Previewing the three local by-elections of 31st August 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Before we start, there is a quick correction to last week’s piece. The England men’s cricket team are in fact due to play a match at the Bristol County Ground this year: they will take on Ireland in a one-day international match on 26th September.
According to the Met Office, today is the last day of summer. The kids are about to go back to school, but there’s time yet to squeeze in one more set of by-elections before then. Here are the three by-elections on 31st August 2023:
Batley East
Kirklees council, West Yorkshire; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Fazila Loonat.
Let’s start the week on the wrong side of the Pennines, in a ward which this column has written about quite a bit in the last seven years. Batley is an industrial town in the Heavy Woollen District of Yorkshire, and the industry here was shoddy. By this I don’t mean that the manufacturing was poor quality, but that it involved shoddy — recycled woollen clothes and rags. Textiles are still important to the local economy — one of the local mills has been done up as The Mill, a factory outlet attracting people from all over West Yorkshire — but the largest single employer in the town is Fox’s Biscuits, whose head office and main factory is here. In days gone by the Batley Variety Club was a major draw to punters and artists from all over the world, with in its heyday such well-known American acts as Louis Armstrong, Roy Orbison and Neil Sedaka treading its boards; but live music is no longer played there, and the old Variety Club building was converted into a gym in 2017.
Before the Yorkshire textile industry collapsed, Batley’s mills became a focus for immigration: large numbers of people came to work here from Gujarat and the Punjab, and they stayed and raised families. Batley East ward is in the top 90 wards in England and Wales for Asian ethnicity (58.4%), in the top 50 wards for Islam (58.3%), and in the top 20 wards for people with a “British only identity” (73.7%). The fact that the Pennine textile industry is no longer what it used to be can be gleaned from the fact that Batley East is also in the top 80 wards in England and Wales for those working in sales or customer service occupations (12.9%).
This corner of Yorkshire has been the subject of two parliamentary by-elections in the last decade, the first one resulting from the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox who went to a constituency surgery in June 2016 and never came home. The resulting by-election (Andrew’s Previews 2016, page 251) saw all the other major parties stand aside as a mark of respect, a precedent which was repeated in Southend West last year; unfortunately, this had the effect that the Batley and Spen ballot paper consisted of Labour versus nearly every far-right group you can think of and some other far-right groups you’d probably forgotten about. Against this background, the defending Labour candidate and former Coronation Street actress Tracy Brabin was elected with 86% of the vote, and she was re-elected as Labour MP for Batley and Spen in June 2017 and December 2019 with much narrower majorities over the Conservatives.
One side-effect of the 2016 Batley and Spen by-election campaign was the suspension from Labour of Kirklees councillor Amanda Stubley, who represented Batley East ward, after she got into an altercation with supporters of the English Democrats which made it to the cameras of Channel 4 News. The following year, Stubley fell off Kirklees council under the six-month non-attendance rule. In the resulting by-election in October 2017 I wrote (Andrew’s Previews 2017, page 308) that Batley East was “a safe Labour ward in current political conditions”, and indeed the defending Labour candidate Habiban Zaman won the by-election with 77% of the vote.
In May 2021 Tracy Brabin was elected as the inaugural Mayor of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, meaning that she would have to leave the Commons — the mayoralty has the powers of a police and crime commissioner, and you can’t be a PCC and MP at the same time. The resulting Batley and Spen by-election of July 2021 (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 242) was a much livelier affair: Labour were defending a small majority of 3,525 votes against strong challenges from both the Conservatives and George Galloway. In the end the Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater, sister of the murdered Jo Cox, won with a small majority of 323 votes over the Conservatives; shares of the vote were 35% for Labour, 34% for the Conservatives and 22% for Galloway, standing as the candidate of his Workers Party of Britain.
Kim Leadbeater is unlikely to be MP for Batley for much longer, though. The parliamentary map of West Yorkshire is being heavily redrawn at the next general election, resulting in the Batley and Spen seat being split up. Going forward Batley will be included in a new parliamentary seat of Dewsbury and Batley, which is the successor to the Conservative-held Dewsbury seat but is projected to be safely Labour even in December 2019 conditions. Interestingly Leadbeater has not gone for the Labour selection in Dewsbury and Batley, instead choosing to follow the majority of her electors into the redrawn seat of Spen Valley which is projected to be notionally Conservative.
George Galloway’s political appeal comes overwhelmingly from Muslims, and it’s possible that he carried Batley East ward in the 2021 by-election. Indeed, the following year’s Kirklees council elections saw a strong challenge from a Workers Party of Britain candidate in Batley East. Labour held the ward in May 2022 with 45%, against 33% for the Gallowayite candidate and 15% for the Conservatives.
Now, one feature of strongly-Asian and strongly-Muslim wards in Pennine towns is that they can swing very hard and very unpredictably depending on what is going on in the local mosques. In May 2023 the Conservatives selected a Muslim candidate in Batley East for the first time since 2015, and they had their best result in Batley East since 2015. In fact, the Tories came extremely close to winning this ward for the first time: Habiban Zaman, the winner of the 2017 by-election, held on for a third term of office by 1,978 votes to 1,964, a majority of just 12 votes. This equates to 44% for both parties.
That’s not a majority which bodes well for this by-election, which — like the last Batley East by-election — has come out of the Councillors Behaving Badly file. The Councillor Behaving Badly here is Fazila Loonat, who was first elected in 2016 (under her previous surname of Fadia) and re-elected in 2021. What did for Loonat was the same thing that did for the Labour MP Fiona Onasanya and the Lib Dem MP Chris Huhne — lying about a speeding offence.
In July 2020 Loonat’s partner, Afshin Amini, had been caught by a speed camera on Huddersfield Road in Dewsbury driving at 39 miles per hour on a road with a 30 mph speed limit. He was driving Loonat’s Mercedes, so the Notice of Intended Prosecution went to her. She filled the form in and sent it back to West Yorkshire Police, naming a driver with a made-up name, a made-up date of birth and an address which turned out to be a shop that Amini owned. A prosecution was launched — not for the speeding ticket, but for the cover-up. In November 2022 Amini pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice, and Loonat followed suit in March 2023. Sentencing was deferred until July 2023 when both of them were sent to prison, Amini for 12 weeks and Councillor Loonat for 14 weeks. Loonat’s sentence is one week over the minimum sentence of three months which disqualifies her as a councillor.
Defending this difficult by-election for Labour is Ebrahim Dockrat, who works for Calderdale College as a director of commercial services and partnerships; he was appointed MBE in the 2019 New Year honours list for services to the community and for his many years of work for local racial equality organisations. The Conservatives have not gone for a Muslim candidate this time, instead selecting Beverley Smith. Also standing are Stephen Long for the Lib Dems, Simon Duffy for the Greens (who also stood here in May), Bikatshi Katenga for the regionalist Yorkshire Party and Mark Steele for the continuing SDP.
Parliamentary constituency: Batley and Spen
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Dewsbury and Batley
ONS Travel to Work Area: Huddersfield
Postcode districts: WF3, WF12, WF13, WF15, WF16, WF17
Ebrahim Dockrat (Lab)
Simon Duffy (Grn)
Bikatshi Katenga (Yorkshire Party)
Stephen Long (LD)
Beverley Smith (C)
Mark Steele (SDP)
May 2023 result Lab 1978 C 1964 LD 262 Grn 256
May 2022 result Lab 2170 Workers Party of Britain 1611 C 734 Grn 201 LD 152
May 2021 result Lab 3520 C 1160 Grn 308 LD 139 Reform UK 83
May 2019 result Lab 3183 C 778 Grn 384 LD 172
May 2018 result Lab 3293 C 811 Grn 162 LD 141
October 2017 by-election Lab 2640 C 443 Heavy Woollen District Ind 140 LD 136 Grn 70
May 2016 result Lab 3487 C 594 Ind 512 LD 248 Grn 156
May 2015 result Lab 5321 C 2194 LD 463 Grn 359 TUSC 122
May 2014 result Lab 2670 Ind 1356 C 527 Grn 386 LD 252 TUSC 181
May 2012 result Lab 3876 C 740 Ind 462 LD 230
May 2011 result Lab 3834 C 1028 LD 333 Ind 295 Grn 212
May 2010 result Lab 4843 C 1774 LD 1274 BNP 678 Grn 186
May 2008 result Lab 3060 C 823 BNP 759 LD 653 Grn 296
May 2007 result Lab 2793 LD 1147 C 852 BNP 754 Grn 185
May 2006 result Lab 2779 LD 1103 BNP 869 C 621 Grn 232
June 2004 result Lab 3024/2697/2370 LD 2008/1750/1564 C 1053/758/639 BNP 958 Grn 553
Previous results in detail
Swadlincote South
Derbyshire county council; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Roger Redfern.
Our other English by-election takes place in the centre of the country, as we are only a few miles from Coton in the Elms, the hamlet generally recognised as the point in England furthest from the sea. Swadlincote is the southernmost town in Derbyshire, and it’s traditionally a mining centre as the town’s civic motto E terra divitiæ — “riches from the earth” — might suggest. As well as coal, the town lies on clay deposits of unusually high quality which were particularly suitable for manufacture of large pipes.
The Swadlincote South county division takes in the town centre, a large industrial area to the west and housing in the south of the town. The presence of the Leicestershire county boundary not far to the south-east and greenbelt land to the west means that most of Swadlincote’s urban growth has taken place in a northerly or southerly direction, resulting in the urban area absorbing the former village of Church Gresley. This was another industrial place, with pottery being the main local industry: the distinctive blue-and-white Cornishware kitchen pottery was manufactured in Church Gresley well into the 21st century.
This column was last in Church Gresley in May 2021 (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 97), covering one of three by-elections to South Derbyshire council which the Conservatives were defending. Church Gresley ward was the most marginal of them, with its three seats having split two to Labour and one to the Conservatives in both 2015 and 2019. Roger Redfern successfully defended the Conservative seat in the by-election, with a large majority.
On the same day Redfern was also elected to the county council, making safe a seat which the Conservatives had gained from Labour in 2017 by just 80 votes; shares of the vote here in 2021 were 59% for the Conservatives and 32% for Labour. This reflected the large Conservative majority for the local MP Heather Wheeler in December 2019 in the South Derbyshire constituency, which has the same boundaries as the council of that name. In 2021, the Conservatives won a clean sweep of all the county divisions in South Derbyshire.
But in the 2023 Derbyshire local elections, the pendulum swung back to Labour with a vengeance. The Tories are now completely shut out of second-tier local government in the county: all the district councils here now have Labour majorities except for Derby city council (which Labour run as a minority) and the rural Derbyshire Dales district (where the Lib Dems, Labour and the Greens are in coalition under a Lib Dem leader). That leaves the Conservatives running only Derbyshire county council and the Police and Crime Commissionership, both of which were last up for election in 2021.
In the case of South Derbyshire, the Tory collapse on the district council had already started before 2021 with a damaging split in the party; the splinter group on the council voted out the Tory leader in 2020 and installed a Labour minority administration, which went on to win a majority in 2023. Roger Redfern lost his seat on the district council three months ago as Labour won Church Gresley ward by 60–40 in a straight fight with the Conservatives. Swadlincote South division also includes half of the Swadlincote district ward, which Labour won by 62–38 in May.
Suddenly that 27-point Conservative lead from two years ago in Swadlincote South isn’t looking all that safe. And the Conservatives will have to defend that lead in this county council by-election following the death of Roger Redfern in June, at the early age of 61. Redfern had started his career in the coalmines, before working for over 30 years as a pub landlord at the Miners Arms in Church Gresley.
This by-election will be a straight fight. Defending from the blue corner is Jacqueline Geddes, who was on their slate for Church Gresley ward in May’s district elections; she is described as “a senior business leader, consultant, and entrepreneur with a successful international track record in project management”. Challenging from the red corner is Alan Haynes, who topped the poll in Church Gresley ward in May.
Parliamentary constituency: South Derbyshire
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): South Derbyshire
South Derbyshire wards: Church Gresley; Swadlincote (part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Burton upon Trent
Postcode districts: DE11, DE12
Jacqueline Geddes (C)
Alan Haynes (Lab)
May 2021 result C 1457 Lab 798 Grn 207
May 2017 result C 1098 Lab 1028 UKIP 198 LD 93
May 2013 result Lab 1067 C 669 UKIP 582 LD 48
Previous results in detail
Penmaen
Caerphilly council, Wales; caused by the death of Labour councillor Jim Sadler.
Let’s finish for the week in south Wales. The county borough of Caerphilly covers a lot more than the eponymous town: it stretches north into the Valleys as far as Rhymney, and east into the lower reaches of the Sirhowy and Ebbw valleys.
It’s in the Sirhowy valley that we find Penmaen, a hamlet on the east side of the valley opposite the town of Blackwood. We can get an idea of the local topography from the fact that penmaen is the Welsh word for “headland”. We can also see how steep the land is from this photograph.
This is the impressive Chartist Bridge, opened in 2005 to connect Penmaen with Blackwood — which was a Chartist stronghold back in the day. The pylon in the middle of the bridge is 90 metres high, and the bridge deck lies 30 metres over the Sirhowy river below.
Penmaen is the name of the local parish, the community council and this electtoral ward, but the settlement of Penmaen itself is actually quite small. The main urban area in this ward is Oakdale, a model village from the 1910s built to house the workers of the nearby Oakdale Colliery. The village had far better living standards than many Valleys villages of the time: it was located some distance away from the pit, and every house was equipped from the outset with electric lights, an indoor bathroom and a front and back garden. The local workmen’s institute has been preserved, although it’s no longer in the village; it’s been re-erected at the St Fagans history museum in Cardiff.
Oakdale Colliery closed in 1989, and its sprawling site has been landscaped — creating one of the largest flat areas in the Valleys — and given over to industrial units. These do create employment, and Penmaen is just outside the top 100 wards in England and Wales for people employed in manufacturing (17.4%). The ward’s census return is very typical for the Valleys in its very low levels of immigration: Penmaen is in the top 60 wards in England and Wales for population born in the UK (98.0%) and in the top 90 for those who identify as White British (97.6%).
The list of famous people associated with mining areas is often dominated by sportsmen, but possibly the most famous former pupil of Oakdale Comprehensive School (now Islwyn High School) was too young to have gone down the pits. Joe Calzaghe was born in London and spent some of his early life in his father’s native Sardinia, but he grew up in this corner of South Wales before embarking on a stellar boxing career. Calzaghe retired from the ring in 2009 with a perfect record of 46 wins from 46 professional fights, having unified three of the four super-middleweight world titles and spent more than a decade as WBO super-middleweight world champion before moving up to win more world titles at light-heavyweight. This from a lad who was bullied at high school, and left Oakdale Comprehensive without taking any GCSEs. If you got your GCSE results last week and they weren’t what you hoped for, remember that you’ve got a long life left to either put that right or make your mark in some other way.
Three or four years above Joe Calzaghe at that school were James Dean Bradfield, Sean Moore, Nicky Wire and the ill-fated Richey Edwards, who found fame as the Manic Street Preachers and are still making music nearly 40 years after they first got together in Blackwood in 1986. The Manics were the first major Western rock band to play in Cuba, and their left-wing politics can also be seen from the lyrics of their first number 1 single If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next, a hymn to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War; from the title of their 2000 number 1 single The Masses Against the Classes, a quote from Gladstone; and the title of their first number 1 album, the Mercury Prize-nominated This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. In these days of fake news, that latter title has rather different connotations now compared with when the album came out in 1998; the Manics had intended it as a quotation from a speech by Nye Bevan.
Given their politics, the Manic Street Preachers might well have been nonplussed when it was revealed in 2009 that the far-right British National Party had used If You Tolerate This… on a video expressing typical BNP views which I won’t go into here. The band’s record label, Sony, were definitely not amused and had the video removed from YouTube and the BNP website very quickly. Now, the reason you never hear of the BNP these days is because the party didn’t learn lessons from this episode and continued to rip off other people’s intellectual property. Specifically, a 2010 party political broadcast from the party featured Nick Griffin sat next to a large jar of Marmite, which prompted Marmite’s manufacturer Unilever to launch legal proceedings for trademark and copyright infringement. Unilever have the money to afford some very expensive lawyers, and the case was eventually settled out of court for a sum which essentially wiped out the BNP’s finances. The party has not been a force in British politics since, and the May 2023 English local elections didn’t have a single British National Party candidate.
The far-right have never had any sort of political foothold in this corner of south Wales, which is associated politically with another giant of the Labour movement. Penmaen was represented in Parliament from 1970 to 1995 by the Labour party leader Neil Kinnock; his Islwyn seat has been in Labour hands continuously for over a century, and is currently represented at Westminster by junior Labour frontbencher Chris Evans and in Cardiff Bay by Labour MS Rhianon Passmore. The Islwyn seat (and its predecessor Bedwellty) is so safe for Labour that the Conservatives have historically used it as a proving ground for promising young candidates: five of the Tory candidates who Neil Kinnock defeated here went on to become MPs elsewhere, including two future prominent frontbenchers (Tim Yeo and Peter Brooke); more recently Sir Robert Buckland, who finished fourth and lost his deposit as the Conservative candidate in the 1995 by-election after Kinnock went to Brussels, served four different Conservative leaders in government as Solicitor-General, Lord Chancellor and Welsh secretary. Welsh constituencies are smaller than those in the rest of the UK at present, something which the forthcoming parliamentary boundary changes have sought to fix: for the next Westminster election the Islwyn parliamentary seat will merge with Newport West. Chris Evans MP has been selected to seek re-election in Caerphilly rather than standing here, so Penmaen will get a new member of parliament in the not too distant future.
At the time of writing the Wikipedia entry for Penmaen states that the ward is represented on Caerphilly council by two Plaid Cymru councillors, a statement which is more than a decade out of date. In fact Penmaen has been in Labour hands since 2012, and the Labour slate was re-elected last year with a 64–36 lead over Plaid Cymru in a straight fight. Those two parties are the only parties represented on Caerphilly council, which has a large Labour majority with Plaid and independent councillors in opposition.
The outgoing councillor Jim Sadler, who passed away in May at the age of 71, was in his first term on the council. He had come to south Wales in the 1980s after previously working in London as a Fleet Street printer, and in his short time on the council he had been working on the resurrection of the bowls club in Oakdale. Sadler had previously left politics to his wife Carol, who represented this ward as a Labour councillor from 1995 to 1999 and was the first mayor of the modern Caerphilly council.
Defending this seat for Labour is Elizabeth Davies, who lives in Penmaen. Plaid Cymru have reselected another Penmaen resident in Andrew Short, who was runner-up here in May. There is rather more choice for the electors in this by-election, with six candidates as opposed to just four last year; completing the ballot paper here are independent candidate George Edwards-Etheridge, Jonathan Errington for the Lib Dems, Clayton Jones for Gwlad (a party campaigning for independence for Wales), and Imogen Martin for the Conservatives.
Parliamentary and Senedd constituency: Islwyn
Parliamentary constituency (from next Westminster election): Newport West and Islwyn
ONS Travel to Work Area: Cardiff
Postcode districts: NP11, NP12
Elizabeth Davies (Lab)
George Edwards-Etheridge (Ind)
Jonathan Errington (LD)
Clayton Jones (Gwlad)
Imogen Martin (C)
Andrew Short (PC)
May 2022 result Lab 831/775 PC 458/454
May 2017 result Lab 903/744 PC 505/450 C 324/299
May 2012 result Lab 877/874 PC 512/501 C 149/137
May 2008 result PC 963/858 Lab 393/369 Ind 236/211 C 184 LD 134
June 2004 result PC 669/667 Lab 482/426 Ind 320/240/203 C 128/75
May 1999 result PC 1156/1149 Lab 512/479 C 158
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). The 2022 edition is out now! You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale
