Previewing the two council by-elections of 27th October 2022
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Two by-elections on 27th October 2022:
Long Eaton
Derbyshire county council; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Alan Griffiths.
Our two by-elections today are both for urban wards in the English Midlands; areas where the Conservatives performed very well at the top of their polling upswings over the last Parliament. We’ll start on the north bank of the River Trent in the town of Long Eaton, which grew into an industrial centre in the Victorian era.
This was mainly thanks to the railways. The Midland Counties Railway came here in 1839, opening a three-way network linking together Derby, Nottingham and Leicester; its three arms all came together at Trent Junction, a tangle of sharply-curved railway tracks on the floodplain just to the south of Long Eaton. In 1844 a fourth branch line was built going north up the Erewash valley, and just to the north of the town an enormous railway complex developed at Toton. At its peak in the 1950s Toton was the largest marshalling yard in Europe, handling and sorting coal traffic from the East Midlands collieries and also building and maintaining railway wagons.
The railways and lacemaking are the traditional mainstays of Long Eaton’s industry. And there could have been more railway work to come here in the future: Toton was slated as the location for the main East Midlands station of High Speed 2, and its link to the Nottingham tram network and siting on railway land would have made it a good site. However, this proposal disappeared when the High Speed 2 eastern leg was cancelled in 2021; instead the high-speed line will terminate south of Long Eaton at East Midlands Parkway, with trains travelling from there to Nottingham and Derby through the sharp and slow curves of Trent Junction.
Although Long Eaton has Nottingham postcodes and is a part of the Nottingham built-up area, it’s located on the western side of the River Erewash and thus is part of Derbyshire. Specifically, it’s located within the Erewash parliamentary seat, which has voted for the government at every general election since it was created in 1983. Erewash council is a little more right-wing, having been under Conservative control since 2003, but it’s very much a marginal area; the 2011 election returned a Conservative majority of one (26 Conservatives versus 25 Labour), with one of those Conservative seats — in Long Eaton Central ward — won by a majority of just twelve votes. The 2019 election here returned a reduced Conservative majority of 27 seats against 19 Labour and one Lib Dem; however the Tories have since improved their position by gaining two by-elections from Labour in May 2021, one of which was in the Nottingham Road ward of Long Eaton (Andrew’s Previews 2021, pages 96 and 184).
The boundaries don’t quite match up any more following ward boundary changes in 2015, but Long Eaton Central and Nottingham Road are the two wards which best correspond to the Long Eaton division of Derbyshire county council. As with Derbyshire as a whole, this area has clearly swung to the right over the last two decades. Long Eaton division had a Labour majority over the Conservatives of just 20 votes in 2009; the Conservatives broke through in 2017 and increased their majority to 50–36 at the 2021 Derbyshire county elections. That was on the same day as the Nottingham Road by-election referred to above.
The Conservatives’ county councillor was Alan Griffiths, who passed away in July at the age of 71. He had sat on the county council’s planning and audit committees, and was also chairman of the Erewash branch of the Conservatives. Away from the council he had a love of football and was a fan of FC Barcelona.
Griffiths’ passing leaves the Conservatives with a by-election to defend which might not look all that safe given the recent deterioration in the party’s polling; as recently as the 2019 Erewash council elections, Labour clearly led across this division. The Conservative defence falls to Chris Page, who is retired; he contested Nottingham Road ward in the 2019 Erewash council elections. The Labour candidate is young and enthusiastic but may suffer from not being local: 23-year-old Joel Bryan is a school chaplain and deputy mayor of Belper, a town around sixteen miles to the north-west. Also standing are Ashley Dunn for the Green Party and Rachel Allen for the Lib Dems. The local press have interviewed all four candidates, and you can find out more here (link).
Parliamentary constituency: Erewash
Erewash council wards: Nottingham Road; Long Eaton Central (most); Derby Road East (small part); Wilsthorpe (small part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Nottingham
Postcode district: NG10
Rachel Allen (LD)
Joel Bryan (Lab)
Ashley Dunn (Grn)
Chris Page (C)
May 2021 result C 1685 Lab 1215 Grn 265 LD 204
May 2017 result C 1469 Lab 1334 UKIP 209 Grn 139 LD 136 Ind 38
May 2013 result Lab 1384 C 978 UKIP 503 LD 161
Previous results in detail
Wednesbury South
Sandwell council, West Midlands; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Kirat Singh.
Our second by-election of the week is in another industrial town. But unlike Long Eaton, Wednesbury is a town with a long history. It was the site of two battles in the Anglo-Saxon era, recorded in the chronicles for 592 and 715; Alfred the Great’s daughter Æthelflæd, the Lady of Mercia, fortified the town in the early tenth century against the threat of Viking invasion. Which is ironic, given that Wednesbury is itself named after a Norse god — indeed, the greatest of all the Norse gods, Woden or Odin himself. One piece of public art in Wednesbury, located next to the tram stop, depicts Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir.
But it’s industry that made Wednesbury. By the 18th century the industrial revolution was in full swing here, with coal coming out of the ground and metal being melted, cast and bashed in the factories above. By 1800 Wednesbury was criss-crossed with canals and full of factories. In the mid-nineteenth century the town was connected to the railway network; there are no trains here now, but since 1999 Wednesbury Great Western Street has been at the centre of the Midland Metro tram network, connecting the town to West Bromwich, Birmingham and Wolverhampton. In a similar way to Long Eaton, Wednesbury is to become the focus for a major junction: construction of Lines 2 and 3 of Midland Metro, which will link Wednesbury to Dudley and Brierley Hill to the south-west, is well underway.
The Black Country is not known for being a friendly area to immigrants and Wednesbury South has recorded some large BNP votes in past council elections, but this ward does have a significant Asian population which made up about 18% of the return in the 2011 census. Unusually most of the Asians here are Sikhs by religion, and Wednesbury South is in the top 50 wards in England and Wales for Sikhism (11.6%).
We can’t talk about local government in Wednesbury without mentioning a 1948 legal case. In 1947 Wednesbury Corporation, which was then the local authority, granted a licence to open a cinema in the town in Sundays, subject to a condition that nobody under 15 was to be admitted on a Sunday. The cinema operators launched legal action, seeking a ruling that this condition was unacceptable and outside the Corporation’s power.
In a landmark judgment of public law (Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation (1948) 1 KB 223), the Court of Appeal set out three tests of unreasonableness that should be met for a judicial review against a public body’s administrative decision to succeed. These tests remain part of British case law today, and the third test — that the decision was, in the later words of Lord Diplock, “so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it” — has become known in the legal trade as “Wednesbury unreasonableness”. That’s rather unfair on Wednesbury council, given that they actually won the case: the Court of Appeal found that they had not acted unreasonably in banning under-15s from cinemas on Sundays.
Wednesbury Corporation no longer exists. It was dissolved in 1966 in a takeover by West Bromwich county borough, which itself disappeared in 1974 in favour of the modern Sandwell metropolitan borough. Sandwell has been Labour-controlled continuously since 1979, and following the 2018 and 2019 borough elections all 72 councillors were members of the Labour party.
This didn’t stop the Labour party crashing and burning here in the 2019 general election. Wednesbury is part of the West Bromwich West parliamentary seat, which was represented from its creation in 1974 by Labour’s Betty Boothroyd. Boothroyd became Speaker of the House of Commons following the 1992 general election, and she resigned from Parliament upon stepping down as Speaker in 2000; the by-election returned Labour’s Adrian Bailey. West Bromwich West became marginal in 2017, swinging strongly to the Conservatives against the national trend, was named as one of the 40 seats in the canonical R*d W*ll, and fell to the Conservatives in 2019 after Adrian Bailey retired. The seat’s Conservative MP, Shaun Bailey, is no relation.
The Conservatives have since built on that to regain representation on Sandwell council, whose composition currently stands at 60 Labour councillors plus this vacancy, 10 Conservatives and one other councillor. One of the Tory breakthroughs came in Wednesbury South, where two seats were up for election at the 2021 borough elections following the death of Labour councillor Bob Lloyd in February 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic meant that Lloyd’s seat was vacant for well over a year before a by-election could be held, and Wednesbury South wasn’t alone in that; Sandwell was one of the councils hardest hit by the pandemic suspension of by-elections, and by the time the 2021 borough elections came around six of its 72 seats were vacant.
Anyway, the 2021 election in Wednesbury South resulted in the two seats available splitting between new Labour councillor Kirat Singh and new Conservative councillor Ian Chambers; shares of the vote were 50% for Labour and 42% for the Conservatives. It was the first time the Conservatives had won a seat in Wednesbury South since 2008. Chambers was elected in second place so he had to seek re-election this year, when the late Bob Lloyd’s term had been due to expire. By this point Ian Chambers had defected from the Conservatives to Labour, and he was re-elected under his new colours with a 58–42 lead over the Conservatives in a straight fight.
This by-election is to replace Kirat Singh, who was suspended from Labour shortly after his election in 2021 for reasons which have never been entirely clear. Singh resigned from the council in August in order to take up a new job which is politically restricted.
Defending this by-election for Labour is Jenny Chidley who is hoping to make a quick return to Sandwell council; she was elected in 2018 for Princes End ward, gaining the seat from UKIP, but lost her seat to the Conservatives in May. The Conservative candidate is Fajli Bibi, who describes herself on Twitter as a “public, private and third sectors leader” and as a TV presenter. May’s election here was a straight fight, but this by-election will have more choice for the electors with the nominations of Gareth Knox for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Manjit Singh Lall for the Lib Dems and Mark Redding for the Green Party.
Parliamentary constituency: West Bromwich West
ONS Travel to Work Area: Dudley
Postcode districts: B70, B71, DY4, WS10
Fajli Bibi (C)
Jenny Chidley (Lab)
Gareth Knox (TUSC)
Manjit Singh Lall (LD)
Mark Redding (Grn)
May 2022 result Lab 1409 C 1036
May 2021 double vacancy Lab 1578/1032 C 1317/970 Reform UK 140 Workers Party of Britain 92
May 2019 result Lab 1243 Ind 590 C 405
May 2018 result Lab 1566 C 807
May 2016 result Lab 1481 UKIP 584 C 446
May 2015 result Lab 2769 UKIP 1511 C 1021
May 2014 result Lab 1364 UKIP 1091 C 427
May 2012 result Lab 1752 C 590
May 2011 result Lab 2372 C 912
May 2010 result Lab 2758 C 1841 BNP 798
October 2009 by-election Lab 1006 C 946 LD 168 Grn 109
May 2008 result C 1215 Lab 1144 BNP 467 Grn 151
May 2007 result Lab 1365 C 996 BNP 798 LD 198
May 2006 result Lab 1256 BNP 886 C 822 LD 222
June 2004 result Lab 1522/1327/1301 C 1096/1015/841 LD 493
Previous results in detail
Catchup
Since there’s not been much going on in politics this week, we’ve got time to review and discuss some other recent electoral developments. While you were all distracted by the prime ministerial psychodrama, the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee put a report out last week on the work of the Electoral Commission (link). In many ways — and this is not a criticism of the committee — the recommendations are the same old calls for the same old actions to fix the same old problems. Electoral law is an utter mess which needed rationalising and consolidating long ago, and the Elections Act 2022 has instead only made that situation worse. The Committee’s chair, Conservative MP William Wragg, is quite right to call for this to be addressed now.
The report confirms that the Voter ID parts of the Elections Act 2022 are being prioritised for introduction at the May 2023 local elections. While the Government have apparently shared draft regulations with the Electoral Commission for introducing this requirement to UK general elections and English local elections, those regulations to support this have not yet been laid and time is running out to get this change smoothly delivered. The 2023 local elections are only just over six months away. No-one wants them to descend into farce.
One welcome change which will come in for the 2023 local elections is a drastic cut in the signature requirement for English local elections from 10 per candidate to 2 per candidate. This change was previously made to get elections through the latter phases of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that was a temporary measure which expired earlier this year. It’s now being brought back in and made permanent. Election agents and electoral administrators alike will no doubt breathe a sigh of relief at seeing one of the most awkward parts of the candidate nomination process get a lot easier to manage.
In the meantime, a spanner has been thrown into the preparations for Thursday 4th May 2023 with the confirmation that King Charles III and Queen Camilla will be crowned on Saturday 6th May. It will clearly be a weekend of celebration — but how are we defining “weekend”? There is a clear tradition of declaring special bank holidays for royal events — in the last 50 years we have had public holidays for the Silver, Golden, Diamond and Platinum Jubilees of Queen Elizabeth II; for the weddings of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, Charles and Diana, and William and Kate; and for the funeral of Elizabeth II last month. Frankly, it would be rude not to have a special bank holiday for the Coronation.
But when? Declare Friday 5th May 2023 to be a public holiday and you run into all sorts of trouble regarding election counts from the previous day’s polls. Returning Officers can run counts on bank holidays (see for example the Northern Ireland count in the 2019 European elections), but they aren’t obliged to do so and there are obvious issues with doing so: recruiting count staff for bank holiday work is a serious problem, and the officials and councillors involved will also likely have coronation-related duties to fulfil. It’s a mess. The Association of Electoral Administrators would prefer a bank holiday on Monday 8th May 2023 instead, which would avoid a lot of those issues.
The parts of the Elections Act 2022 relating to postal vote handling might not be ready for implementation by May 2023. In the meantime we have a serious problem relating to postal votes: the current series of Royal Mail strikes. If you are an elector in an upcoming by-election and you have a postal vote, fill your ballot in and send it back as soon as you receive it: if your postal vote is delayed by strike action and arrives after the deadline, it won’t count.
Despite the fact that we only had a Northern Ireland Assembly election last May, it sounds like there might be another one along soon. Chris Heaton-Harris, who was appointed as Northern Ireland secretary in the short-lived Truss administration and appears to be still in post at the time of writing, is obliged to call a new Assembly election if a new power-sharing government is not formed by tomorrow. The Electoral Office for Northern Ireland is making contingency plans for an Assembly election on Thursday 15th December.
Welsh returning officers, by contrast, can sit back for a while unless the UK government reaches a more advanced state of falling apart such that we end up with a general election. The next scheduled elections in Wales are for the Police and Crime Commissioners in 2024. Recent changes to local government law in Wales allow a council to change its voting system to proportional representation by passing a motion to that effect within twelve months of the last local election. We are now almost halfway through that period and I’m not aware that any Welsh council is seriously considering doing this; if any reader knows different do please let me know.
One document which Welsh returning officers will no doubt have looked through with interest is the recent proposals from the Parliamentary Boundary Commission for Wales, which has revised its draft map of future Welsh parliamentary constituencies. The English, Scottish and Northern Irish commissions are due to publish their revised proposals on 8th November, after which there will be a final four-week public consultation before the final map is published next summer.
Also on 8th November, if we can look across the pond briefly, are the US midterm elections. That subject is off-topic for this column and your columnist does not pretend to be an expert on US politics, but one thing to be aware of is a worrying trend for those who believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen to try and take over the electoral process (link). We should be grateful that this sort of pressure is not experienced by the UK’s electoral administrators; our local council election offices may well be under all sorts of pressure, particularly given the cost pressures in local government, but we can count on them to be well-prepared, hard-working and impartial.
The end of 2022 is shaping up to be a busy time for some of the UK’s returning officers and for this column. There are 25 council seats to be filled in the first three weeks of November alone, and we have pending parliamentary by-elections in West Lancashire and the City of Chester which will hopefully take place by the end of the year. There’s a lot of electoral action to look forward to, so stay tuned to this column.
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
