian Lewis (Richard Winters in Band of Brothers, Henry VIII in Wolf Hall) is his half-brother.
Sir William Russell represents one of the City of London’s smaller wards. Bread Street ward surrounds St Paul’s Cathedral on three sides; major features of the ward include the major shopping/office complex at One New Change, the recently-redeveloped Paternoster Square (home these days to the London Stock Exchange), and the St Paul’s Cathedral School which educates and houses the cathedral’s boy choristers. Many former St Paul’s Cathedral School pupils have gone on to greater things, and not just in music: the former England cricket captain Alastair Cook and the actor Sir Simon Russell Beale were choristers here in their younger days. St Paul’s underground station, a stop on the Central Line behind Paternoster Square, lies on the northern boundary of the ward. Bread Street itself is the ward’s eastern boundary, and is so-named because in mediaeval times it was the city’s bread market.
Back in the day plenty of people would have lived in Bread Street ward, which was the birthplace of the poets John Donne and John Milton. But the residential population here is now very low, and most of the electors in this by-election will be people who work in the ward and are nominated by businesses based here.
The ward is represented on the City Corporation by the Alderman and two Common Councilmen. Since the last City elections in March 2022 one of the two Common Councilmen for Bread Street has been Emily Benn, Tony Benn’s granddaughter. Emily has served as a Labour councillor in Croydon in the past and has stood three times for Parliament as a Labour candidate, but elections in the City don’t work like that; even politicians who are well-known for being partisan in other fields will normally seek election in the City as independent candidates, as Benn did. This memo was seemingly not received by Harini Iyengar, who stood in Bread Street in 2022 as an official candidate of the Women’s Equality Party and finished last out of four candidates.
Common Councilmen of the City serve for four-year terms. Alderman of the City are technically elected for life; however, in practice there is a retirement age and an expectation that Aldermen will seek re-election at least every six years. Sir William Russell was first elected in 2013, and previously sought re-election in August 2018: on that occasion, nobody opposed him (Andrew’s Previews 2018, page 305).
Russell is now seeking re-election for a third term of office as Alderman. This time he faces a bakeoff in Bread Street from Sarah Loveday, a chartered HR professional whose puntastic election slogan is “Knead for Change”. As normal, both candidates are Independent. The City’s electoral process started yesterday with the Wardmote, a public meeting-cum-hustings which has been adjourned for the poll, and which will reconvene tonight for the declaration of the result.
Parliamentary constituency: Cities of London and Westminster
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Cities of London and Westminster
London Assembly constituency: City and East
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: EC1A, EC2V, EC4M, EC4V
Sarah Loveday (Ind)
William Russell (Ind)
Worfield
Shropshire council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Richard Marshall.
Our remaining polls today are in the western part of England, starting with a very rural area in the West Midlands. The Worfield electoral division covers a series of tiny villages on the east bank of the River Severn, roughly the area between the edge of Bridgnorth to the south-west, the edge of Telford to the north-west and the Staffordshire border to the south-east. Most of the main road links to Bridgnorth — north from Telford, east from Wolverhampton or south-east from Stourbridge — pass through this division, and there are certainly plenty of vehicles around to use them: Worfield makes the top 70 wards in England and Wales for households with three or more cars or vans, and the top jobs of Wolverhampton and Telford are certainly within commuting distance.
The largest of the eight parishes in the division is Worfield itself, although its headcount is inflated by the fact that Worfield is a geographically large parish whose boundaries include a number of other settlements. One of those hamlets is Stableford further up the Worfe valley, where Henry and Eleanor Wodehouse and their family lived from 1896 to 1902 after Henry retired from the Hong Kong civil service; their teenage son P G Wodehouse later used the area as a rather thinly disguised setting for some of his novels.
This is a true-blue corner of Shropshire both in parliamentary and local elections. At Westminster level it’s part of the Ludlow constituency, which is to be renamed as South Shropshire at the next general election at which point the local MP Philip Dunne will retire. All four local elections in Worfield since the current Shropshire council was introduced in 2009 have been very heavy wins for the Conservatives: the division last went to the polls in 2021, when the new Conservative candidate Richard Marshall polled 75% of the vote against Lib Dem and Green opposition. Shropshire council has a Conservative majority and Councillor Marshall quickly joined the council’s cabinet, with responsibility for highways and regulatory reform; but he stood down from the council for personal reasons in July 2023, slightly more than half-way through his first term of office.
Defending for the Conservatives is Michael Wood, who is seeking to resume a long local government career. Wood was first elected to the former Shropshire County Council as long ago as 1993, and he represented this Shropshire council division from 2009 until he handed the baton over to Marshall in 2021. He is opposed by Andrew Sherrington for the Lib Dems and Shanthi Flynn for Labour. The local radio station Sunshine Radio have interviewed all the candidates, and you can find out more here (link).
Outgoing Shropshire councillor Richard Marshall is not to be confused with the Richard Marshall who for many years has been the solo cornet player with the Black Dyke brass band — a position which is similar in status and musical workload to the leader of a world-class symphony orchestra. But if we fail to confuse the two Marshalls, we’ll miss out on some great music. So here is cornet player Richard Marshall in a live performance from 2016, showing just why he’s held that position with Dyke for so long.
Parliamentary constituency: Ludlow
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): South Shropshire
ONS Travel to Work Area: Telford
Postcode district: TF8, TF11, WV6, WV15
Shanthi Flynn (Lab)
Andrew Sherrington (LD)
Michael Wood (C)
May 2021 result C 754 LD 147 Grn 105
May 2017 result C 754 Lab 117 LD 111
May 2013 result C 607 UKIP 256
June 2009 result C 898 Ind 287 LD 246
Previous results in detail
Audley; and
Knutton
Newcastle-under-Lyme council, Staffordshire; caused respectively by the resignations of Labour councillors Sue Moffat and Steph Talbot.
Our tour through the western counties of England continues in Staffordshire, as we come to two wards on the edge of the Potteries conurbation. Very much so in the case of Audley, which is the centre of a large rural parish to the north-west of Newcastle-under-Lyme; this is one of the wards where many pass through but few linger, because the M6 motorway and the A500 dual carriageway to the Potteries both run through the ward.
Audley Rural parish contains a number of other villages which used to have coal pits, including Halmer End which in January 1918 was the scene of the North Staffordshire coalfield’s worst mining disaster. An explosion of firedamp inside the Minnie Pit killed 156 men and boys; the source of the initial spark was never identified. The news came to the attention of the war poet Wilfred Owen, who wrote a poem about the disaster shortly afterwards; Miners was one of the few poems by Owen published in his lifetime.
Comforted years will sit soft-chaired,
In rooms of amber;
The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our life’s ember;The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned;
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.
Mining for coal in this area ceased long ago, but the brickmaking company Ibstock continues to operate a quarry just to the west of Knutton, a working-class village not far west of Newcastle town centre. This quarry lies outside Knutton ward, as does the landfill site of Walleys Quarry which is the site of one of the most pungent ongoing political controversies. And when I say pungent, I mean pungent: the place stinks, and it has stunk Newcastle borough out for years with high levels of hydrogen sulphide emissions.
This column previously covered Walleys Quarry in November 2021 (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 510), in the wake of a High Court ruling that the Environment Agency’s enforcement action against the quarry’s operator had been inadequate. The Environment Agency had appealed against that decision, and their appeal was upheld by the Court of Appeal which overturned the High Court’s ruling in December 2021. In the two years which have passed since then the smell has not stopped, and the Environment Agency still receives complaints from local residents on a very frequent basis. Waste dumping in Walleys Quarry is expected to continue until 2026, by which time the landfill site will be full.
It’s fair to say that the Walleys Quarry operators don’t have a good relationship either with the Environment Agency or the local MP. Conservative backbencher Aaron Bell, a prominent quizzer who won series championships on The Krypton Factor and Only Connect before entering politics, has previously made allegations about the quarry’s working practices under parliamentary privilege. He gained the Newcastle-under-Lyme parliamentary seat, which covers both Audley and Knutton wards, from Labour in December 2019.
That gives the Tories a trifecta in this corner of Staffordshire, as they also have majorities on both Staffordshire county council and Newcastle-under-Lyme council. It perhaps helps that neither of those authorities had elections in 2023, which was not a good Tory year in Staffordshire; Newcastle council has an unusual electoral cycle and its last elections were in May 2022. The Conservatives had taken control of a hung council through defections in the 2018–22 term, and the 2022 borough elections saw this confirmed by the voters: Newcastle council returned 25 Conservative councillors against 19 for Labour.
The two previous results for Audley ward show those factors in action. In 2018 Audley’s three seats had split between an independent, Labour and the Liberal Democrats; in 2022 the Labour councillor Sue Moffat was re-elected, the former Lib Dem councillor Ian Wilkes was re-elected as a Conservative, and the Conservatives gained the seat left open by the retirement of the independent councillor. Shares of the vote were 49% for Labour and 38% for the Conservatives, but because the Labour figure was inflated by Moffat’s personal vote the seat count was 2–1 in the Conservatives’ favour. Conservative councillor Wilkes had previously gained the local county council seat of Audley and Chesterton from Labour in 2021.
Knutton ward’s election results are complicated by what is clearly a very large personal vote for the local Conservative county councillor Derrick Huckfield, who has sought election here over the last 21 years successively for the “Caring Party”, UKIP and the Conservatives and has won under the latter two labels. Labour candidates who have lost to Huckfield in the past include Gareth Snell, who went on to have a brief career as MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, and Llin Golding who had been the Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme from 1986 to 2001. In 2018 Huckfield sought re-election to Newcastle council as a Conservative in the neighbouring Silverdale ward, and lost; Labour won Knutton by a 75–25 margin over the Conservatives. The Labour councillor for Knutton, Brian Johnson, resigned in 2021. For the resulting by-election on 25th November, I wrote:
This by-election is a straight fight. Defending for Labour is Steph Talbot, who stood in May’s county council elections for Newcastle South division; she runs Alice, a charity supporting disadvantaged and vulnerable families in Newcastle and Stoke. Challenging for the Conservatives is county councillor Derrick Huckfield. Despite the 3 to 1 margin in favour of Labour three years ago, this column would rate Huckfield as favourite.
Note those words emphasised here. This column almost never makes explicit predictions of who’s going to win an election in the preview, so that last sentence — an explicit prediction that the Conservatives would overturn a Labour majority of almost 50 percentage points — put my reputation on the line. And I was right. When the votes came out of the single ballot box (Knutton ward only has one polling station), Derrick Huckfield defeated Steph Talbot by 188 votes to 180.
But Huckfield’s triumph proved to be short-lived on that occasion. The 2022 Newcastle council elections six months later saw a rematch in Knutton ward between Huckfield and Talbot, and this time Steph Talbot ran out the winner by 48% to 34%.
So, we have here a three-councillor ward whose representation is split between Labour and the Conservatives, and a single-member ward which has voted for both parties within the last two years. And Labour are defending both of these wards in by-elections, following the resignations of their councillors Sue Moffat and Steph Talbot. I have not been able to find any given reason for their resignations, but in the case of Moffat it is noticeable that she recently applied to be Labour’s next parliamentary candidate for Newcastle-under-Lyme and didn’t get the selection; while last December Talbot was ousted as the head of the Alice charity.
Defending the Labour seat in Audley ward is Rebekah Lewis who works as a community adviser for a local charity; she is a granddaughter of Baroness Golding. The Conservatives, who will have a full slate in this ward if they gain this by-election, have selected Sally Rudd who is a dental therapist from Bignall End, another village in the ward. Also standing are Andrew Wemyss for the Liberal Democrats and independent candidate Duran O’Dwyer, who also both give addresses in the ward; Wemyss has represented both of the predecessor wards (Audley and Bignall End, and Halmerend) on Newcastle-under-Lyme council, but that was a long time ago.
In Knutton ward the defending Labour candidate is Robert Moss, who has recently retired from a 28-year career as a firefighter. Challenging for the Conservatives, as in the 2021 by-election, is county councillor Derrick Huckfield. This by-election is not a straight fight, thanks to the intervention of Lib Dem Aidan Jenkins. And there will be no prediction this time, because I am a coward!
This entry has been corrected: the Minnie Pit disaster took place in Halmer End, not Bignall End as originally stated.
Audley
Parliamentary constituency: Newcastle-under-Lyme
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Newcastle-under-Lyme
Staffordshire county council division: Audley and Chesterton
ONS Travel to Work Area: Stoke-on-Trent
Postcode districts: CW3, ST5, ST7
Rebekah Lewis (Lab)
Duran O’Dwyer (Ind)
Sally Rudd (C)
Andrew Wemyss (LD)
May 2022 result Lab 1120/845/814 C 883/855/805 LD 291/199
May 2018 result Ind 986 Lab 818/714/574 LD 773 C 529/501/357 LD 208/183
Previous results in detail
Knutton
Parliamentary constituency: Newcastle-under-Lyme
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Newcastle-under-Lyme
Staffordshire county council division: Keele, Knutton and Silverdale
ONS Travel to Work Area: Stoke-on-Trent
Postcode district: ST5
Derrick Huckfield (C)
Aidan Jenkins (LD)
Robert Moss (Lab)
May 2022 result Lab 239 C 172 Ind 88
November 2021 by-election C 188 Lab 180
May 2018 result Lab 355 C 120
Previous results in detail
Brooklands
Manchester council; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Julia Baker-Smith.
Let’s finish for the week with a very different ward, within the urban sprawl of Manchester. But this hasn’t always been the case. A century ago Brooklands ward was Cheshire parkland, with the Tudor stately home of Wythenshawe Hall at its centre. Wythenshawe Hall had been home for centuries to the Tatton family, and the land around it was a deer park on the south bank of the River Mersey. The hall had been knocked around by the English Civil War, when it was besieged for three months in the winter of 1643–44 before falling to the Parliamentarians, but was then patched up.
Quite the contrast with the far side, the Lancashire side, of the Mersey: there lay Didsbury, a suburb of the crowded, industrial city of Manchester. Didsbury was and remains an attractive suburb for the middle classes, but in 1923 inner-city Manchester had a lot of substandard slum terraces which needed something doing to them for reasons of public health. But what to do with all the people living there?
In 1926 Wythenshawe Hall and its surrounding grounds were bought from the Tattons by Ernest Simon, a Liberal politician who had been Lord Mayor of Manchester in 1921–22 — at the time the city’s youngest-ever Lord Mayor — and served as Liberal MP for Manchester Withington in the short-lived 1922–23 Parliament. Simon was also one of the founding subscribers of the New Statesman, contributing £1,000 of the money needed to get that periodical going in 1913. He saw Wythenshawe as the answer to Manchester’s housing problems, and he immediately donated the Hall and its grounds to Manchester Corporation to be used solely for the public good. The land is now the open space of Wythenshawe Park; the hall became a museum.
Wythenshawe Hall was badly damaged in an arson attack in 2016; following restoration, it reopened to the public a year ago. That arson attack happened under the gaze of an 1875 statue of a previous person who had tried to trash the place, Oliver Cromwell. His statue was relocated here from the city centre in 1968.
Later in 1926 the last male head of the Tatton family finally gave in and sold the rest of Wythenshawe to Manchester Corporation, who over the last century have filled it with council houses. The “garden suburb” of Wythenshawe is a claimant for the title of Europe’s largest council estate, and the five wards of Manchester city council which cover it today had a combined population of 79,000 in the 2021 census. Anywhere else in the country this would be a major town; but Wythenshawe has never even had town status, instead being just a Manchester suburb.
Brooklands is the north-western of Wythenshawe’s five wards, covering Wythenshawe Park, Northern Moor, a large chunk of Baguley and the Southmoor industrial estate. It’s served by the Northern Moor, Wythenshawe Park, Moor Road and Baguley tram stops on the Wythenshawe/Airport branch of the Metrolink tram system. This tram line opened only in 2014; before then Wythenshawe was very poorly connected to the outside world, with no railway station and with the motorway network having to take much of the strain.
Wythenshawe’s founder Ernest Simon had a part to play in one of the UK’s most obscure political records. After losing his Manchester Withington seat in the Commons in 1923 he got it back in 1929, lost re-election in 1931 and made a number of later attempts to get back onto the green benches, finishing up as an independent candidate in the Combined English Universities by-election of March 1946. This by-election had four strong candidates. Simon’s 22% of the vote was good enough for third place, over independent Labour candidate Stanley Wormald’s 19% (this was the last parliamentary by-election of the 20th century in Great Britain which Labour did not contest). Second place in the 1946 Combined English Universities by-election went to the writer, suffragist, future radio broadcaster and independent candidate Mary Stocks with 28%, while the Conservative candidate, past and future Norwich MP Henry Strauss, won with a hair under 30% of the vote. This still stands as the record low winning score in a parliamentary by-election; but records are there to be broken, and a recent constituency poll for the forthcoming Mid Bedfordshire by-election suggests that Strauss’ 1946 record might be in some danger.
This is the second by-election which Andrew’s Previews has covered resulting from the resignation of councillor Julia Baker-Smith. She had been a Manchester councillor since 2021 but started her local government career in 2013 on the Isle of Wight, being elected as an independent councillor for Whippingham and Osborne ward under her previous surname of Hill. Baker-Smtih was re-elected there in 2017, and served as leader of an independent group on the Isle of Wight council before joining the Labour party and relocating to Manchester. She resigned from that council in 2019, and the resulting Whippingham and Osborne by-election (Andrew’s Previews 2019, page 186) was gained by the Conservatives.
Might the same happen here? Well, like the rest of the city of Manchester, Brooklands ward is a Labour stronghold; Labour hold 87 of the 96 seats on the city council plus this vacancy, and in May this ward turned in a Labour lead of 70–13 over the Conservatives. The Tories have been shut out of Manchester city council since the 1990s, and their efforts to get back on the council in the 2000s were focused on this ward: that choice seems to have been based less on Manchester Brooklands’ demographic than on the fact that the ward borders strongly middle-class wards in Sale and Timperley, which were Conservative strongholds on Trafford council back in those days. The Conservatives came close to gaining this ward at the Labour low point of 2008; but the Trafford Tories have other things to worry about now, and the 13% Conservative score in Manchester Brooklands ward in May suggests that outside support for the party’s Manchester branch has dried up. Labour also represent this ward in parliament: junior frontbencher Mike Kane has been the MP for Wythenshawe and Sale East since winning a by-election in 2014, and his seat has been left unchanged by the Boundary Commission going forward.
Outgoing councillor Baker-Smith doesn’t appear to have completely left her Isle of Wight roots. She was working remotely in an NHS job which is nominally based there, and she quit Manchester council in July to spend more time on the island caring for a family member.
Defending the resulting Brooklands by-election for Labour is Dave Marsh, who describes himself on Twitter as a born and bred Wythenshawe lad. The Conservatives are hoping for a decent result with their candidate Norman Decent who, like Baker-Smith, has experience of local government on the south coast: he was a Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole councillor representing Kinson ward in Bournemouth from 2019 to May 2023, and his second-place finish in Manchester Brooklands ward in 2022 came while he was still a serving BCP councillor. Also standing are two returning candidates from May 2023, the Greens’ Grace Buczkowska and Reform UK’s Dylan Evans; they complete the ballot paper along with Euan Stewart for the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Wythenshawe and Sale East
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Wythenshawe and Sale East
ONS Travel to Work Area: Manchester
Postcode districts: M23, M33, WA15
Grace Buczkowska (Grn)
Norman Decent (C)
Dylan Evans (Reform UK)
Dave Marsh (Lab)
Euan Stewart (LD)
May 2023 result Lab 1777 C 324 Grn 274 Reform UK 168 LD 133
May 2022 result Lab 1652 C 631 Grn 310 LD 152
May 2021 double vacancy Lab 1686/1499 C 689/672 Grn 385/219 LD 112/75 Loony 57
May 2019 result Lab 1336 C 463 UKIP 389 Grn 301 LD 203
May 2018 result Lab 1684/1635/1486 C 763/705/634 Grn 313 LD 153/134/117
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
