Previewing the three council by-elections of 30th March 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Before we start this week, apologies are due to Angus Mylne who was an unsuccessful candidate in the Cripplegate by-election to the City of London Corporation last week. I had misspelt his name in last week’s Previews. Sorry about that.
Three by-elections on 30th March 2023:
Heath
Barking and Dagenham council, London; caused by the death of Labour councillor Olawale Martins.
One of the attractions and challenges of writing Andrew’s Previews is that it demonstrates what a varied place Britain is. This week’s three entries run the gamut from city centre to suburb to small-town, and I have to be ready to give all these places the attention they deserve and to tell their story.
But local by-elections are not evenly distributed across the country. They’re essentially a random selection of areas, and randomness doesn’t do even distribution. If you look at the state of your bingo card in the middle of a game, you’ll notice that often some columns get filled in quickly before others have properly got going. You’ll notice similar patterns if you analyse a few weeks’ lottery numbers. There are peaks, and there are troughs. That’s randomness.
When applied to this column, randomness means that there are some districts in the UK which I end up writing about time and again, while other parts of the country get overlooked for years for the simple reason that all their councillors successfully finish their term. In over 12 years of Andrew’s Previews, there are still a handful of councils (notably the city of Portsmouth) which this column has never given the full by-election treatment to. Clearly those places are doing something right in terms of retaining their elected members.
Which is how we come to Dagenham. Just a century ago this was a rural area on the north bank of the Thames estuary. The low-lying land next to the river had flood defences from a very early point, but they were breached in 1707 by an exceptionally high tide which inundated over 1,000 acres of land. It took thirteen years, and the voting of £40,000 of public money by Parliament, to repair the breach. To celebrate this the King’s Commissioner of Works started an annual event: a festival of Thames whitebait, marked by a feast at Dagenham every Whitsuntide. For a time this was a serious landmark in the political year, with senior politicians including Pitt the Younger in regular attendance.
Dagenham as we know it dates from the inter-war years, when it grew from rural parish within Romford Rural District to full-blown municipal borough in just twelve years, 1926 to 1938. During this period the Ford Motor Company built an enormous car factory next to the river, and the Greater London Council built an even more enormous housing estate at Becontree. It’s the latter that we’re concerned with here, for the Heath of the ward name is Becontree Heath. Or, more accurately, was Becontree Heath: the present ward is now entirely built up and no trace of actual heathland remains.
The area of the modern Heath ward was sufficiently far away from the core of the Becontree estate that housebuilding was still going on here after the Second World War, and this ward includes the Heath Park Estate which won a merit award at the 1951 Festival of Britain. The ward runs north from here to the Becontree Heath or “Merry Fiddlers” junction and to Dagenham Civic Centre, a fine example of 1930s municipal architecture. However, it’s no longer in municipal use: Barking and Dagenham council have let the Civic Centre out to Coventry University, who use it as one of their two London campuses.
The last time Andrew’s Previews gave Barking and Dagenham the full treatment was all the way back in April 2012, and in a rather racially-charged context. At the time this was one of the strongest districts for the British National Party, who had won a by-election in Goresbrook ward in 2004 and won a second seat in that ward at the 2006 local elections. Labour gained the two BNP seats in that ward in May 2010, but one of the Labour councillors turned out to be ineligible because she was employed by the council as a lollipop lady. She was re-elected at a by-election in July 2010 but then resigned, prompting another by-election in April 2012. The BNP finished second, within over 30% of the vote, at both of those by-elections.
Part of the reason that the BNP were trying to stir things up in Barking and Dagenham is that the borough has seen major demographic change in this century. In the 2021 census Heath ward was majority non-white: it was in the top 60 wards in England and Wales for residents born in Africa (12.4%) and in the top 80 wards for black ethnicity (26.6%. mostly of African rather than West Indian heritage).
The last four ordinary elections to Barking and Dagenham council all returned a full slate of 51 Labour councillors out of a possible 51, and the last time anybody other than Labour won an election in this borough was a July 2008 by-election in Chadwell Heath ward which went to the Conservatives. That’s almost fifteen years ago.
The closest call for Labour here in recent years has actually come at parliamentary level, when Jon Cruddas was re-elected in 2019 as the MP for Dagenham and Rainham by just 293 votes over the Conservatives. Cruddas has been the MP here since 2001, and he will stand down at the next general election at the end of his sixth term of office. He was a candidate for the Labour deputy leadership in 2007, and actually led in the first round of counting; however, that was with less than 20% of the first preferences, and he didn’t attract enough transfers to make the final two.
There doesn’t appear to be much indication that the redwash in Barking and Dagenham will end here. Heath ward was cut down from three councillors to two by boundary changes in 2022: the local elections here last year were a straight fight between Labour and the Conservatives, with the Labour slate winning 74–26. The ward name goes all the way back to the Dagenham borough era: in the London borough era previous editions of Heath ward have voted Labour in every election except for the Conservative landslide of 1968.
There could have been a by-election for Heath ward in the 2014–18 term, when Labour councillor Dan Young got himself into the Councillors Behaving Badly file: he assaulted his girlfriend in public on Hallowe’en in 2014, and ended up with a police caution for common assault and with his Labour membership suspended. Young stayed on as a councillor until resigning in November 2017, by which time we were too close to the 2018 borough elections for a by-election to be held.
Instead we travel to Heath ward following the death of Olawale Martins, who was first elected here in 2018. At the time of his death last November he was deputy chair of Barking and Dagenham council’s pensions committee. He was just 63 years old.
Both Labour and the Conservatives have selected very young candidates for this by-election. Harriet Spoor, who is the defending Labour candidate, is 20 years old and in the second year of a politics degree at Queen Mary University of London. The Conservatives’ Joe Lynch is even younger: he’s an A-level student at All Saints Catholic School in Dagenham, and also referees football games for the Essex County FA in his spare time. Two more parties have entered the fray following the straight fight last time: Zygimantas Adomavicius stands for the Liberal Democrats and Kim Arrowsmith for the Green Party.
Parliamentary constituency: Dagenham and Rainham
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: RM8, RM9, RM10
Zygimantas Adomavicius (LD)
Kim Arrowsmith (Grn)
Joe Lynch (C)
Harriet Spoor (Lab)
May 2022 result Lab 952/930 C 338/338
Previous results in detail
Westgate
Gloucester council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Dawn Melvin.
Our other English by-election today takes place in a very historic location, as we come to the centre of the ancient city of Gloucester. This was founded by the Romans in the first century AD as Glevum, a fortress guarding the lowest bridging-point of the River Severn. The “bright fort” was built in the typical Roman style, enclosed by a rectangular wall with rounded corners and a gate in the middle of each side. Even now Eastgate Street, Northgate Street, Southgate Street and Westgate Street all meet at Gloucester Cross, at the centre of the original Roman fort.
After the Romans left, Gloucester remained an important location in Mercia, Wessex and then England. King Henry III, while still a child, was crowned in Gloucester Cathedral in 1216; his grandson Edward II was buried here in 1327 following his death, in suspicious circumstances, at Berkeley Castle further down the Severn valley. The cathedral will be this year’s host of the Three Choirs Festival, which rotates between here, Hereford and Worcester; and in recent years it has come to the attention of a new generation worldwide as a filming location for the Harry Potter films.
Gloucester Cathedral is located to the north of the mediaeval Westgate Street, which gives its name to the ward covering Gloucester city centre. Close by is the Tailor of Gloucester’s House, used as the setting for a Beatrix Potter story; while on Westgate Street itself can be found the city’s folk museum and the Shire Hall, headquarters of Gloucestershire county council.
Westgate Street continues through a modern one-way system to Westgate Bridge, which until 1966 (with the opening of the motorway Severn Bridge, many miles downstream) was part of the lowest road crossing of the Severn. This bridge has been replaced several times over the centuries, and the three current bridges — one for inbound traffic, one for outbound traffic, and a footbridge in between — are modern structures dating from 2000. The Westgate Bridge takes travellers to Alney Island, which lies between two channels of the Severn; traffic for points west has to complete the crossing of the river on the far side of the island at Over Bridge. Here a 1970s structure has superseded a rather flat 1820s stone arch bridge erected by Thomas Telford, which is now for pedestrians and cyclists only as it is too narrow and weak to carry modern road traffic. More on that theme later.
The Westgate ward also extends to the south of the city centre to take in Hempsted. This is a village which wasn’t incorporated into the city until 1966; part of the reason for that is that Hempsted is cut off from the rest of the city by the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. Once the broadest and deepest canal in the world, this channel preserved Gloucester’s status as an inland port by allowing seagoing ships to bypass a number of loops in the Severn. The canal terminates at Gloucester Basin, on the southern edge of the city centre.
The city of Gloucester has returned MPs to Parliament continuously since the thirteenth century, and in modern times it’s a seat which has voted for the winning party nationally at every election from 1979 onwards. Since 2010 the MP here has been Conservative backbencher Richard Graham.
The Gloucester parliamentary seat covers all but one of the wards of Gloucester city council, which has had a Conservative majority since 2015. In 2016 Gloucester moved away from the thirds electoral system and started electing its councillors on an all-out basis. This gives the city a rather unusual electoral cycle, because most of the non-metropolitan English districts who elect all of their councillors are up for election in May this year; however, Gloucester city council’s next election is not due until 2024.
The last Gloucester city council elections took place in 2021 and returned an increased Conservative majority with 26 Conservative councillors, 10 Lib Dems and 3 Labour. The Conservatives have since lost a by-election to the Lib Dems (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 457), but they managed to hold a by-election in Tuffley ward last October, at the electoral pit of the Truss administration, thanks to a very even split in the opposition vote between Labour and the Lib Dems.
Westgate ward is part of the Conservative majority, and it re-elected the Conservative slate in 2021 with 40% of the vote against 28% for the Lib Dems and 20% for Labour. Some of that Conservative score was clearly a personal vote for Pam Tracey, who topped the poll some way ahead of her running-mates Paul Toleman and Dawn Melvin. Tracey has been the county councillor for the area for some years, and on the same day she was successfully re-elected to Gloucestershire county council in the Hempsted and Westgate division. This by-election is to replace Conservative councillor Dawn Melvin, who stood down from the council in February for private family reasons; she had represented Westgate ward since 2016.
Defending for the Conservatives is Peter Sheehy, who has run businesses in Gloucester city centre for the last 50 years; he is currently co-owner of the Turk’s Head Inn. Sheehy was a county council candidate for the Conservatives two years ago, finishing second to the Lib Dems in Kingsholm and Wootton division which takes in two small corners of this ward; four years ago he had the distinction of being one of the first two local election candidates for the Brexit Party, when he contested a July 2019 by-election in Gloucester’s Barnwood ward (Andrew’s Previews 2019, page 218). The Lib Dems have reselected Rebecca Trimnell who was runner-up here at the last election in 2021; she works for a charity helping people with dementia. The Labour candidate Trevor Howard will be hoping to connect with the electorate for longer than a brief encounter in the polling booth; he is retired from a career in the nuclear sector. Also standing are Benjamin “Lord Benny” Baker for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and Gill White in a rare local election outing for Reform UK. Local Democracy Reporter Carmelo Garcia has interviewed all the candidates, and you can find out more here (link).
Parliamentary constituency: Gloucester
Gloucestershire county council division: Hempsted and Westgate (most), Kingsholm and Wotton (small parts)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Gloucester
Postcode districts: GL1, GL2
Benjamin Baker (Loony)
Trevor Howard (Lab)
Peter Sheehy (C)
Rebecca Trimnell (LD)
Gill White (Reform UK)
May 2021 result C 969/814/793 LD 666/501/465 Lab 477/441/430 Grn 239 Ind 59/55/30
May 2016 result C 905/765/679 Lab 406/370 Grn 276 LD 210/205/186 TUSC 114
Previous results in detail
Aethwy
Isle of Anglesey council, North Wales; caused by the death of Plaid Cymru councillor Alun Mummery.
Let me finish for the week by taking you to the Menai Strait, the narrow stretch of tidal water which divides Anglesey from the Welsh mainland. The waters are treacherous, with strong currents flowing in either direction depending on the state of the tide. The central section of the Menai, known as the Swellies, is particularly turbulent: whirlpools, shoals and small islands lie ready to trap even the most experienced of sailors.
This natural obstacle is a problem for travellers, and Anglesey gets rather a lot of them. The island has a very different economic profile to Gwynedd over the water. It’s relatively flat and thus much more suitable for agriculture than Gwynedd, and Anglesey’s main town — Holyhead — is a major port at one of the narrowest points of the Irish Sea, with ferries arriving and departing for Dublin and Dún Laoghaire several times a day. A fixed link to Holyhead would be a major prize for whoever could develop it first.
Enter the “Colossus of Roads”, the great civil engineer Thomas Telford, who spent much of his later years developing and improving the main road from London to Holyhead. His route is still followed to a large extent by the modern A5. Threading a road through the Welsh mountains from Llangollen to Bangor without any major gradients was a serious achievement for Telford, but the crossing of the Menai Strait was quite another matter. His solution was the Menai Suspension Bridge, erected over the narrowest point of the strait and opened in 1826; with a span of 176 metres, it was at the time the longest suspension bridge in the world. Two decades later, some distance to the west at the other end of the Swillies, Robert Stephenson raised the Britannia Bridge to carry the railway line to Holyhead.
These fixed links with the mainland have proven to be fragile as time has gone on. The Britannia Bridge was badly damaged by a fire in 1970, and subsequently rebuilt as a double-deck structure: trains now run on the lower deck, with traffic on the A55 expressway using the upper deck. The Menai Suspension Bridge, iconic though it is, is almost 200 years old now and is showing its age; as with Over Bridge on the Severn which we covered earlier, Telford’s bridge is too small for large vehicles to fit through it and now has a rather severe weight limit. The Menai Suspension Bridge was closed without warning in October 2022 for essential maintenance work, and didn’t reopen until February 2023; that forced all traffic between Anglesey and the mainland onto the Britannia Bridge, which is the only single-carriageway section of the A55 and as such can be a bottleneck on that road. Plans to relieve both bridges by constructing a third Menai crossing, slightly to the east of the Britannia Bridge, fell victim last month to the Welsh Government’s cancellation of all roadbuilding scheems in Wales on climate change grounds.
The Menai Bridges transformed the economy of Anglesey, not least because the bridgehead of Telford’s crossing at Porthaethwy was brought within commuting distance of the city of Bangor. A town grew up, which still bears the name Porthaethwy in the Welsh language but in the English tongue is simply called Menai Bridge. With 2,445 electors on the roll, Menai Bridge is the fifth-largest town on Anglesey. It has an unusual cultural legacy: Rownd a Rownd, a Welsh-language soap opera which S4C have been broadcasting since 1995, is filmed in Menai Bridge.
The Britannia Bridge crosses from the mainland to a village which, with 2,422 electors, is only marginally smaller than Menai Bridge. Llanfairpwllgwyngyll’s claim to fame is that it was the location for the first British meeting of the Women’s Institute, which took place here in September 1915. But you probably know it for its notoriously long name, which spills over 51 Welsh letters (some of which are digraphs) and 58 letters in English. In an 1869 publicity stunt the railway station was given the name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch; this station has since been renamed to the rather more manageable Llanfairpwll, and it is the first stop after Bangor for local trains on the North Wales Coast line. The Welsh railway station with the longest name today is, as this column has previously noted, Rhoose Cardiff International Airport.
As can be seen from this clip on ITV’s The Chase from some years ago, Llanfair PG’s name (which hasn’t really settled down in local use even now) is rather more well-known to the outside world than its location. But don’t try this question on Mark “the Beast” Labbett now, because he won’t get caught out again. That’s how quiz professionals work.
Menai Bridge and Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll are the two main settlements within Aethwy ward, which also takes in the rural community of Penmynydd to the north-west and Pili Palas, a small zoo which is particularly noted for its butterfly house. The name of this ward recalls the former Aethwy Rural District, which was created in 1894 to cover parishes which were previously administered from over the water as part of the Bangor Rural Sanitary District. Even then, Bangor was the main economic centre for the area.
However, proposals in the 2010s from the Boundary Commission for Wales to combine Anglesey and Bangor into the same parliamentary seat, as part of an intended reduction of MPs in Wales (which is over-represented in the current House of Commons), fell on very stony ground locally. After those reviews failed, the Johnson government enacted changes to the law around parliamentary boundary reviews which made the parliamentary constituency of Ynys Môn a “protected” constituency, shielding it from the large cut in Wales’ parliamentary representation which should take effect by the time of the next Westminster poll. It was of course a complete coincidence that the change in the law to preserve the Ynys Môn constituency came after that seat was gained by the Conservatives in the 2019 general election.
Anglesey has been a single parliamentary seat since 1885, when the Beaumaris District of Boroughs was abolished. Over the last century Anglesey/Ynys Môn has returned MPs from all four Welsh parties, but the Senedd constituency has been in the hands of Plaid Cymru continuously since the creation of the original Welsh Assembly in 1999. Since a 2013 by-election the MS for the island has been Rhun ap Iorwerth, the deputy leader of Plaid Cymru, who is a former pupil of the Ysgol David Hughes secondary school in Menai Bridge. Ysgol David Hughes has a rather long list of notable former pupils who include the current Conservative MP for Pudsey Stuart Andrew, the former UKIP Wales leader Nathan Gill, the singer Aled Jones, the Rocketman actor Taron Egerton, the veteran Wales goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey and two of the Super Furry Animals.
The local authority here is the Isle of Anglesey County Council, based at the centre of the island in Llangefni. This has traditionally been dominated by independent councillors, but their star fell somewhat as a result of serious political infighting which led to the 2012 Anglesey elections being postponed by a year. The 2013 and 2017 Anglesey elections were close between the independent councillors and Plaid Cymru, but in 2022 Plaid made major gains on the island to win a majority on Anglesey council for the first time.
Aethwy ward is part of the Plaid majority, and Plaid Cymru have held all three seats here since 2017. In 2022 the Plaid slate was re-elected with 51% of the vote in Aethwy ward, against 24% for Labour and 13% for the Conservatives.
Top of the poll here in 2013 and 2017 was Alun Mummery, who was first elected to the county council in a July 2012 by-election for Gwyngyll ward, which then covered the eastern half of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. He was an independent candidate then, but was re-elected in 2013, 2017 and 2022 with the Plaid nomination. Mummery, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 80, had previously worked for the county council as a rent collector. His passion was football, and he helped to run the local team Llanfairpwll FC for over half a century.
Big shoes to fill for the defending Plaid Cymru candidate Sonia Williams, who is a business development manager and Menai Bridge town councillor. The Labour candidate is Karl Jones, who gives an address in the village of Tyn-y-gongl some distance to the north. Standing again for the Conservatives is Steven Green, another Menai Bridge town councillor who was their lead candidate here last year. A four-strong ballot paper is completed by Sarah Jackson of the Lib Dems, who contest Aethwy ward for the first time in ten years.
There are no council by-elections scheduled for the next two weeks, so this column will now take a well-earned break for an extended Easter holiday before returning on 20th April. But don’t think you’ll be getting rid of me that easily. I’ll be hard at work behind the scenes getting everything together for the extended previews of the 4th May local elections, and I’ve also found time to appear on your television screens. Tune in to Channel 5 at 18:30 on Good Friday (yes, it’s a bank holiday so you have no excuse not to tune in) to watch your columnist answering quiz questions in pursuit of a cash prize. There’s just one thing standing in my team’s way — the Eggheads…
Parliamentary and Senedd constituency: Ynys Môn
ONS Travel to Work Area: Bangor and Holyhead
Postcode districts: LL59, LL60, LL61, LL75, LL77
Steven Green (C)
Sarah Jackson (LD)
Karl Jones (Lab)
Sonia Williams (PC)
May 2022 result PC 1491/1489/1392 Lab 696 C 372/338/310 Grn 359
May 2017 result PC 1343/1314/1267 Ind 882 Lab 553/505
May 2013 result PC 1091/1037/712 Ind 762/506/340/177 LD 409/361 UKIP 401 C 189
Previous results in detail: 2013–17 2022
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
