Previewing the South Cambridgeshire and Stirling local by-elections of 16th March 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Two by-elections on 16th March 2023:
Cottenham
South Cambridgeshire council; caused by the death of Liberal Democrat councillor John Loveluck.
We start the week in England, in a rather flat landscape. The village of Cottenham can be found around five miles north of Cambridge, on relative high ground within the Fens; the land here falls gently towards the River Great Ouse, which is the northern boundary of Cottenham ward. This is one of South Cambridgeshire’s “Fen Edge” villages, as is the much smaller village of Rampton which is part of Cottenham ward.
With just under 5,000 electors on the roll Cottenham is big enough to support a secondary school, and it’s one of the larger villages within South Cambridgeshire district. This is a local government district with no towns, which entirely surrounds the city of Cambridge and is economically dependent on it. Cottenham is a ward with relatively high levels of education, and indeed the education sector — which here will be dominated by Cambridge’s universities — is a major employer here. The ward as a whole has very low levels of deprivation.
The present Cottenham ward dates from 2018 and is a cut-down version of the previous ward, which stretched south-west to Oakington and the A14. The old Cottenham ward was normally Conservative, but South Cambridgeshire district swung hard to the Liberal Democrats in the 2018 election and continued in that vein in 2022. Cottenham ward is part of the Lib Dem majority on the council, and in 2022 the Liberal Democrat slate increased its majority over the Conservatives to 63–20. There are no local elections here in May: South Cambridgeshire’s next elections are scheduled for May 2026.
The Liberal Democrats also represent the area on Cambridgeshire county council, which they run in coalition with Labour; the Cottenham and Willingham division was a convincing Lib Dem gain in 2021 after the Conservatives won the 2017 county election here by just two votes. The ward is currently part of the South Cambridgeshire parliamentary seat, which is Conservative-held with a small majority over the Lib Dems.
This by-election follows the passing in February of John Loveluck, who was in his first term on South Cambridgeshire council but had served the community for rather longer as a Cottenham parish councillor. He had recently retired from his job as a scientist and engineer, working on the design and manufacture of medical devices. Loveluck also had a particular interest in the wildlife of the fens, and at the time of his death he was working on a scheme by the parish council to install solar panels on the Cottenham village hall.
Defending for the Liberal Democrats is Eileen Wilson, who previously represented this ward on South Cambridgeshire council from 2018 until standing down in 2022; less than a year later, she now has the chance to return to the council. The Conservative candidate is Frank Morris, who works in the technology sector; he fought this ward last year on the Conservative slate and stood here previously in 2018 as an independent. Also standing are Oliver Fisher for the Greens, Tom Hingston for Labour and independent candidate Jo Pilsworth.
Parliamentary constituency: South Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire county council division: Cottenham and Willingham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Cambridge
Postcode districts: CB24, CB25
Oliver Fisher (Grn)
Tom Hingston (Lab)
Frank Morris (C)
Jo Pilsworth (Ind)
Eileen Wilson (LD)
May 2022 result LD 1545/1354 C 498/456 Grn 409
May 2018 result LD 1198/1092 C 799/746 Lab 349/231 Ind 258 Grn 168
Previous results in detail
Dunblane and Bridge of Allan
Stirling council, Scotland; caused by the death of Scottish National Party councillor Graham Houston.
Our Scottish by-election this week couldn’t be in a more different landscape from the Cambridgeshire fens. Here we are on the western edge of the Ochil Hills; the boundary of Dunblane and Bridge of Allan ward stretches to the summit of Blairdenon Hill, 631 metres above sea level.
There’s nobody living on those wild uplands, of course. The lines of communication here instead lie along the valley of the Allan Water, a river which rises in western Perthshire and flows south through the ward to meet the Forth north of Stirling. The Allan is followed fairly closely by the Stirling-Perth railway line, and rather less closely by the M9 motorway, which terminates at Keir Roundabout to become the A9 dual carriageway.
However, this ward does have something in common with Cottenham — the influence of a university nearby. Bridge of Allan is home to the campus of the University of Stirling, one of the plate-glass universities founded in the 1960s. Stirling is known for excellence in sport, and the campus’ Olympic swimming pool has produced the first Briton to win four medals at a single Olympic Games: Duncan Scott, who grew up in nearby Alloa, took home a gold and three silver medals from the swimming pool of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
The Stirling campus itself is part of Stirling North ward, but Bridge of Allan is very much under the university’s influence. Dunblane, a few miles to north, is another matter. This is the UK’s northernmost electrified railway station, with regular trains to Stirling and beyond to both Edinburgh and Glasgow; as a result, Dunblane is very much a commuter town. It was part of Perthshire until 1975, unlike Bridge of Allan which was part of Stirlingshire.
It’s impossible to mention Dunblane without recalling the terrible events of 27 years ago this week, when a man whom I shall not name walked into the gymnasium of the town’s primary school with four handguns. By the time he took his own life, 16 pupils and one of their teachers had lost theirs. The Dunblane massacre led directly to the UK parliament enacting some of the tightest gun-control laws in the world, and thankfully this country has not seen a school shooting since.
Two of the Dunblane primary school pupils who survived that day were Jamie and Andy Murray, who would go on to become the brightest stars of UK tennis in the 21st century. Jamie Murray has seven grand-slam doubles titles to his name; Andy has won three grand-slam singles titles (two Wimbledons and one US Open), two Olympic gold medals and a knighthood. Sir Andy’s marriage to Kim Sears in 2015 at Dunblane Cathedral was described as Scotland’s wedding of the year.
As a high-profile figure, Sir Andy Murray has previously drawn public attention for putting his political opinions on social media, which is entirely his prerogative — like Gary Lineker, he’s not a BBC employee or anything like that. This column would have nothing to talk about if everybody had the same opinion, as our elections would be rather boring.
Luckily, Dunblane and Bridge of Allan has consistently been a rather interesting ward. It was created in 2007, with boundaries which originally included Stirling University. The first election returned one councillor each from the Conservatives, the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems who won their seat with strong transfers from the Greens.
In 2012 the Lib Dem vote collapsed and the Greens gained their seat. The new Green councillor was Mark Ruskell, who had been the Green MSP for the Mid Scotland and Fife region from 2003 to 2007. Ruskell returned to Holyrood in that role in 2016, and as a result he stood down from Stirling council at the 2017 election.
Boundary changes for the 2017 election, which removed the university campus, strengthened the Conservative position in the ward. This was a good year for the Scottish Conservatives anyway, and they topped the poll in the redrawn Dunblane and Bridge of Allan with 44% of the first preferences which was good for two out of four seats. The SNP had 28% and held their seat. In the race for the final seat Labour started on 12% and the Greens on 10%, but the new Green candidate Alasdair Tollemache picked up transfers from all over the place — particularly from the SNP surplus — to hold the final seat. Labour lost their seat to the Conservatives. If the SNP had balanced their candidates better and Tollemache had been eliminated, the Green transfers would probably have elected Labour rather than a second SNP or (if there had been one) a third Conservative candidate.
The most recent Scottish local elections in 2022 were not such a good Conservative year. The Tories still topped the poll across Dunblane and Bridge of Allan, but the Conservative vote fell to 30% and that cost them their second seat. The SNP and the Greens easily held their seats with 26% and 16% respectively, and the final seat went back to Labour who started on 12% and picked up strong transfers from the Lib Dems at the end of the count. All four outgoing councillors had stood for another term. Douglas Dodds (C), Graham Houston (SNP) and Alasdair Tollemache (Grn) were successfully re-elected, while former Conservative councillor Alastair Majury sought re-election as an independent candidate after a rather troubled five-year term: he polled 5% of the first preferences and was eliminated in eighth place, losing his seat to Labour’s Ewan Dillon.
This ward is represented by the Scottish National Party in both the Scottish and UK parliaments, as part of the Clackmannanshire and Dunblane constituency at Holyrood and the Stirling constituency at Westminster. The latter seat has returned three different MPs at its last three elections, voting SNP in 2015 and 2019 and Conservative in 2017. The local MSP Keith Brown is the current depute leader of the SNP, although he is not a candidate in the current party leadership election, and he sits in Nicola Sturgeon’s cabinet with the justice and veterans portfolio. The current Stirling MP Alyn Smith has had a longer political career than his three-and-a-bit years in Westminster might suggest: he was a member of the European Parliament for Scotland from 2004 to 2019, and he is the SNP’s Westminster spokesman for Europe and EU Accession.
Alyn Smith’s Stirling constituency has the same boundaries as the Stirling council area, which often has closely-fought local elections. The 2022 elections here returned eight SNP councillors, seven Conservatives, six Labour, one Green and an independent. Labour, who poll a decent vote in Stirling city, have been running the council in some form since 2012: they had a coalition with the Conservatives from 2012 to 2017, they were the junior partners in a coalition with the SNP from 2017 to 2022, and they now have a minority administration with Conservative support despite being the third-largest party on the council.
This by-election is to fill the seat left behind by the SNP’s Graham Houston when he passed away in December, aged 74. Houston had been the SNP councillor for Dunblane and Bridge of Allan at all four elections since 2007, and he served as leader of the council from 2008 to 2012 among a number of other local government positions, including as vice-president of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities from 2017 to 2012.
If we re-run the 2022 votes for a single vacancy, then the Greens’ Alasdair Tollemache is the so-called Condorcet winner because he would have beaten any other candidate in a head-to-head. However, he didn’t have enough first preferences to make the top two: if we eliminate all candidates other than Conservative councillor Dodds, the SNP’s Houston and Tollemache then the Conservatives have 40%, the SNP 31% and Tollemache is eliminated with 28%. Once Tollemache’s votes are distributed the two-party preferred vote in this ward is very close: 2,787 votes for the SNP’s Houston, 2,737 votes for the Conservative councillor Douglas Dodds.
The SNP might start in second place here, but they are certainly in with a good chance of holding this seat. Transfers are often crucial in Dunblane and Bridge of Allan, and this by-election might be no exception to that pattern. If the SNP lose this by-election to the Conservatives, then the Tories will overtake the Nationalists to become the largest party on Stirling council.
Defending for the SNP is their losing candidate from last year, Ahsan Khan; he is a former housing association chief executive who currently lectures on housing, and he is married to the Stirling MSP Evelyn Tweed. The Conservatives have selected Robin Kleinman, who lives in Bridge of Allan and is described as a community stalwart. Standing for the Greens is Clare Andrews, who lectures in psychology at Stirling University but gives an address over the border in Clackmannanshire. The Labour candidate is David Wilson, who is a local government worker and UNISON officer. Completing a ballot paper of six candidates are Dick Moerman for the Lib Dems and Nickie Willis of the Scottish Family Party. As normal for Scottish local by-elections, Votes at 16 and the Alternative Vote are in use here.
Westminster constituency: Stirling
Holyrood constituency: Clackmannanshire and Dunblane
ONS Travel to Work Area: Falkirk and Stirling
Postcode districts: FK9, FK15
Clare Andrews (Grn)
Ahsan Khan (SNP)
Robin Kleinman (C)
Dick Moerman (LD)
Nickie Willis (Scottish Family Party)
David Wilson (Lab)
May 2022 first preferences C 2134 SNP 1830 Grn 1138 Lab 842 LD 665 Ind 377 Alba 61 Scottish Family Party 50
May 2017 first preferences C 3045 SNP 1926 Lab 824 Grn 706 LD 476
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
