Previewing the three local by-elections of 28th March 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
It’s Maundy Thursday, which was once a dies non in UK electoral law — a day, like Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays, on which elections could not be held and which did not count towards the timetable for calculating nomination and other deadlines. This was changed some years ago, but Maundy Thursday is still an unpopular day for by-elections to be held: partly because it’s immediately followed by a bank holiday, and partly because the March or April date falls in the run-up to the scheduled May local elections.
The three polls on 28th March 2024 form one of the busier Maundy Thursdays of recent years, and we have something for everyone with one by-election for each of England, Wales and Scotland. Let’s start in Wales:
Neath East
Neath Port Talbot council, Glamorgan; caused by the death of Labour councillor Sheila Penry.
Last month we were in the county borough of Neath Port Talbot, filling a vacancy in the Briton Ferry East ward. Now we travel immediately north of there to hold a by-election for a seat which has been vacant for longer than that in Briton Ferry East, but which is only being filled now. Politics is confusing like that sometimes.
This sense of confusion continues as we look at the area of Neath up for election today. This ward is defined as covering the Melyncrythan and Penrhiwtyn wards of Neath town council, which together form a continuously built-up area along the main road towards Briton Ferry: Melyncrythan is immediately south of the town centre, Penrhiwtyn to the south of that. The west of the ward is marshland along the banks of the River Neath, cut off from the rest of the ward by the South Wales railway line and the Neath Canal. Along the canal and the railway line is an industrial area dominated by a large Crown Foods factory and by the D S Smith packaging plant; also here is the Area 51 Play Centre, where the children of Neath can presumably play with UFOs. But you didn’t hear that from me, of course.
Now, let’s have a look at the map of this area:
Does anybody know why this ward is called Neath East? Answers on a postcard please to the usual address.
In fact, if we take a wider view and look at the three-and-a-bit wards covering Neath town, we see that Neath East is in fact the town’s westernmost ward. It’s further south than Neath South ward, and doesn’t extend as far east as Neath North (or Cimla, which is part of Neath for administrative purposes). The ward’s eastern finger is unpopulated, consisting of the northern slopes of the 151-metre summit of Moel Pencaerau.
If this was a mistake by the Welsh local government boundary drawers, it’s a mistake of very long standing. The current boundaries of Neath East, Neath North and Neath South wards seem to have been set up for the 1983 local elections, when the local authority here was still Neath district council. These arrangements appear to have been carried forward unchanged on the establishment of the current Neath Port Talbot county borough in the mid-1990s, and boundary reviews for the 1999 and 2022 local elections both recommended no change.
The Local Democracy and Boundary Commission’s report on the latter review does discuss the name of Neath East ward, but only in the context of what its Welsh-language name should be. The Commission proposed Dwyrain Castell-nedd, which was run past the Welsh Language Commissioner; he agreed that this was a correct translation of “Neath East” without engaging with the question of whether it was an appropriate name in the first place. There had previously been no official Welsh-language name for Neath East ward, because its boundaries were defined in a 19th December 1994 ministerial order which was never published as a statutory instrument and which — because it came out of the Home Office, which had responsibility for local government then — was written in English only. (I am grateful to the Welsh Government for supplying a copy of that order to me via a Freedom of Information Act request.) Statutory instruments relating to Wales were not published bilingually until the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales in 1999.
In the Assembly’s modern replacement, Senedd Cymru, the Neath constituency is represented by Jeremy Miles MS, who lost the Welsh Labour leadership contest to Vaughan Gething last week. Gething has kept Miles in the Welsh cabinet, with the new portfolio of economy, energy and the Welsh language. Neath’s representation in the UK parliament is more complicated: the town’s MP Christina Rees, ex-wife of the former Welsh secretary Ron Davies, has only recently got the Labour whip back after she was suspended from the party in October 2022. Rees is standing down at the next Westminster election, not that she has much choice in that: a large chunk of the current Swansea East seat is being added to the Neath constituency in the boundary changes, and Labour have selected the outgoing Swansea East MP Carolyn Harris to fight the new Neath and Swansea East constituency.
Labour lost their majority on Neath Port Talbot council in 2022 and have gone into opposition: they are still the largest party, but a coalition of independent and Plaid Cymru councillors is running the show. Neath East ward had been solidly in the Labour column since its establishment in 1983, but this also changed in 2022 when the ward’s three seats split between Plaid Cymru (35%), Labour (33%) and an independent councillor (32%). The Labour survivor was Sheila Penry, a political veteran who represented Neath East ward from 1999 until her death in December. Penry was the lead organiser of the town’s carnival for many years, and had served as mayor of both the county borough and Neath town.
A hard act to follow for the Labour candidate Lauren Heard, who is a Neath town councillor and was on the staff of Christina Rees MP when she was elected to the town council in 2022. Another town councillor on the ballot is Megan Poppy Lloyd: she was the Green candidate for Neath in the 2021 Senedd election, but she is now in Plaid Cymru and stood on their ticket in Neath South ward two years ago. There are two independents on the ballot: Keith Finn represents Melyncrythan ward on the town council and works as a physiotherapist and yoga teacher, while Sylwia Harris is a solicitor specialising in contentious probate and employment law. Those are your four candidates.
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Neath
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Neath and Swansea East
ONS Travel to Work Area: Swansea
Postcode district: SA11
Keith Finn (Ind)
Sylwia Harris (Ind)
Lauren Heard (Lab)
Megan Lloyd (PC)
May 2022 result PC 482/418/371 Lab 463/427/418 Ind 452
Previous results in detail
Somerton
Somerset council; caused by the death of Liberal Democrat councillor Dean Ruddle.
Our English by-election this week takes place in a small town which gave its name to a county. However, while other county towns grew into major cities, Somerton never achieved greatness: its population stalled in the nineteenth century and is now comfortably under 5,000. The town still has a weekly market serving the local population, and its traditional industry — glovemaking — has now given way to agriculture as the major economic sector. Somerton is off the main road network for Somerset, and the railway station here closed in the 1960s although trains still pass through the town regularly.
There are claims that Somerton was briefly the capital of Wessex around 900, and in more modern times this was commemorated by the town being the centre of the Wessex ward of South Somerset council. This was abolished last year and Somerton is now the centre of an electoral division which returns two members of the unitary Somerset council. This division takes in seven other parishes in the general area, some of which have rather elaborate names (to take two examples, Compton Dundon and Keinton Mandeville). It was originally drawn up for the 2013 Somerset county council election.
For the last decade local elections in Somerton had been dominated by the figure of Dean Ruddle, who had represented the town on the county council since 2013 and on South Somerset district council from 2015 to abolition. He had also sat on Somerton town council for ten years and was the serving chair of that council. Originally Ruddle was a Conservative figure, but he resigned that party’s whip in 2018 over concerns about the county council’s finances: he was re-elected to South Somerset council in 2019 as an independent, and then joined the Liberal Democrats before the 2022 Somerset county elections. This returned a Lib Dem majority, and Dean Ruddle joined the council’s cabinet with the adult social care portfolio. He still held that post when he died suddenly in January at the age of 59.
Ruddle’s 2018 concerns about Somerset county council’s finances appear to have been well-founded, and unitarisation of the county’s local government has not resolved the problems. The Lib Dem administration which took over in 2022 declared a financial emergency in November 2023. They did manage to set a balanced budget for 2024–25, but this involved £35 million in cuts, 1,000 job losses and large council tax rises — and even that is unlikely to solve the council’s funding gap for future years.
A competent Conservative party might well seek to capitalise on this, because the Lib Dem lead in Somerton ward in 2022 was not particularly large: they beat the Conservatives by only 51–39, and under his previous Tory colours Dean Ruddle had enjoyed big majorities in previous years. However, the local Conservatives may well be in some disarray following the result in the Somerton and Frome parliamentary by-election last year, which the party resoundingly lost to the Liberal Democrats after the previous MP was caught in a newspaper drugs sting. The Lib Dem MP Sarah Dyke will see her seat split into two new seats by the boundary changes: she is to seek re-election in Glastonbury and Somerton.
Defending for the Liberal Democrats is Stephen Page, who lives in Keinton Mandeville and represented the former Wessex ward on South Somerset council from 2015 to 2019; in the 2022 Somerset county elections he contested the neighbouring Castle Cary division. The Conservatives have reselected David Hall, who was runner-up here in 2022; he had previously been deputy leader of the county council, then representing Bridgwater East and Bawdrip division. Also standing are Gregory Chambers for Labour and Matthew Geen for the Green Party — vote Geen, go Green.
Parliamentary constituency: Somerton and Frome
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Glastonbury and Somerton
ONS Travel to Work Area: Yeovil
Postcode districts: BA22, TA10, TA11
Gregory Chambers (Lab)
Matthew Geen (Grn)
David Hall (C)
Stephen Page (LD)
May 2022 result LD 1906/1761 C 1436/1205 Lab 288 UKIP 97
May 2017 Somerset county council result C 2340 LD 869 Grn 177 Lab 122
May 2013 Somerset county council result C 1450 LD 788 UKIP 514 Grn 412 Lab 133
Previous results in detail
Stromness and South Isles
Orkney Islands council; caused by the resignation of independent councillor James Stockan.
For our wildcard this week we are going offshore to the Orkney archipelago. Like Shetland much further to the north, Orkney consists of a large central island aptly called “Mainland” and a number of smaller islands surrounding it.
Orkney Mainland’s second-largest town is Stromness, which is located in the south-west corner of the island and has a population of around 2,500. This is a seaport of long standing, with a large harbour sheltered from the strong tides of Hoy Sound and the gales of the North Atlantic. There are regular ferries from here to Scrabster on the Caithness coast and to the islands of Graemsay and Hoy to the south.
Hoy is by far the largest of the islands which guard the western edge of Scapa Flow. It’s the only mountainous Orkney Island, with a summit of 481 metres at Ward Hill and seacliffs of over 350 metres at St John’s Head; but advanced rockclimbers are drawn to the vertical or worse cliffs of the Old Man of Hoy, a 137-metre sea stack on the island’s western coast which has been created by coastal erosion.
Hoy’s main settlement at Lyness on the east coast was once a major naval base, with up to 12,000 personnel stationed here during the Second World War. This is thanks to its location on the shallow and sheltered waters of Scapa Flow, which were an anchorage for Viking ships back in the day and then became home to much of the Royal Navy fleet during the two World Wars. Following the German defeat in the First World War, 74 of the Imperial German Navy’s ships were interned here before being scuttled; seven of them, together with the British battleships HMS Royal Oak and HMS Vanguard, still lie in the waters of Scapa Flow. Today the British ships are off-limits as war graves, while the German ships are popular targets for scuba divers.
Historically, the wrecks of Scapa Flow have been important sources of scrap metal for scientific use. Their steel armourplating predates the nuclear test era, which released radioactive material into the atmosphere and led to slight contamination of all steel produced since that date. This level of contamination is nothing to worry about for general use, but it is a problem if you are trying to manufacture Geiger counters or other sensitive radiation detectors; so pre-atomic steel has been in demand over the post-war decades for these specialised uses.
The main raw material for the nuclear industry is uranium, of which there are significant deposits in the rocks under the Stromness area. Proposals in the 1970s to exploit this led to significant local opposition, including from an unlikely source. The composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who had moved to Hoy in 1971 and spent the rest of his life on Orkney, composed The Yellow Cake Revue: this was a series of cabaret songs premiered in Stronmess in 1980 with a serious anti-nuclear theme. One piano interlude from this song collection, Farewell to Stromness, depicts the residents of the town being forced to leave as a result of nuclear contamination; it has become one of Davies’ best-known pieces.
Nuclear power in Orkney may never have got off the ground, but fossil fuels are still important to the local economy. The small island of Flotta (population around 80) is dominated by a major North Sea oil terminal, which was opened by Tony Benn in 1977. Oil from the Piper, Claymore, Tartan, Golden Eagle and other oilfields is piped here for processing before leaving by tanker.
However, for electricity Orkney has embraced renewable energy in a big way. Wind power are extremely popular here, and the islands contain 10% of the UK’s domestic wind turbines. The European Marine Energy Centre, which is based in Stromness, is working on projects to generate power from the waves and tides around the archipelago. All this means that Orkney regularly generates over 100% of its electricity needs from renewable sources, with the excess power being exported to the Scottish mainland.
Orkney is a constituency of its own at Holyrood and is joined with Shetland to forms a Westminster constituency. Both of these have extremely low headcounts, reflecting the islands’ isolation and distance from the centres of political power in Edinburgh and London; the Orkney and Shetland seat was exempted from the recent Westminster boundary changes for this reason. Parliamentary elections here are dominated by the Liberal Democrats: Liam McArthur has been the Lib Dem MSP for Orkney since 2007, while the Orkney and Shetland parliamentary seat — which has been in Lib Dem or Liberal hands continuously since 1950 — has been represented since 2001 by the former Scottish secretary Alistair Carmichael.
Local elections here are another matter. The Orkney Islands council is by headcount the third-smallest principal local government unit in the UK, with a population of around 22,000. Like the two smaller units, the City of London and the Isles of Scilly, elections here are dominated by independent candidates. The 2022 local elections returned 19 independents and two Green councillors.
With this sort of political profile, the main benefit of the introduction of proportional representation to the islands in 2007 was to reduce the number of uncontested elections. At its first election in 2007 the modern Stromness and South Isles ward had seven independent candidates chasing three places; James Stockan, the outgoing councillor for the former Stromness North ward, topped the poll with 42% of the vote and was easily elected on the first count. He polled 54% of the first preferences at the 2012 election, when official SNP and UKIP candidates stood and did very poorly. In 2017 Stockan, outgoing independent Rob Crichton and new face Magnus Thomson were elected unopposed; Stockan subsequently became the first political leader of the Orkney Islands council.
This wasn’t James Stockan’s only electoral experience. He had stood as an independent candidate in the 2011 Holyrood election, finishing second in the Orkney constituency with an impressive 25%. In 2016 he was an independent candidate for the Highlands and Islands region, polling 1.8%; almost half of his vote total came from Orkney.
The 2022 election in Stromness and South Isles saw a bit of a backlash against the three outgoing councillors. James Stockan topped the poll and was elected on the first count again, but only with 31% of vote; the second seat went to new face Graham Bevan on 24%, Lindsay Hall started on 15% and official Scottish Green candidate Maia Brodie polled 14%. Outgoing independent councillors Crichton and Thomson finished fifth and sixth; Crichton overtook the Greens on Thomson’s transfers, but eventually finished as runner-up 42 votes behind Hall. Given the relatively small number of votes involved, that was quite a decisive majority.
After making the national news during his second term as council leader by suggesting that Orkney could leave the UK to join a Nordic country, James Stockan is now retiring from politics and he resigned from the council in February. He has been replaced as leader by 29-year-old independent councillor Heather Woodbridge, who won the last Orkney by-election in North Isles ward in October 2020 (Andrew’s Previews 2020, page 96) and who is now Scotland’s youngest council leader. Stockan’s replacement on the council will be elected in this by-election.
The Stromness and South Isles by-election will have an even larger proportion of postal votes than you normally see in local by-elections: this is because the South Isles (Graemsay, Hoy and Flotta) don’t have polling stations of their own and their inhabitants traditionally all vote by post. Graemsay’s voters are allotted to the polling station in Stromness, while residents of Hoy or Flotta who want to cast their vote in person are required to go to the council offices in Kirkwall — not a journey many intending voters will undertake.
Votes at 16 apply to this by-election, but the Alternative Vote will not come into operation because there are only two candidates for the electors to choose from. Janette Park is a community councillor in Stronmess, honorary curator of the Stromness Museum and (with her husband) a partner in a local butcher’s. She is up against Magnus Thomson, who lives on Hoy and was previously a councillor for this ward from 2017 to 2022. As normal in Orcadian elections, both candidates are independents.
Westminster constituency: Orkney and Shetland
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Orkney and Shetland
Holyrood constituency: Orkney
ONS Travel to Work Area: Orkney Islands
Postcode district: KW16
Janette Park (Ind)
Magnus Thomson (Ind)
May 2022 first preferences Ind 353 Ind 281 Ind 175 Grn 157 Ind 115 Ind 69
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
