Previewing the three council by-elections of 13th June 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Three by-elections on 13th June 2024:
Mottingham, Coldharbour and New Eltham
Greenwich council, London; caused by the death of Conservative councillor John Hills.
Today’s selection of three council by-elections — one in London, two in Scotland — is just large enough to offer something for everyone to enjoy. We’ll start off in the suburbs of London by visiting the Coldharbour estate, which was built as a garden suburb in the late 1940s by Woolwich council to house residents whom the wartime Blitz had made homeless. The estate was named after Coldharbour Farm, which had previously occupied the site; by the time development began in 1947, Coldharbour Farm was the last working farm in the County of London. The Minister for Health Aneurin Bevan had the honour of officially opening the estate’s first house at 2 Wynford Way, wihle ten years later the Queen Mother visited to mark its completion.
The Coldharbour estate lies to the south of the A20 Sidcup Road, one of London’s main arterial roads. To the north of that, and mostly forming the boundary of this ward, is the Dartford Loop railway line on which can be found Mottingham and New Eltham railway stations. The name of Mottingham was added to this ward following minor boundary changes in 2022, but much of Mottingham’s residential area is actually over the borough boundary in Bromley — which, just to confuse matters, has a Mottingham ward of its own.
The counters at next month’s general election are going to have to take particular note of this, because both Mottingham wards have been included within a new parliamentary seat called Eltham and Chislehurst which will span the Bromley-Greenwich boundary. This is the successor to the Eltham constituency which had been represented since 1997 by Labour’s Clive Efford; but the boundary changes wipe out Efford’s majority of 3,197 votes from December 2019 and notionally replace it with a Conservative lead in Eltham and Chislehurst of around the same score. Efford will need to gain his seat all over again on 4th July if he is to secure an eighth term of office; he’s up against the notionally defending Conservative candidate Charlie Davis, a former Greenwich councillor.
The main road through the Coldharbour estate is named William Barefoot Drive after a long-serving local councillor of a century ago. Barefoot served three years as mayor of Woolwich, sat on the Labour NEC, and was a Woolwich councillor for over 30 years until November 1941 when he suffered a fatal heart attack in the Woolwich council chamber. That chamber is now the home of the London Borough of Greenwich, which Barefoot might be pleased to find out has been under Labour control continuously for the last 53 years.
In local elections the Eltham wards are the only part of Greenwich borough capable of electing Conservative councillors in the current political climate, and even then there aren’t many of them these days. The 2022 Greenwich council elections returned 52 Labour councillors and just three Conservatives, the party’s worst-ever result in the borough. Two of the Conservative councillors were elected here in Mottingham, Coldharbour and New Eltham ward, which turned in a very close result. In vote terms Labour led here 44–43, but the Conservatives got their second councillor in ten votes ahead of the second Labour candidate.
That lucky second Conservative was John Hills, who subsequently passed away in April at the age of 86 after a long illness. Hills was a veteran: not just in the Greenwich council chamber, where he had sat continuously since winning a 2000 by-election in the former New Eltham ward; but also in the sense that he had served in the forces, and he was Greenwich council’s Armed Forces champion up to his death. He’ll be a hard act to follow.
Hills’ passing gives a tricky by-election for the Conservatives to defend in a marginal parliamentary seat. Their candidate is Roger Tester, who represented the predecessor ward of Coldharbour and New Eltham from 2018 to 2022 and was the losing Conservative candidate in this ward two years ago. The Labour candidate is Nikki Thurlow, who lives on the Coldharbour estate and according to her Twitter is “in love with reading and sci-fi”. Also standing are Ulysse Abbate for the Lib Dems and Mark Simpson for Reform UK, both of whom will be parliamentary candidates for Eltham and Chislehurst next month, plus Matt Stratford of the Green Party.
Parliamentary constituency: Eltham and Chislehurst
London Assembly constituency: Greenwich and Lewisham
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: BR7, SE9
Ulysse Abate (LD)
Mark Simpson (RUK)
Matt Stratford (Grn)
Roger Tester (C)
Nikki Thurlow (Lab)
May 2022 result Lab 1916/1836/1734 C 1894/1846/1748 LD 399 Reform UK 149
Previous results in detail
Clydebank Central
West Dunbartonshire council, Scotland; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Craig Edward.
We now turn to two by-elections in Scotland, one urban and one rural . For the urban one we’re travelling to a town which owes its entire existence to industry. The story begins in the 1870s when J & G Thomson’s shipyard in the Glasgow suburb of Govan was compulsorily purchased by the Clyde Navigation Trustees, who wanted their premises for new quays. Forced to find a new home, Thomson’s found a new location to work from a few miles downstream: their chosen site was on the north bank of the Clyde, close to the main Glasgow-Dumbarton road and to the Forth and Clyde Canal. Work on the new shipyard started in 1871.
Initially Thomson’s arranged to literally ship its workers to and from their homes in Govan by paddle steamer, but before too long a small town had grown up around the growing Clyde Bank shipyard. In 1882 the railways came to Thomson’s works, and in the same year construction started on something even bigger just half a mile away. When it opened in 1884, the 46-acre Singer plant was the largest sewing-machine factory in the world, with its 7,000 employees turning out 13,000 sewing machines every week. In 1886 the residents of this town successfully joined the local government map with the creation of a police burgh: the new town took the name of Clydebank, after the shipyard which had created it.
Clydebank is now the north-west corner of Glasgow’s built-up area, but it has never been incorporated into the city. The local authority here is West Dunbartonshire council, which combines the Clydebank area with the town of Dumbarton further down the estuary, the Vale of Leven to the north of Dumbarton, and the southern shore of Loch Lomond. All the communication links between Dumbarton and Glasgow run through Clydebank, including two commuter railway lines which merge together at Dalmuir station. The Singer plant may be long gone, but there is still a Singer railway station here.
The Singer plant has also left its mark on local politics The stereotype of “Red Clydeside” has its roots in a major strike here in 1911, when 10,000 or more of Singer’s workers walked out in support of twelve female colleagues who had come out very badly from a workplace reorganisation. Singer’s subsequently sacked all of the strike organisers and other trade unionist troublemakers, including one Arthur McManus who went on to become the first chairman of the Communist Party of Great Brtiain and — some years later — was allegedly one of the writers of the notorious Zinoviev letter.
Ever since then Clydebank’s politics has had a decidedly left-wing bent. In 2012 and 2022 the Labour party won an overall majority on West Dunbartonshire council despite the use of proportional representation, helped on both occasions by winning two of the four seats in Clydebank Central ward. At the 2012 election the ward’s other two seats went to the Scottish National Party and an independent; the SNP gained one of the Labour seats in 2017, but Labour got their second seat back in 2022 when independent councillor Denis Agnew retired. The Scottish National Party led Labour here 52–40 on first preferences two years ago, with the Conservatives being the only other party to stand.
The SNP represent this area at other levels of government too. The local MSP is Marie McNair, who rose from the council in 2021 to be elected for the Clydebank and Milngavie constituency. In next month’s Westminster election Martin Docherty-Hughes, who is the SNP’s defence spokesman at Westminster, will seek a fourth term as MP for the West Dunbartonshire constituency which has almost the same boundaries as the district (a small corner of Glasgow is being transferred into the Westminster seat at this election).
So, might we see the SNP finally break their losing streak of over a year in local by-elections here? Well, Labour do need to pull off a 6% swing since 2022 to hold this by-election and retain their overall majority on West Dunbartonshire council, and they will not be helped by this by-election coming out of the Councillors Behaving Badly file. Craig Edward, who was elected here for his first term in May 2022, was thrown out of the Labour party four months later after being charged with possessing indecent images of children. He subsequently fled to England, but kept his council seat. In February this year Edward pleaded guilty to three counts involving hundreds of images; the following month the council finally received a resignation letter from Edward, just before Dumbarton sheriff court sent him to prison for 28 months and ordered him to sign the sex offenders’ register.
Not the most promising of backgrounds for the defending Labour candidate Fiona Hennebry, who runs a charity and a drop-in cafe in the town. The SNP candidate is Marina Scanlan, who stood in 2022 in the neighbouring Kilpatrick ward. There is a far more diverse ballot paper in Clydebank Central this time, with 19-year-old Ewan McGinnigle standing for the Conservatives, 22-year-old Nathan Hennebry for the Communist Party of Britain (clearly Red Clydeside is still alive and well), independent candidate Andrew Muir who is associated with the socially-conservative Scottish Family Party, Kai Pyper for the Lib Dems and Kelly Wilson for Sovereignty, a minor nationalist party. As this is Scotland the Alternative Vote is use, Votes at 16 apply, and intending Labour and Communist voters might wish to check which Hennebry they are giving their first preference to.
Westminster constituency: West Dunbartonshire
Holyrood constituency: Clydebank and Milngavie
ONS Travel to Work Area: Glasgow
Postcode districts: G60, G81
Fiona Hennebry (Lab)
Nathan Hennebry (Comm)
Ewan McGinnigle (C)
Andrew Muir (Ind)
Kay Pyper (LD)
Marina Scanlan (SNP)
Kelly Wilson (Sovereignty)
May 2022 first preferences SNP 2434 Lab 1844 C 366
May 2017 first preferences SNP 2345 Lab 1315 Ind 791 C 441 West Dunbartonshire Community Party 84
Previous results in detail
Tain and Easter Ross
Highland council, Scotland; caused by the death of independent councillor Alasdair Rhind.
We finish up for the week in the Scottish Highlands, by revisiting one of this wards which seems to come up in this column over and over again. It’s less than nine months since the voters of Tain and Easter Ross were called out for a by-election; now we’re back for the ward’s second casual vacancy of this term.
Tain is one of the largest towns in Ross-shire and it is Scotland’s oldest Royal Burgh: it was granted its charter in 1066 by King Malcolm III Canmore, thanks to its status as a pilgrimage site for St Duthac. It’s on the main road and railway line up the eastern seaboard from Inverness, and its main export is whisky from the large Glenmorangie distillery. Glenmorangie has for many years been Scotland’s best-selling single malt, but the profits from this no longer stay in Scotland; the distillery was bought in 2004 by the French luxury goods group Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy.
The ward based on Tain also takes in a large section of the relatively flat and fertile countryside of Easter Ross. Here we can find the Seaboard villages (Hilton of Cadboll, Balintore and Shandwick) and the small west-facing harbour of Portmahomack.
Tain and Easter Ross ward was created in 2007 when the Highland council went over to proportional representation, and the first poll here re-elected the three previous councillors for the area: Richard Durham as a Lib Dem, and Alasdair Rhind and Alan Torrance as independents. Torrance subsequently joined the SNP. He died in 2011 and the resulting by-election was won by independent candidate Fiona Robertson.
The balance of two independents and one Lib Dem was maintained in 2012, but this time the Lib Dem councillor was veteran politician Jamie Stone, who had been the MSP for the local seat of Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross from 1999 to 2011. He had lost his Holyrood seat to the SNP the previous year. Outgoing Lib Dem councillor Richard Durham unsuccessfully sought re-election as an independent, finishing fifth.
In May 2017 independent Fiona Robertson and Lib Dem Stone were re-elected, but Alasdair Rhind lost his seat to the Scottish National Party candidate Derek Louden. A month later councillor Jamie Stone was elected to the House of Commons as the Lib Dem MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross. He resigned from the Highland council, and Alasdair Rhind won the resulting by-election in September 2017 easily (Andrew’s Previews 2017, page 257).
Stone was narrowly re-elected to the Westminster parliament in December 2019, finishing just 204 votes ahead of the SNP. If he wants a third term he’ll have to gain his seat all over again, because the boundary changes add a large chunk of the former Ross, Skye and Lochaber to his constituency; on the new lines Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross would have likely voted SNP in December 2019. The Westminster seat is notionally defended by new SNP candidate Lucy Beattie, who is a farmer from the Ullapool area.
The Scottish National Party hold the similar Holyrood seat of Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, which has returned three different MSPs in its last three elections. The current incumbent Maree Todd, who transferred here in 2021 after being a Highlands and Islands regional MSP in the previous term, is a Scottish Government minister with the social care, wellbeing and sport portfolio.
The Highland council has a long-standing independent tradition, but this has been steadily eroded following the removal of single-member wards in 2007: the previous first-past-the-post electoral system had discouraged competition against strong independent candidates to the point where many wards went uncontested. In the 2022 Highland council election independent councillors fell to second place for the first time: 22 SNP candidates were returned, 21 independents, 15 Lib Dems, 10 Conservatives, 4 Greens and 2 Labour. An SNP-Independent coalition is in place to run the council.
The 2022 election in Tain and Easter Ross saw the balance of SNP, Lib Dem and independent councillors restored following the Lib Dem by-election loss in 2017. The SNP councillor Derek Louden was re-elected on the first count with 31% of the vote, and the other two seats went to the Lib Dems’ Sarah Rawlings with 22% and Alasdair Rhind with 21%. Fiona Robertson polled 16% and lost her seat.
Tain and Easter Ross’ Lib Dem councillor Sarah Rawlings then stood down from the Highland council after a year on health grounds. The resulting by-election in September 2023 was gained by independent candidate Maureen Ross, who led in the first round with 41% against 24% for the Lib Dems and 19% for the SNP; Ross pulled further away on transfers to enjoy a final majority over the Lib Dems of 62–38.
This fourth Tain and Easter Ross by-election is for an open seat following the death of Alasdair Rhind in April, at the age of 65. Rhind was a funeral director by trade, so hopefully his colleagues gave him a fitting sendoff. He had stood in the inaugural 1995 Highland council election as an independent candidate for Tain (losing to the Lib Dems’ Jamie Stone), contested a 1996 by-election in Invergordon following the death of his mother, and finally made it to the council chamber in 1999 as an independent councillor for Tain West ward. Apart from a few months in 2017, he had continuous service since then.
Two independent candidates have come forward to succeed Rhind: Laura Dundas owns restaurants in Tain and Dornoch, while John Shearer has settled down from a former globetrotting career in international banking to run two hotels in Tain. This time the Lib Dem candidate is Barbara Cohen, who gives an address in the ward. Gordon Allison is back for the Scottish National Party and is hoping to improve on his third-place finish in last year’s by-election. Also standing are Eva Short for the Conservatives and two more returning candidates from last year: Andrew Barnett for the Scottish Green Party and Harry Christian for the Libertarian Party.
Westminster constituency: Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross
Scottish Parliament constituency: Caithness, Sutherland and Ross
ONS Travel to Work Area: Alness and Invergordon
Postcode districts: IV18, IV19, IV20
Gordon Allison (SNP)
Andrew Barnett (Grn)
Harry Christian (Libtn)
Barbara Cohen (LD)
Laura Dundas (Ind)
John Shearer (Ind)
Eva Short (C)
September 2023 by-election Ind 1022 LD 603 SNP 464 C 207 Lab 88 Grn 56 Libertarian 23
May 2022 first preferences SNP 1051 LD 739 Ind 726 Ind 554 C 364
September 2017 by-election Ind 1266 SNP 612 LD 372 C 233 Ind 68 Libertarian 13
May 2017 first preferences SNP 831 Ind 708 LD 679 Ind 569 C 558 Ind 139
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
