Previewing the three council by-elections of 27th June 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
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Andrew’s Previews 2023
It’s finally here! The eighth annual collection of Andrew’s Previews, covering 2023, is now out in paperback for your reading pleasure. As with the seven previous books in the series, this is a republication of all the Andrew’s Previews articles for the year, with edits for spelling, grammar and factual errors.
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Reading the tea-leaves on Westminster by elections is dangerous, for local by elections even more so, but you won’t find a better way to engage in this dangerous behaviour than by following these previews.
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Andrew’s Previews 2023 is available now from Amazon (link).
If you’re not convinced by these testimonials, here are the previews for the three local by-elections taking place on 27th June 2024, with Labour defending two seats and independents one. There are plenty more previews like these in the books for your reading pleasure…
Hoxton West
Hackney council, London; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Yvonne Maxwell.
It’s fair to say that this general election campaign is not going well for the ruling Conservative party. Quite apart from their dire polling position, the party has also become embroiled in a scandal in which party officials tried to make some quick money by betting on the date of this general election. At the time of writing the Conservatives have been forced to disendorse two parliamentary candidates including the Prime Minister’s parliamentary private secretary; a Metropolitan Police officer has been suspended; and the party’s director of campaigning Max Bialystock has gone on leave of absence.
The whole point of insider trading like this is to profit from other people’s ignorance, and we can see that the whole scheme had a prospect of success from the fact that three council by-elections are taking place today — forcing the voters of three wards to turn out at the polling station on two consecutive Thursdays. None of the people involved in scheduling these by-elections for 27th June had any idea that a general election was going to be called for 4th July.
All three of today’s by-elections are urban and politically left-wing, with two in the far north of England and the other in London. Hoxton West ward lies in Hackney borough, covering an almost entirely built-up area to the south of the Regent’s Canal and to the north of City Road and Old Street, only a mile or two to the north of the City of London. Old Street underground station lies on the ward’s southern boundary at the so-called Silicon Roundabout, an area where a large number of technology firms have based themselves in recent years.
Slum clearance has done for much of the old housing in this traditionally poor area of London, and Hoxton West ranks 10th in England and Wales for flats or apartments (96.1% of households), many of which are socially rented. The ward is also ranked 10th for households with no car or van (75.0%), and it has a large immigrant population from all over the world with only 44% of residents here being born in the UK.
The Hoxton area is part of the Hackney South and Shoreditch constituency, which has been in Labour hands since its creation in 1974. Dame Meg Hillier, who has chaired the Commons Public Accounts committee since 2015, has represented this seat since 2005 and previously sat for the London Assembly’s North East constituency (which includes Hackney) in 2000–04. She will be seeking a sixth term in the Commons in seven days’ time.
The local authority here is Hackney council, which has used the elected mayoral system since 2002. There was a boroughwide mayoral election here last November following the resignation of Labour mayor Philip Glanville who was brought down by a scandal over his association with a former housemate, Labour councillor Tom Dewey. Dewey had been elected to Hackney council at the last borough elections in 2022, resigned almost immediately for reasons which were not disclosed at the time, and was subsequently prosecuted for possessing indecent images of children. Glanville had attended a Eurovision party with Dewey in May 2022, after having been told by the council’s chief executive that Dewey had been arrested a few days earlier.
Philip Glanville had been mayor of Hackney since winning a previous by-election in 2016, and before that he was a Hackney councillor for Hoxton West ward; this column covered the consequential council by-election in November 2016 after he won the mayoralty. That poll was a safe Labour hold and nothing has changed in the intervening eight years. In the May 2022 Hackney council elections the Labour slate won here with 53%, with the Conservatives and Greens polling 15% each.
This by-election is to replace Labour councillor Yvonne Maxwell, who had served the ward since winning the 2016 by-election. The defending Labour candidate is Ben Lucas, a GMB member and former parliamentary staffer. Standing for the Conservatives is Farhan Jaisin, who is a manager at a local foodbank. The Greens have reseelcted Cheuk Ting Ho who stood on their slate here in 2022; she is a data scientist and software developer. Geoffrey Payne completes the ballot paper for the Liberal Democrats.
Parliamentary constituency: Hackney South and Shoreditch
London Assembly constituency: North East
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: EC1V, N1
Cheuk Ting Ho (Grn)
Farhan Jaisin (C)
Ben Lucas (Lab)
Geoffrey Payne (LD)
May 2022 result Lab 1574/1308/1308 C 452 Grn 449/447/423 LD 365 TUSC 108
May 2018 result Lab 1771/1714/1527 Grn 447/421/366 C 372/354/298
November 2016 by-election Lab 951 C 185 LD 133 Grn 123
May 2014 result Lab 1693/1687/1634 Grn 602/487/448 C 362/339/326 LD 190/182/161 TUSC 136
Previous results in detail
General election night
With seven days to go to the Main Event, Britain Elects would like to plug our very own real-life event! If you would like to watch the results come in next Thursday in the company of Ben, myself and other political junkies, then get yourself over to the official Election Night Watch Party at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Chester city centre. Doors at 2100 and we will go on until a new dawn has broken. Full details can be found here.
Harraby North
Cumberland council, Cumbria; caused by the death of Labour councillor Cyril Weber.
For our other Labour defence of the week we travel a long way north to the city of Carlisle. Harraby is a south-eastern suburb of Carlisle along the A6, the main road south from the city towards Penrith and London; it boomed in population after the Second World War, with a large industrial estate at Durranhill and the Upperby railway works providing employment for the area. The Upperby works are located on the West Coast Main Line, which is the western boundary of Harraby North ward; the railways towards Settle and Newcastle run along the ward’s northern boundary, while the River Petteril and its floodplain divides the area from Carlisle city centre to the north-west. Harraby North is a very working-class ward, making the top 70 wards in England and Wales for adults employed in routine occupations (26.3%).
There used to be a factoid that Carlisle was the UK’s largest city by area. This is no longer the case now, but it was true in the period 1974–2023 when the local authority here was Carlisle city council: that was a merger of the old Carlisle county borough with the far-flung and sparsely-populated Border rural district. But in April last year both Carlisle city council and Cumbria county council were swept away by a further reorganisation of Cumbria’s local government, which created Cumberland council to cover the former local government districts of Carlisle, Allerdale and Copeland. (This is a smaller area than the old county of Cumberland, which also included Penrith.) As a result of this, local government for places as far away as Millom is now administered from here in Carlisle. Carlisle no longer has a city council of its own, and the Cumberland councillors for the wards covering the city’s urban area (including Harraby North) act as charter trustees to keep the city status alive until a parish council for the city can be set up. If we ever get a parish-level Carlisle city council in future, it would be on the pre-1974 boundaries.
We see a similar confusion with the Carlisle parliamentary seat, which until 1997 followed the boundaries of the old county borough and was tightly drawn around the urban area. This meant that Carlisle returned Labour MPs more often than not. More recent redistributions have added more and more rural and Conservative-voting areas to the constituency, and at parliamentary level Carlisle has been in the Tory column since 2010. John Stevenson, a solicitor and Conservative backbencher, is seeking re-election next week for his fifth term of office.
The Conservatives found Carlisle council to be a rather tougher nut to crack, but the 2019 city council elections made the Conservatives the largest party on a hung council; by-election and defection gains meant that by the time of abolition in 2023 there was a Conservative majority in Carlisle. The Tories also held the elected mayoralty in Copeland, led the permanently-hung Allerdale district, and just about had a majority of Cumbria county councillors across the three districts. With the old county division boundaries due to be reused for the inaugural Cumberland council election in 2022, surely this was a good bet for a Conservative majority?
Well, no as it turned out. The 2022 Cumberland elections saw Labour comprehensively recover their poise in the Carlisle urban area and the industrial towns of west Cumbria, and Labour won a large majority across the district: 30 seats against just 7 Conservatives, 4 Lib Dems, 3 independents and two Greens. The Tories failed to win a single seat in the Carlisle urban area, and this column awarded the title of Result Which Made My Jaw Drop to the Lib Dem gain of the very middle-class Stanwix Urban ward, in northern Carlisle, which had been continuously in the Conservative column for decades.
Harraby North was already one of the safest Labour wards in what became Cumberland, and it was the base for a long local government career for Labour councillor Cyril Weber until his death in April at the age of 78. Weber was first elected to Carlisle city council all the way back in 1979, and he represented Harraby ward continuously from then to 2015; he was mayor of the city in 1988–89. In 2001 Cyril Weber was elected as the Cumbria county councillor for Belle Vue division, transferring to Harraby in 2009 and to Harraby North following boundary changes in 2013; he was then elected in 2022 as the first Cumberland councillor for Harraby North, enjoying a 65–31 majority over the Conservatives. His successor will serve until the next Cumberland council elections in May 2027.
Defending this by-election for Labour is Justin McDermott, who appears to be fighting his first election campaign. The Conservatives have reselected Rob Currie who stood here in 2022; he used to be a Carlisle councillor, representing Yewdale ward from 2018 to 2019. Also standing are Peri Conner for the Green Party and Sarah Wills for the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Carlisle
ONS Travel to Work Area: Carlisle
Postcode district: CA1
Peri Conner (Grn)
Rob Currie (C)
Justin McDermott (Lab)
Sarah Wills (LD)
May 2022 result Lab 708 C 339 TUSC 49
May 2017 Cumbria county council result Lab 737 C 358
May 2013 Cumbria county council result Lab 748 UKIP 242 C 138 Grn 31
Previous results in detail
Primrose
South Tyneside council, Tyne and Wear; caused by the resignation of independent councillor Paul Milburn.
It’s time to bring the curtain down on the last standalone council by-election of the 2019 Parliament. To do so we’re going to march to Jarrow, a town on the south bank of the River Tyne with a very long history.
In the 7th and 8th centuries Jarrow was a very important place as one of the two sites of the monastery of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, a major Christian centre which boasted the largest library north of the Alps. The Venerable Bede, the only Briton to be named a Doctor of the Catholic Church, lived here for most of his life. Bede’s major historical work, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, was completed at Jarrow as was his 725 book The Reckoning of Time, which were both influential in establishing the Anno Domini (or Common Era) dating system across Christendom. His handwriting may also appear in the Codex Amiatinus, a copy of the Bible which was taken from Jarrow to Italy in 716 as a present for Pope Gregory II. Now residing in a library in Florence, the Codex Amiatinus is the oldest surviving single-volume Bible and is possibly the best-preserved version of its Vulgate text.
Bede certainly has not been forgotten in Jarrow. A museum opened here in his memory in 1993, and was reconstituted in 2016 under the name of Jarrow Hall after going bust. The Venerable Bede also gives his name to an electoral ward of South Tyneside council, which is the local authority.
However, our focus today is on Jarrow’s other ward. Primrose ward takes in Jarrow town centre but is named after an estate on Leam Lane, around a mile to the south. This was a council estate, and Primrose ward still has high levels of social renting and a working-class population.
Jarrow is a classic Victorian town built around a single industry, which in this case was shipbuilding. Palmers’ shipyard opened for business in Jarrow in 1852 and immediately made its name with the construction and launch of the John Bowes, the world’s first iron screw collier. Fifty years later, Palmers’ yard ran for three-quarters of a mile on the south bank of the Tyne and employed 10,000 men and boys from Jarrow and further afield building ships (including a number of notable Royal Navy warships), marine engines and boilers.
The eponymous Charles Palmer was elected in 1874 as one of the two Liberal MPs for North Durham. His first win was voided by the Election Court for intimidation, but he won in the resulting by-election and ended up with a long career in politics. Palmer was the first mayor of Jarrow in 1875, and he served from 1885 until his death in 1907 as the first MP for the Jarrow constituency.
Following Palmer’s death the Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company overextended itself, and it was already in serious financial difficulties by the time the Great Depression hit. Palmers’ eventually went bust in 1933, and the Jarrow shipyard was quickly closed down by National Shipbuilders Security, a Government body seeking to reduce the size of the UK’s shipbuilding business. Massive unemployment followed in the town. In the 1935 general election the Jarrow constituency was gained by Labour candidate Ellen Wilkinson, and the following year the town came to national attention with the 1936 Jarrow Crusade, in which 200 local men walked all the way to London to raise the plight of this forgotten town. Some work did come from this — notably, the Titanic’s life-expired sister ship RMS Olympic was sent to Jarrow to be broken up — but it took the outbreak of the Second World War to revive the town’s fortunes.
Today Jarrow stands at the southern end of the lowest fixed crossings of the Tyne. These take the form of four tunnels which connect the town centre with Willington Quay on the north bank. The first two of these were the Tyne Cyclist and Pedestrian Tunnel, which opened in the Festival year of 1951; vehicular traffic is served by the Tyne Tunnels of 1967 and 2011, with the original tunnel — which at one point carried the A1 — now used only by northbound traffic. The town centre is connected to Gateshead and Newcastle to the west by Jarrow metro station, which is on the Tyne and Wear Metro’s South Shields branch.
South Shields is now the home of South Tyneside council, which takes in Jarrow and a number of other towns in the general area. This council has had a Labour majority continuously since 1979, but that might not be the case for much longer if the ruling Labour group can’t get their act together. Until 2020 the leader of the council was the controversial figure of Ian Malcolm, whose twelve-year reign was dissected in reports last March from the council’s standards committee which found that he had bullied council officers and had run up personal bills totalling around £19,000 on a council credit card. If the voters of South Tyneside hadn’t noticed that, then they will definitely have noticed long-running strike action by the council’s binmen in recent months over a disciplinary dispute. In May 2024 Labour lost ten of the fourteen seats they were defending on South Tyneside council, and their majority group plummeted to 28 seats out of a possible 54.
It wasn’t the established political parties that benefited from this. There appears to be no Liberal Democrat organisation in the borough, and the Conservatives lost their last council seat here in May following a series of dire councillor selections. Readers with long memories might recall South Tyneside Conservative councillor David Potts, who was rarely far from the pages of Private Eye in the early part of this century until he drank himself into a very early grave in 2013. In 2021 this column told the story of (some of) the many brushes with the law of Conservative South Tyneside councillor Jeff Milburn, who was disqualified from the council for five years after being given a four-month suspended sentence for possession of a bladed article and then a 20-month suspended sentence for two firearms offences. To give you an idea of the level of stupidity involved in this, the bladed article in question had been found on Milburn by the security team at South Tyneside magistrates’ court, when he turned up there to answer an unrelated drink-driving charge.
But it turned out that the stupidity was not over. Jeff Milburn then submitted nomination papers as an independent candidate for the 2023 South Tyneside council elections despite being disqualified as a result of his two previous suspended prison sentences, which led to him being charged with election fraud. At this point the courts finally lost patience with him, and last November Judge Edward Bindloss at Newcastle crown court sent Milburn to prison for a total of ten months — four months for the Representation of the People Act offence, plus six months of the firearms suspended sentence. Milburn will also have been struck off the electoral register for five years, and the clock on his five-year disqualification from public office has been reset. Again.
The former Conservative seats in Cleadon with East Boldon ward have been gained by the Green Party, who have been quietly building a local electoral fortress in South Shields in recent years. But the Labour collapse here in May 2024 was mostly to the benefit of independent candidates, who won ten of the 18 seats up for election.
Since I’ve had a pop at both Labour and Conservative councillors in this piece, it’s only fair to point out that South Tyneside’s independent group has its own fair share of fruit and nutcases. Consider John Robertson, who was an independent candidate for Primrose ward in Jarrow in May 2011 and finished in a strong second place. This was just a matter of weeks after Robertson, who at the time ran a scaffolding firm, had deliberately driven a lorry into the headquarters of the council-run South Tyneside Homes — with whom he was in a dispute over a contract. £160,000 of damage was caused for which Newcastle Crown Court sentenced him to 40 weeks in prison, suspended. Robertson also filed for bankruptcy with debts of £1.3 million.
This was not by any means the end of John Robertson’s vendetta against South Tyneside council. He launched legal action against the council in 2013 and 2014, which ended with an extended civil restraint order being made against him.
In 2019 Robertson made it to elected office in South Tyneside by being elected as an independent councillor for Fellgate and Hedworth ward. He got straight into hot water over an offensive social media post aimed at one of his constituents, Michelle Potts, whose husband Jay’s sister is divorced from Robertson. In February 2021 he was sanctioned by the council’s standards committee for bullying a Labour councillor on social media, and suspended from the Jarrow and Boldon Community Area Forum. A month later the council sanctioned him again, this time for email and social media harassment of a senior officer at South Tyneside Clinical Commissioning Group; the council ordered that all Robertson’s outgoing council emails be monitored by officers.
Then in June 2021 Robertson, suffering an apparent rush of blood to the head, sent a resignation letter in to the council and posted a copy of it on his social media. He then had second thoughts, tried to retract his resignation and found that you can’t do that. Robertson stood for re-election in the July 2021 Fellgate and Hedworth by-election caused by his own resignation, and lost his seat to Labour — whose candidate was none other than the aforementioned Jay Potts. Karma.
This was not by any means the end of John Robertson’s vendetta against South Tyneside council. He launched proceedings against the council in the Employment Tribunal in what appears to have been a bid to get his seat back, then returned to elected office on 5th May 2022 by the more conventional method of winning an election in Jarrow’s Primrose ward. Within two weeks Robertson was appearing before Newcastle magistrates on a harassment charge related to the above social media bullying of a Labour councillor; he was found guilty following a two-day trial, sentenced to eight weeks in prison suspended and ordered to pay £250 compensation plus costs. In the meantime John Robertson had never fully paid South Tyneside council’s legal costs from the 2013 and 2014 litigation, and in November 2022 he was declared bankrupt by Newcastle civil court over an unpaid debt to the council of £8,661. Neither the eight-week suspended sentence nor the bankruptcy are enough to disqualify Robertson, who remains in post.
John Robertson’s win in Jarrow’s Primrose ward was not a flash in the pan. Last month Primrose re-elected its independent councillor David Kennedy with a 57–35 lead over Labour, with the Greens being the only other party to stand; this means that the ward has now voted for independent candidates in five successive elections going back to 2019 when Paul Milburn became Primrose’s first independent councillor of recent years. Now, I don’t want you to get the impression from this piece that all South Tyneside politicians are in the Councillors Behaving Badly file, and Paul Milburn was by all accounts a respected and effective councillor for his ward. He was re-elected for a second term in 2023, and in another timeline he might have become leader of the independent group last month. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed last year with Parkinson’s disease. Milburn chose to announce his retirement on health grounds at last month’s council AGM, to seek a more peaceful lifestyle following a recent “noticeable change” in his condition.
Before the recent independent winning streak, Primrose was a solid Labour ward whose previous councillors included a future MP. Emma Lewell-Buck represented the ward for some years before she was elected to Parliament in the 2013 South Shields by-election. Primrose ward is part of the Jarrow and Gateshead East constituency, where Labour backbencher Kate Osborne will seek a second term of office next week.
Before then we have a council by-election in South Tyneside to deal with. The defending independent candidate is Joan Hamilton, a former union shop steward at the council who has been endorsed by ward councillors David Kennedy and John Robertson; in May she was runner-up in Monkton ward. Labour have selected Kevin Brydon, who was an unsuccessful candidate here in 2023. Only one other candidate has been nominated, Darius Seago of the Green Party; as happened here last month, the Conservatives haven’t found a candidate.
Parliamentary constituency: Jarrow and Gateshead East
ONS Travel to Work Area: Newcastle
Postcode districts: NE31, NE32, NE36
Kevin Brydon (Lab)
Joan Hamilton (Ind)
Darius Seago (Grn)
May 2024 result Ind 1004 Lab 617 Grn 150
May 2023 result Ind 869 Lab 651 C 89 Grn 75
May 2022 result Ind 875 Lab 746 C 153 Grn 79
May 2021 result Ind 793 Lab 683 C 283 Grn 91
May 2019 result Ind 759 Lab 667 Grn 158 LD 132 C 129
May 2018 result Lab 1122 C 325 Grn 229
May 2016 result Lab 1185 Grn 301 C 237
May 2015 result Lab 1923 UKIP 870 C 326 Grn 182
May 2014 result Lab 1070 UKIP 647 C 135
June 2013 by-election Lab 755 UKIP 520 BNP 157 C 80
May 2012 result Lab 1284 BNP 227 C 195
May 2011 result Lab 1157 Ind 767 C 164 Ind 93
May 2010 result Lab 1723 BNP 478 LD 422 C 300 Ind 285 Grn 63
February 2010 by-election Lab 854 BNP 566 Ind 213 Ind 174 C 124 LD 100
May 2008 result Lab 1005 BNP 681 C 382
May 2007 result Lab 1066 BNP 504 C 270 Grn 221
May 2006 result Lab 917 LD 260 C 180 Ind 178 Ind 142 Grn 114
June 2004 result Lab 1065/1036/972 C 634
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
