The General Election Undercard — Previewing the 60 council by-elections of 4th July 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
It’s general election day. Millions of words, acres of pixels and downpours of ink have been expended in the cause of getting your vote. Your cross on the ballot paper will (if you’re lucky) go towards electing a Member of Parliament for a term of up to five years.
You’ve probably heard about all this already. What you almost certainly haven’t heard about is the undercard: the sixty by-elections to our local councils which are being combined with this general election. Combining polls in this way has a lot of benefits: both for the council organising the election, which can administer two votes for the price of one; and for the voter, who only has to turn up at the polling station once. (Except possibly in Scotland, for which see below.) A few councillors who may have been planning to retire in the near future have brought forward their resignations, so that their successor can be elected at this opportune moment. We will also meet a number of retiring Labour councillors who are standing in the general election, and who are so confident of winning that they have resigned their council seats in advance.
Some of these by-elections will be worth keeping an eye on. Readers may remember that Canterbury was a Labour gain in the 2017 general election from seemingly nowhere; some models had picked it up as a possible good Labour result, but this went rather against the collective wisdom. There was also a local by-election in Canterbury on that day in the city-centre Westgate ward; that came through early on election night as a Labour gain from seemingly nowhere, and it turned out to be a good pointer to the parliamentary result when it came through some hours later.
Today’s 60 by-elections are for 61 seats. Of these, thirty-six are defended by Labour, thirteen (for fourteen seats) by the Conservatives, six by the Liberal Democrats, two by independents, one by the Green Party, and the other two are two non-party contests in the City of London (one of which is uncontested). This distribution partly reflects that London (where Labour are strong in local government) is overrepresented in what follows, and partly reflects that after year upon year of heavy local election losses there simply aren’t as many Conservative councillors as there used to be.
The whole of the undercard is discussed below, but because of the sheer number of polls today they won’t get the usual Andrew’s Previews treatment. For the same reason there are no factfiles this week, but full candidate lists are available from Who Can I Vote For?, and you can click on each ward name in this column to find past election results from my very own Local Elections Archive Project. Without further ado, let’s plunge in:
North East
We’ll start as traditional in the north east of England, where there is just one by-election north of the Tees. This is in the Coxhoe division of County Durham, a rural ward a few miles to the south-east of Durham city within the Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor constituency. Coxhoe itself was the birthplace of the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while the ward also includes Bowburn, a pit village which has turned into a commuter village thanks to its location next to the A1(M) motorway. This ward returned a full slate of three Labour councillors in 2013 but independent candidates made gains in both 2017 and 2021, and the last Labour seat is up in this by-election. Independents led Labour here 44–34 in 2021. Retired nurse Viv Anderson defends for Labour, while independent candidates Stuart Dunn (chair of Coxhoe parish council) and Jamie Peterson (endorsed by the two sitting independent councillors) will hope to gain.
On the far side of the Tees Labour are defending two by-elections to Middlesbrough council, both of which are in the Middlesbrough and Thornaby East constituency. Central ward is pretty much what it says on the tin, taking in the town centre, the Riverside Stadium, Teessaurus Park, the rapidly-regenerating Middlehaven area north of the town centre, and the southern end of the Transporter Bridge. The latter is an icon of Teesside but has been closed to traffic since 2019 because of its poor structural condition. Central is a very safely Labour ward, which has been vacated by Matt Storey after he gained the Cleveland police and crime commissionership from the Conservatives in May. Lewis Young should have little trouble defending the ward for Labour.
Acklam ward is a residential area in the south-west of the town, home to Middlesbrough’s rugby union and cricket clubs. It has been vacated by Labour councillor Sheila Dean, who had held one of the ward’s two seats since the current boundaries were drawn up in 2015; Acklam ward’s other seat went to Labour in 2015, to an independent in 2019 (by one vote) and to the Liberal Democrats in 2023. On the basis of last year’s result this should be a fight between defending Labour candidate Luke Henman and the Lib Dems’ Mark Brown.
North West
Moving into the North West, we start with a ward in the Lancaster and Wyre constituency which seems to have a season ticket for this column. The Lancaster University campus is located on a hilltop just off the southern edge of Lancaster’s built-up area. For many years it’s been a Lancaster council ward of its own, currently with two councillors, and it is comfortably the UK’s youngest ward by age profile. It also has dire turnouts because university students don’t often vote in local elections, and for the small minority who do Individual Voter Registration has made it more difficult for them to register: the University authorities can no longer send a list of eligible students to Lancaster council without asking permission from the student first. In one infamous by-election here in December 2016 the winning candidate didn’t even break 100 votes; the winning scores here in the May 2023 elections were 217 votes for Labour and 197 for the Green Party, with those two parties sharing the ward’s two seats, out of an electorate of 3,921. The University ward tends to see a lot of by-elections because students get elected as councillors, graduate and then leave the city; this has happened to Labour councillor Erin Hall so Labour are defending this by-election. Anya Wilkinson-Leishman defends for Labour against Green candidate Maria Deery, who is a busy woman: Deery is also standing today as the Greens’ parliamentary candidate for Makerfield in Greater Manchester.
We have two contrasting by-elections on the River Ribble. On the north bank of the Ribble estuary is the Lea and Larches ward of Preston (Preston constituency), which covers the western end of the city; it’s vacated by Labour councillor David Borrow, who was previously the Labour MP for South Ribble in 1997–2010 and had the distinction of being the first MP to enter into a same-sex civil partnership. This used to be a safe Labour ward but was narrowly gained by the Lib Dems in May; Mark Routledge defends for Labour against a Lib Dem challenge from Sean Little.
Further up the Ribble Valley the Liberal Democrats are defending St Mary’s ward (Pendle and Clitheroe constituency) which is the northern of the five wards covering Clitheroe. Here can be found the railway station, much of the town centre, and housing along the road towards Waddington. This was a safe Lib Dem ward in 2023 but the outgoing councillor, Stewart Fletcher, had quit the party and formed a Progressive Liberal group on Ribble Valley council before he quit the district to move to the Outer Hebrides. There is no Progressive Liberal candidate for this by-election, which is defended for the Lib Dems by Mark Sutcliffe.
The only Greater Manchester by-election today is in Wigan borough, where Leigh South ward goes to the polls. This ward lies mostly between the Bridgewater Canal and the East Lancs Road, and it includes Leigh Sports Village — a 12,000 seat stadium which is home to Leigh Leopards of Super League and to the reserve and women’s teams of Manchester United in the game played with round balls. Games were played here in the 2013 and 2021 Rugby League World Cups and in the Women’s Euro 2022. This is part of the Leigh and Atherton parliamentary seat, which under its previous name of Leigh was an iconic if narrow Conservative gain in 2019; but the well-known local Conservative MP is not standing again and the Tories now have no councillors left in the constituency. In May’s Wigan council elections localist independent candidate Jayson Hargreaves took over second place from the Tories in this safe Labour ward. Labour councillor John O’Brien is retiring after 23 years’ service, which included a year as mayor of Wigan in 2007–08; the defending Labour candidate here is Barbara Caren.
By contrast we have rather a lot of by-elections in Merseyside. Travelling west from Leigh South along the East Lancs Road brings us to Windle ward, which is the northern edge of St Helens; here the Labour leader of St Helens council, David Baines, is standing down from the council and seeking election to Parliament today as the Labour candidate for the local seat of St Helens North. Windle is a ward where the Conservatives can be competitive in a good year; the last St Helens elections were in 2022 which was not a good year, and the Tory candidate here finished in third and last place between the Greens. Lisa Preston is seeking to hold what should be a safe Labour ward.
Labour also have to defend three by-elections in Liverpool. Broadgreen ward (West Derby constituency) is centred on Broadgreen Hospital and covers the housing immediately north of the “Rocket” junction at the western end of the M62 motorway; Clubmoor East ward (Walton constituency) covers a long and thin area south of the East Lancs and north of Queens Drive; and Fazakerley North ward (also Walton constituency) covers the housing immediately to the south of Aintree racecourse, with appropriate streetnames like Foxhunter Drive and Red Rum Close.
The three outgoing Labour councillors Nick Crofts, Louise Ashton and Helen Avis (previously Stephens) all give a variety of personal reasons for their resignations. All three wards are safely part of the Labour majority on Liverpool council, and there shouldn’t be much trouble for the defending Labour candidates Hayley Todd, Richard McLean and Declan Henry.
Our two by-elections today on the shores of the River Mersey are not in fact in Liverpool, even though one of them contains much of the Port of Liverpool. Sefton’s Linacre ward covers both the dockland on the riverfront and Bootle town centre behind it; unsurprisingly, it’s part of the Bootle constituency. This is one of the safest Labour wards in the land — the party polled 86% here in May — and new Labour candidate Jim Conalty will surely replace long-serving councillor John Fairclough, who was previously the deputy leader of Sefton council and ran into controversy last year for failing to declare his ownership of a number of properties.
On the far bank of the Mersey we travel to the Land of the Plastic Scouser for yet another by-election to Wirral council from the cursed Liscard ward, which is part of the Wallasey constituency and takes in Egremont Promenade on the riverbank (opposite Everton’s new stadium). This poll is to replace Labour councillor Daisy Kenny, who won a previous by-election here in July 2021. Again, this is a safe Labour ward where the Conservatives have been competitive in recent memory but have now fallen to third behind the Greens. Graeme Cooper is favoured to hold the seat for Labour. Wirral council is hung, with Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems all participating in the administration while the Greens are in opposition.
Our final North West by-election today is yet another Labour defence, this time to Cheshire West and Chester council where the Northwich Leftwich ward is up for election. This ward in southern Northwich is part of the new Mid Cheshire constituency, and Northwich Leftwich’s outgoing Labour councillor Andrew Cooper is the Labour parliamentary candidate for that seat. On current polling he should gain what is a notional Conservative seat, and the Labour by-election candidate Rachel Waterman should succeed him in a safe ward. A Labour loss here would cut their majority on Cheshire West and Chester council to just 36 seats out of 70.
Yorkshire
There are four by-elections to report in Yorkshire. We’ll start in York itself where Labour are defending Hull Road ward, which takes in the eastern end of the city’s built-up area plus the University of York campus at Heslington. It’s part of the York Central constituency. Appropriately the outgoing Labour councillor is a recent York graduate: Sophie Kelly was the University of York Students’ Union’s activities officer in 2021–22 before joining the civil service in 2022 and York council in 2023, and she has stepped down from the council after finding herself unable to balance her democratic duties with her personal and work commitments. Her resignation will likely lead to an increase in the average age of the council, as the defending Labour candidate John Moroney is a retired GP.
Further down the East Coast Main Line we come to Town ward, which has not yet been renamed to reflect Doncaster’s promotion to city status as part of Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022. Town ward is Doncaster city centre and thus part of the Doncaster Central parliamentary seat; the ward also takes in the Town Field and the Eco-Power Stadium, home of Doncaster Rovers FC. Labour councillor Jake Kearsley stood down last month for personal reasons; hoping to defend this safe Labour ward is Rob Dennis, a civil servant who sits on Cantley with Branton parish council to the east.
In the East Riding two Conservative councillors who had both served since winning by-elections in 2021 have handed in their resignations. Charlie Dewhirst has vacated East Wolds and Coastal ward, which covers a massive rural area between Bridlington and Driffield; he works for the National Pig Association, until his resignation he was the deputy leader of East Riding council, and he’s now the Conservative parliamentary candidate for the local seat of Bridlington and the Wolds. Claire Holmes is a criminal barrister who had the dubious distinction of being the losing Conservative candidate in last year’s Selby and Ainsty by-election; her resignation triggers a by-election in South East Holderness ward, which covers the seaside town of Withernsea and a large rural area up to and including Spurn Point, where the Humber estuary ends and the North Sea begins. Both wards were safe enough for the Conservatives in 2023, a year when the party lost control of East Riding council which they currently run as a minority; but Labour have had a couple of near-misses in previous South East Holderness by-elections, and some modellers are projecting that Labour could be competitive in the Beverley and Holderness constituency. The defending Conservative candidates are David Winter in South East Holderness (who is seeking to return to the council after losing his seat in South West Holderness ward last year) and Jonathan Bibb in East Wolds and Coastal (who is an antique dealer and personal trainer).
East Midlands
We now move south to Nottinghamshire and visit Rampton ward, a swathe of countryside between the town of Retford to the west and the River Trent to the east. The main employer here is Rampton Hospital, a high-security psychiatric unit where some of the UK’s most notorious and most mentally-disturbed criminals are incarcerated. Still dominating the landscape for the time being are the now-decommissioned cooling towers of Cottam power station, a former coal-fired plant close to the River Trent which ceased to burn coal in 2019.
The right to vote for mental patients is a complicated matter. In England and Wales, patients who are subject to a hospital order, a restriction order or a hybrid order, or prisoners who have been transferred into a psychiatric unit, are classed as offenders and they are not eligible to vote. Other persons detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 (including persons who have been remanded into a hospital) can vote by post, and they are indeed eligible to register to vote at the hospital if they have been there long enough for electoral law to consider them to be resident.
Rampton ward is part of Bassetlaw district but is not included within the Bassetlaw parliamentary seat; it’s part of the Newark constituency. In Bassetlaw council elections it’s one of a dwindling number of safe Conservative wards. Ant Coultate is standing down after five years, and the defending Conservative candidate is Simon Richardson who until recently was a parish councillor in nearby Tuxford.
Moving west into Derbyshire, we have two by-elections to Chesterfield council which is a two-party contest between Labour and the Lib Dems. Covering Chesterfield town centre is Spire ward, named after the famously distorted spire of the parish church of St Mary and All Saints. Legend has it that the spire will straighten itself if a virgin ever gets married in the church.
Spire ward is being defended by Labour following the death of Peter Innes, a former coalminer who had picketed at Orgreave during the miners’ strike in 1984. The defending Labour candidate Sharon Blank was in the Chesterfield council cabinet for most of the 2019–23 term but she didn’t seek re-election in 2023. She’s defending a marginal ward from Lib Dem candidate Ed Fordham, who stood here unsuccessfully last year. Fordham runs a bookshop in the town, leads the Lib Dem group on Derbyshire county council, and came close to being elected to Parliament back in 2010 as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn.
The Liberal Democrats are themselves defending another Chesterfield by-election in Staveley North, a ward whose name should be read as the northern ward of Staveley parish; very little of Staveley town itself is actually here. The main population centres are the former mining villages of Mastin Moor and Woodthorpe and the railway centre of Barrow Hill, whose Roundhouse is now preserved as a railway musuem. This by-election was triggered by the death in May of Lib Dem June Bingham at the age of 69. The Lib Dems’ Stephen Hartley, who has been a regular unsuccessful candidate in recent Chesterfield elections, should be favoured; however, this ward is part of the North East Derbyshire constituency which is a Conservative versus Labour battle in the general election, so it will be interesting to see how these two differing trends affect each other.
At the other end of the county we come to the site of one of the more surprising Labour gains in 2023, when the party gained majority control of South Derbyshire council. One of the South Derbyshire wards the party gained was Hatton, a village in the Derbyshire Dales constituency on the north side of the River Dove which here is the Derbyshire-Staffordshire boundary; just to the north of the river bridge is Tutbury and Hatton railway station, whose level crossing is supervised by one of the UK’s oldest surviving railway signalboxes dating from 1872. The landscape here is dominated by the giant Nestlé Tutbury factory, which makes the UK’s entire supply of Nestlé instant coffee; but Hatton is by no means politically right-wing, and the ward’s Labour candidate in 2023 Julie Jackson had so little expectation of winning that she was away on holiday when the count took place. Once the votes were counted, and probably recounted a time or two, Jackson and the Conservative candidate Oliver Clark had tied for first place on 270 votes each; the returning officer drew lots to resolve the tie, and the lot fell on Jackson who was declared elected in her absence. Julie Jackson has now resigned after a year, and Labour’s Jackie Lane comes here hotfoot from her second-place finish in the Melbourne ward by-election two months ago to defend a majority of 0. She is up against Conservative candidate Julie Patten, who represents the area on Derbyshire county council and is seeking to return to South Derbyshire council on which she previously represented the neighbouring Hilton ward.
West Midlands
Crossing into Staffordshire we come to the only double by-election taking place today, for two seats in the same ward. This is Madeley and Betley, which lies in hilly territory in Staffordshire’s north-west corner and is a place where many pass through but few stop: the West Coast Main Line and the M6 motorway both run through this ward. Although Madeley has Crewe postcodes, it’s part of the Newcastle-under-Lyme district and parliamentary seat.
For some years local elections in Madeley have been dominated by Simon and Gary White, who were elected to Newcastle-under-Lyme council in by-elections in February 2012 and December 2016 respectively. They’re a married couple who ran a luxury B&B in Madeley while also moonlighting as TV stars: Simon appeared in 2011 in the Channel 4 series Four in a Bed, while both Simon and Gary were contestants on Come Dine With Me in 2016. The Whites resigned from the council at the end of Simon’s third year as mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme; they have sold up and moved to the nearby town of Market Drayton.
Simon White was originally elected with the Lib Dem nomination but won re-election in 2015 and 2018 as an independent candidate, wihle Gary was an independent from the start. Ahead of the 2022 borough elections the entire independent group on Newcastle-under-Lyme council joined the Conservatives, which gave the Tory group an overall majority on the council that the 2022 elections confirmed. Which makes it interesting that the Whites signed the nomination papers of two independent candidates for this by-election, one of whom has since withdrawn; the remaining independent is Madeley parish councillor Tanya Morgan, who took the role of Simon’s mayoress last year. The official slate of the Conservatives, whose council majority will be cut to 23 out of 44 if they lose both seats here, consists of Mandy Berrisford and Jill Whitmore.
In the south-west corner of the bankrupt city of Birmingham Labour defend two council seats in the marginal Birmingham Northfield constituency, where Alex Aitken was going to be the Labour parliamentary candidate until he pulled out at the last moment citing personal challenges. He has also tendered his resignation as a Birmingham councillor prompting a by-election in King’s Norton North ward, which was close in 2018 but which Airken made safe in 2022. One stop further down the Cross City line Labour are also defending Northfield ward, which has a similar political profile, following the resignation of Kirsten Kurt-Elli. The defending Labour candidates are Carmel Corrigan (in King’s Norton North) and Esther Rai (in Northfield ward).
South West
There are two council by-elections in the South West, both of which are Labour defences in the Bristol area. Just outside the city boundary to the east can be found the Gloucestershire town of Kingswood, which long ago merged into the Bristol’s urban sprawl. Until now Kingswood gave its name to a parliamentary seat which was gained in a by-election last March by Labour’s Damian Egan; but the boundary changes have broken that seat up, and Egan is seeking re-election in the general election for the new Bristol North East constituency. That seat includes the Kingswood ward of South Gloucestershire, whose outgoing ward councillor Leigh Ingham is also trying to get into Parliament: she is Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Stafford in this general election. The defending Labour candidate for this year’s second Kingswood by-election is Julie Snelling, who is a Staple Hill and Mangotsfield parish councillor.
In Bristol proper we have the first by-election arising from a vacancy in the Class of 2024. This is in Horfield ward, which is on the northern edge of the city next to Filton and is dominated by Southmead Hospital, where Princess Anne was treated last week after being injured by a horse. Horfield is in the Bristol North West constituency, which has been trending towards Labour in recent parliamentary elections.
This year’s Bristol local elections saw a changing of the guard, as the city’s elected mayoralty (held by the unpopular Labour mayor Marvin Rees) was abolished and the council took back control. The Green Party did very well in this year’s Bristol city council elections and won 34 seats out of a possible 70, two short of a majority; they have formed a coalition with the eight Liberal Democrat councillors to run the city. Labour (21 councillors) and the Conservatives (7) are in opposition.
The Labour group have immediately found themselves one down, and that’s entirely their own fault. One of the elected Labour councillors was Deborah Vittori, returned as one of two Labour councillors for Horfield ward. But it turned out that Vittori is ineligible to be a Bristol councillor because she is employed by the council: she’s a primary school teacher. You can’t sit on a council you’re drawing a wage from, that’s an obvious conflict of interest which Bristol Labour should have picked up on before adopting Vittori as a candidate. Following the poll Bristol council declared Vittori to be disqualified, and this by-election is the result.
Based on this May’s result Horfield ward looks safe enough for the replacement Labour candidate Carole Johnson, who previously sat on the council for Ashley ward until 2021 and was deputy Lord Mayor in 2020–21. A gain for the returning Green Party candidate Anna Meares, who works for Somerset council and starts in second place 48–29 behind, would give the Greens half of the seats on Bristol council but not the crucial mayoral casting vote, because this year’s Lord Mayor of Bristol is a Lib Dem councillor.
A quick word
Before we cross to the East of England for the second half of this week’s Undercard preview, a quick reminder that researching and writing Andrew’s Previews does take a lot of time and effort. If you’ve appreciated this piece and you would like to convert your appreciation into currency, there is a donation box which is open now (link). If you fancy having a permanent reminder of your donation, and if you want to read Previews like this from previous years, I also have a book to sell (link). There will be a few copies of Andrew’s Previews 2023 on sale at the Britain Elects election night party in Chester.
Eastern
Crossing to the east of the country, we find ourselves in Bedford’s Wyboston ward for the second summer in a row. This is a rural ward in the North Bedfordshire constituency which wraps around the county’s northern border: it surrounds St Neots on two seats, and it includes the festival of roadbuilding which is the Black Cat roundabout on the A1. We were here at the end of June last year for a by-election after Conservative councillor Tom Wootton was elected as Mayor of Bedford, which automatically vacated the Bedford council seat in Wyboston ward which he had also won; the by-election winner Julie Cox lasted less than a year before handing in her own resignation. This Wyboston by-election will be defended for the Conservatives by Sharan Sira, who is a qualified finance and operations director for a Bedford-based business; she is favourite to win Bedford’s safest Conservative ward.
In Cambridgeshire we have a by-election to Fenland council in Whittlesey South ward, which as well as the southern part of Whittlesey town takes in the village of King’s Dyke on the road towards Peterborough, plus a large expanse of fenland which lies within the Whittlesey parish boundary. Also here is Whittlesea railway station, because when it comes to spelling there’s the right way, the wrong way and the railway. This ward is within the North East Cambridgeshire constituency. Whittlesey South split its two seats between the Conservatives and an independent candidate in 2023, and it’s the Conservative seat which is up here following the retirement of long-serving councillor Kay Mayor. The defending Conservative candidate Gurninder Singh Gill, who runs a haulage firm and is a Whittlesey town councillor, might face a tough challenge from former Cambridgeshire county council leader Martin Curtis who used to be in the Conservatives but is now an independent candidate.
The Liberal Democrats have a by-election to defend in the North Walsham East ward of North Norfolk, where they run the council and held the parliamentary seat until 2019. Councillor Garry Bull, who has served three terms as mayor of North Walsham, is standing down on health grounds; he leaves behind a safe ward for the defending Lib Dem candidate Kate Leith who is a garden designer.
In Suffolk we have two by-elections in the Lowestoft parliamentary seat which both arise from the resignation of Craig Rivett, who sat on both the county council and East Suffolk council and was the county council’s cabinet member for public health and public protection. His Pakefield county division takes in the Pakefield and Carlton Colville areas at the southern end of the Lowestoft Town; the Carlton Colville ward of East Suffolk excludes Pakefield but adds in the two rural parishes of Gisleham and Mutford instead. In 2021 Pakefield was safe for the Conservatives, but Carlton Colville has been closely contested between the Conservatives and Lib Dems at the two East Suffolk council elections to date.
The defending Conservative candidate for the Pakefield county by-election is Mark Bee, who is seeking to resume a long local government career: Bee was first elected as a councillor in 1998, and he has served as leader of both Suffolk county council and Waveney council, which was one of the two local authorities which merged in 2019 to create East Suffolk council. Another local Conservative seeking to make a political comeback is estate agent Letitia Smith, the defending candidate for the Carlton Colville district by-election, who was East Suffolk’s cabinet member for tourism until she lost her seat in 2023; she could face a tough challenge from Lib Dem candidate Adam Robertson, who was a close runner-up in this ward last year and is also the Lib Dems’ parliamentary candidate for Lowestoft.
Further down the coast we have a by-election to Southend-on-Sea council in Kursaal ward, which lies just to the east of the city centre. The eponymous Kursaal is sometimes cited as the world’s first amusement park, having opened for business in 1901. It’s fallen on hard times in recent years: the only business now operating from here is a Tesco Express, and in May the Victorian Society placed the Kursaal on a list of 10 at-risk Victorian buildings.
Kursaal ward is in the Southend East and Rochford parliamentary seat. In Southend council elections it’s a safe ward for Labour, who run the city council in coalition with independent and Lib Dem councillors. Labour councillor Gabriel Leroy has stood down after just a year in office to relocate closer to his family. Six candidates will no doubt be busy distributing their Kursaal flyers, but Labour’s Chris Webster will start as favourite; she has worked as a headteacher and as a counsellor, and she contested Prittlewell ward in May.
On the road and railway line from the Kursaal towards London we come to the Basildon Pitsea county division, which in population terms is a massive local electoral unit covering most of eastern and central Basildon. It’s split between three parliamentary constituencies — the two Basildon seats plus Castle Point. Basildon Pitsea returns two Essex county councillors, and since 2017 its two seats have been split between the Conservatives and Labour; the winning candidates in 2021 were Luke Mackenzie for the Conservatives and Aidan McGurran, previously managing editor of the Mirror, for Labour. Mackenzie was the serving mayor of Basildon when he died of cancer in March at the appallingly early age of 37; he was replaced as a Basildon councillor in May’s all-up elections, but there wasn’t time to arrange a simultaneous county by-election for that date. We have one now, though. The defending Conservative candidate is Craig Rimmer, who was the unsuccessful Conservative here in 2021 and lost his seat in the 2024 Basildon council elections when all three borough wards wholly within this county division returned a full slate of Labour councillors; one of those councillors is the Labour candidate Emma Callaghan, whose husband Gavin is the leader of Basildon council.
Our final by-election in the Eastern region is in the South West Hertfordshire constituency, as we travel to the Rickmansworth Town ward of Three Rivers district: this is the point where those three rivers, the Chess, the Colne and the Gade, all meet. Despite being outside the Greater London boundary Rickmansworth is within the M25 motorway and is served by London Underground: Rickmansworth station is on the Metropolitan line, and Chiltern Railway trains between London and Aylesbury also call here.
South West Hertfordshire is one of the parliamentary seats which the various 2024 general election models have trouble with, because in 2019 the main anti-Tory vote here came from the outgoing MP and former Cabinet minister David Gauke who unsuccessfully sought re-election as an independent candidate. With Gauke not standing again a lot of votes are up for grabs this time, and vote swings for the general election here should be big even by the standards of some of the wilder modelling which is doing the rounds this year.
Rickmansworth Town is normally a safe Conservative ward in council elections, but the Liberal Democrats — who run Three Rivers council — came close here in 2023 and in May. If this result comes through early on election night the swing might be a pointer as to where Gauke’s votes from 2019 are going — but one major confounding factor is that Royal Mail have apparently lost the postal votes for this by-election which had to be reprinted and hand-delivered last weekend by the council. Given that postal votes normally skew towards the Conservatives this might not be helpful for the defending Tory candidate Mike Sims, who is a painter and decorator; the Lib Dems’ Pav Dhyani, who finished just 48 votes behind the Conservatives in May, is standing again.
London
London is the busiest region for by-elections on 4th July with 15 polls taking place in the London Boroughs. Of these Labour are defending thirteen and the Conservatives and Lib Dems one each.
Two polls take place east of the River Lea, both of which are in the Stratford and Bow parliamentary seat. Labour councillors Sasha das Gupta and Ken Penton have both tendered their resignations from Newham council, forcing two resignations along the Elizabeth line in Forest Gate North and Maryland wards respectively.
Both of these are on paper safe Labour wards which should return the defending Labour candidates Liz Cronin (formerly of HM Treasury and Labour Lords, according to her Twitter) and Melanie Onovo (who has recently graduated in history and politics from Christ Church, Oxford). However, Newham Labour did lose two by-elections to independent candidates last year; and even once this general election is over the local party’s campaign team won’t be able to stop just yet, because two more Newham by-elections have been pencilled in for 18th July.
Mind, when it comes to embarrassing recent by-election losses Hackney Labour would like to say “hold my beer” to their Newham counterparts. For the second time in six months we are back in Cazenove ward, which is part of Diane Abbott’s Hackney North and Stoke Newington seat and covers parts of Stoke Newington, Upper Clapton and Stamford Hill. The last of these is a Haredi Jewish enclave, and as a result Cazenove is one of the most Jewish wards in the land. There was a previous by-election here in January, after ward councillor Caroline Woodley won the Hackney mayoral by-election last year. On that occasion the defending Labour campaign was a shambles, with their candidate being disendorsed following allegations of transphobia and then being re-endorsed after apologising. In the meantime the Conservatives, who had previously been also-rans here, recruited to their cause Ian Sharer who had previously represented the area as a Lib Dem councillor and was a close runner-up in 2022 as a Lib Dem candidate. The outcome of the by-election was a Conservative gain with a massive swing. Labour now have a second by-election to defend after Eluzer Goldberg stood down due to personal and work commitments; the defending Labour candidate is GMB figure Patrick Pinkerton whose campaign presumably never sleeps, while the Conservatives will be a looking for another gain with their candidate Hershi Moskovits.
Further north we come to Hornsey ward, in the Hornsey and Friern Barnet constituency, where Labour’s Adam Jogee has gone to Staffordshire to stand in the general election as Labour candidate for Newcastle-under-Lyme. He was a senior Labour councillor in Haringey who has served two terms as mayor of the borough, and he was Haringey’s cabinet member for communities when he resigned. Jogee was first elected for Hornsey ward in 2014 when he was just 22, and his Labour successor Adam Small should have little trouble holding this safe ward.
A few stops down the East Coast Main Line from Hornsey brings us to Barnet Vale ward, which lies between New Barnet railway station and the Northern Line terminus at High Barnet; the ward also includes the open space of Monken Hadley Common. This is part of the Chipping Barnet parliamentary seat, which has voted Conservative since its creation in 1974 but where former Cabinet minister Theresa Villiers is in some serious trouble. Barnet council was a Labour gain in the 2022 London elections, in which Barnet Vale ward split its three seats between two Labour candidates and one Conservative. Labour are defending this by-election after councillor Marianne Haylett stood down due to family and work commitments; their defending candidate Sue Baker is a school liaison officer, while the Conservatives’ Sachin Rajput is a former long-serving Barnet councillor who lost his seat in 2022. Rajput was previously the Conservative candidate for Brent and Harrow in the 2012 London Assembly elections.
Which brings us neatly to Brent, where Labour councillor Eleanor Southwood is standing down after ten years’ service. Southwood was born blind and has previously served as chair of the RNIB alongside being a former Brent council cabinet member; she is currently a director of another sight-loss charity, and she was appointed MBE in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to charity and local government. Her departure opens up a vacancy in Queens Park ward, which is part of the new Queen’s Park and Maida Vale constituency; for some reason the constituency, the park and the railway/Underground station have apostrophes, but there has never been an apostrophe in the ward name. This was a safe Labour ward in 2022 and their candidate Lesley Smith, who is coming to politics from a long and successful business career, should be favoured. Other candidates for this seat have some interesting family connections to past Prime Ministers: the Conservatives have selected Emily Sheffield who is David Cameron’s sister-in-law and used to be editor of the London Evening Standard, while the Lib Dems’ Virginia Bonham Carter is a cousin of the actress Helena Bonham Carter, a daughter of the 1958 Torrington by-election winner Mark Bonham Carter and a great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith.
The arrangements for the Queens Park by-election count are quite complicated because this is a Brent council by-election, but the parliamentary count is being handled by Westminster council from which the majority of the seat is drawn; so Westminster will have to verify the council by-election votes before they are sent back to Brent and counted there.
Westminster council also have a by-election of their own to worry about in Abbey Road ward, which covers the whole of the St John’s Wood area and includes Lord’s cricket ground as well as the famous recording studios and zebra crossing. Which has its own webcam (link) to allow you to see Beatles tourists messing around in the middle of the road from the comfort of your own home.
In recent years Labour have made all the running in the city of Westminster: they gained control of the council from the Conservatives in 2022 for the first time, gained the West Central seat in the London Assembly from the Conservatives two months ago, and the Cities of London and Westminster parliamentary seat which includes Abbey Road ward might well be going the same way. Abbey Road itself is, however, still safely in the Conservative column as of May 2022. Conservative councillor Amanda Langford has stood down and the party’s defending candidate is Hannah Galley, who was until recently a special adviser to the Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk.
Our last by-election in London north of the Thames is way out on the edge of the Greater London area, in the Feltham and Heston constituency. Hanworth Village ward, part of Hounslow borough, is the first part of London that those driving in from the M3 direction will see. It’s a close marginal ward which split its three seats two to Labour and one to the Conservatives in 2022; Labour are defending this by-election following the resignation of Noreen Kaleem; their candidate is Aysha Tariq, while the Conservatives have selected Vanita Kanda.
The only Lib Dem defence in today’s London by-elections is in the party leader Sir Ed Davey’s Kingston and Surbiton constituency. Hook and Chessington North ward is part of Kingston upon Thames council and lies in that strange salient that sticks out of Greater London’s south-west boundary. It was safe for the Lib Dems in 2022, and it may well have helped that the candidates on the ballot paper are listed in alphabetical order and all three Lib Dem candidates had surnames beginning with A. Steph Archer has stood down, and the Lib Dem candidate seeking to replace her is Lorraine Dunstone who is an office manager and has been a Kingston councillor in the past.
Moving back into the Great Wen, with the Wimbledon Championships underway there are two by-elections in Merton, the borough which covers SW19. Both of these are in the Mitcham and Morden constituency which is very much the Labour-voting part of the borough, and both of them are caused by Labour councillors standing for Parliament elsewhere: Natasha Irons is the Labour candidate for Croydon East in the general election, while Helena Dollimore is standing for Hastings and Rye. Irons previously represented the wonderfully-named Figge’s Marsh ward which is centred on Mitcham Eastfields railway station, while Dollimore has vacated Merton’s St Helier ward which covers the Merton half of the massive St Helier housing estate.
Both of these are safe Labour wards which should return the defending Labour candidate. In Figge’s Marsh that’s Franca Ofeimu, a healthcare professional who fought Village ward (the seriously upmarket ward that covers the All England Club) in 2022 and whose name contains all the vowels, while the Labour candidate for Merton St Helier is Shuile Syeda.
In Lambeth the voters of Streatham Common and Vale ward (part of the Streatham and Croydon North seat) are being called out for their second by-election in two months. The ward easily returned three Labour councillors in 2022 who were Danial Adilypour, Henna Shah and Tom Rutland. Adilypour is the deputy leader of Lambeth council. Rutland is standing in the general election as the Labour candidate for East Worthing and Shoreham, and he resigned from the council some time ago to allow a by-election to be held alongside the London mayor and assembly elections in May; that by-election safely returned Labour candidate Sarah Cole. This second by-election is to replace Henna Shah, who has recently been working as a special adviser to the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden; if Labour win the general election then Shah can probably look forward to a behind-the-scenes job in the new government. This time the defending Labour candidate for Streatham Common and Vale is Dominic Armstrong.
Further over in Southwark borough, Labour are defending two by-elections within the Peckham constituency. Faraday ward covers Burgess Park and the notorious Aylesbury estate, and it has been vacated after two years by Kimberly McIntosh who works for the Windrush Justice Programme. McIntosh has also recently written a book on her experiences and philosophy with the title of Black Girl, No Magic.
The by-election in Rye Lane ward, which is centred on Peckham Rye railway station, results from the resignation of Chloe Tomlinson. Faraday and Rye Lane are both safe Labour wards, as one Piers Corbyn found out when he contested Faraday ward at the last Southwark council elections and got nowhere; they should return the defending Labour candidates Mohamed Deen and David Parton respectively.
Our last Labour defence in London comes in the Lewisham North constituency, where Labour councillor Juliet Campbell has quit the council because she is standing in the general election as the Labour candidate for Broxtowe, in Nottinghamshire. This forces a by-election in Blackheath ward, at which the Labour record of holding a full slate of Lewisham councillors since 2018 could be at risk: the Labour lead of 43–29 over the Liberal Democrats here in 2022 is inflated by a large personal vote for Campbell. The defending Labour candidate is Pauline Dall, while the Lib Dems have again put up Chris Maines who was the party’s Lewisham mayoral candidate in 2022 and, some years ago, was on the wrong end of a series of knife-edge parliamentary results in Orpington.
As usual the wildcard here is the City of London Corporation — the elected body covering the ancient Square Mile of the City of London which has the population of a large parish. Despite this the City has escaped untouched from every local government reorganisation over the last 200 years, and it is the only UK elected body to retain elected Aldermen and business voters. Indeed, the City’s electoral system ensures that a majority of councillors are returned by business voters: twenty-one out of 25 wards have a ward list dominated by the business vote, while the City’s relatively few residents are corralled into four wards which between them return 20 out of 100 Common Councilmen and four out of 25 Aldermen, the senior councillors from whom the Lord Mayor is selected.
One of the residential wards is Cripplegate, which covers areas on the northern edge of the City which suffered badly from Second World War bombing: apart from the church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, not much was left standing. Residential development followed. First to come was the Golden Lane estate, built on Corbusian principles in the 1950s, which was part of Islington until it was transferred into the City by boundary changes in 1994; when it was built, the Golden Lane estate’s Great Arthur House was the UK’s tallest residential building. After that came the Barbican, a brutalist paradise of the 1960s and 1970s which was once one of London’s most prestigious residential developments. Cripplegate ward covers the eastern half of the Barbican estate, including the arts centre, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the City of London School for Girls.
This column used to write that the City used “Alderman” as a non-binary term, but when I travelled down to the Barbican for a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert in May (which you can listen to on BBC Sounds for the next week) the public noticeboard outside St Giles’ church referred to the outgoing representative Susan Pearson as an Alderwoman. Clearly times have changed. Pearson had served as Alderwoman of Cripplegate since 2022 and had represented the ward on the Common Council before then, being elected on a clear manifesto of standing up for the Golden Lane and Barbican residents.
Aldermen and -women of the City are technically elected for life but are expected to retire at the age of 70, and that time has come for Pearson. Labour will get a decent vote out of the Barbican in the general election for the Cities of London and Westminster constituency, and three of the eight Common Councilmen and -women for Cripplegate ward were elected as official Labour candidates, but elections in the City are generally non-partisan. Susan Pearson nominated independent candidate Elizabeth King as her successor; King lives in the Barbican estate, founded and ran the Square Mile Food Bank, and has (according to her official City profile) “worked in the steel and energy industries in a variety of strategic, corporate finance and planning roles.” When nominations closed for the Cripplegate Aldermanic election King was the only candidate, and at yesterday’s Wardmote she was formally declared elected unopposed. This column sends its congratulations. King’s election will mean a consequential by-election in Cripplegate ward in due course, because she was previously a Common Councilwoman for the ward.
The City’s returning officer must have breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that candidate list, because the date for the Cripplegate aldermanic election had been fixed for 4th July before the general election was called. It’s essentially impossible to combine City elections with polls for other levels of government because the Corporation’s franchise and hours of polling are completely different to everywhere else: additionally, City elections do not require Voter ID. Cripplegate ward contains two of the City’s four polling stations for residents in the general election, with St Giles Cripplegate catering to 3,228 electors (nearly half of the City’s residential electorate) and the Golden Lane Estate polling station having 672 on the register. If the aldermanic election had been contested, it would probably have been necessary to book completely separate polling stations for it with all the inconvenience for the electors which that would have implied.
The other two City polling stations for the general election are at St Bride’s and the Portsoken Community Centre. Neither of these are within Farringdon Within ward, where a by-election is taking place today to the Common Council after Graeme Doshi-Smith resigned due to pressure of work. This is a large ward in the west of the City, running from the Blackfriars area in a rather complicated way up to Barbican underground station; notable features of the ward include most of Holborn Viaduct, City Thameslink railway station, the Old Bailey, Ludgate Hill, the church of St Bartholomew the Great and the street of Cloth Fair, on which the City’s oldest surviving residential dwelling stands. This is one of the business-dominated wards with few residents; some of the business voters will be nominated by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who have a large building here on Newgate Street complete with a section of the old Roman Wall in the basement.
Farringdon Within returns eight Common Councilmen and -women, and Doshi-Smith was elected in eighth place in 2022 with 100 votes — a lead of 13 over Labour’s Harry Stratton. Four independent candidates are standing for this by-election: in ballot paper order they are Edward Goodchild (who has contested a few recent City elections without success), Jani Levänen (a St John’s Ambulance volunteer associated with the Stationers’ Company), Gerard O’Sullivan (who stood here in 2022 and finished in 15th and last place) and David Williams (a barrister).
South East
We have seven English by-elections remaining to bring you from the South East region, and it says a lot about just how far the Conservatives have sunk in local government here that only two of them are Tory defences.
Two of the vacancies have fallen in the part of Surrey which lies inside the M25. Ashford East ward, part of the Spelthorne constituency, lies just outside the Greater London boundary; the Ashford here is not the large town in Kent but the smaller town in Surrey or Middlesex (delete to taste) which has merged into the London outer suburban sprawl. Spelthorne council is on the list of councils that could fall into serious financial trouble due to the scale of their debts, and this financial instability has been coupled with political instability in recent years after the ruling Conservative group imploded in the 2019–23 term. The 2023 elections more or less confirmed the fragmented nature of Spelthorne council, on which the Conservatives are still the largest party but the administration is a coalition of an independent group and the Lib Dems. Ashford East was a safe Conservative ward until 2023, when independent candidates gained two of the ward’s three seats; councillor Elizabeth Baldock, who was deputy leader of the Independent Spelthorne Group, has now stood down on health grounds. Her husband Philip Baldock is seeking to hold the seat for the independents, against competition from Conservative candidate Sinead Mooney who represents Staines on Surrey county council and is Surrey’s cabinet member for adult social care.
Meanwhile, in the Runnymede and Weybridge constituency the Liberal Democrats have to defend the extremely affluent Cobham and Downside ward of Elmbridge, a council which they were projected to win overall control of in May but where the party fell short. Cobham and Downside is one of the few Elmbridge wards where Residents Associations are not a factor in local politics; instead this was a safe Conservative ward until a July 2021 by-election saw a surprise Lib Dem gain. The Lib Dems gained a second seat in 2022 and confirmed their by-election gain last year, but in May 2024 the Tories held their final seat in the ward by 122 votes. This by-election is a Lib Dem defence following the resignation of the 2021 by-election winner Robin Stephens, who is moving away from the area; his party’s candidate is Diane Leakey who contested the neighbouring Oxshott and Stoke d’Abernon ward in May, while the Conservatives have selected Katerina Lusk who fought this ward without success in 2022 and 2023.
The Lib Dems also have to defend St Michael ward in the city of Winchester. This is the ward which takes in much of Winchester city centre including the cathedral, plus the very old private school of Winchester College where one Rishi Sunak was a pupil in the 1980s. The ward also covers the south-east of Winchester and the old Iron Age hillfort of St Catherine’s Hill, which is owned by Winchester College who hold occasional assemblies there. The voters of St Michael ward do not necessarily share Sunak’s politics, and this is a safe Lib Dem ward within the Winchester parliamentary seat; today’s by-election is to replace George Prest, who was elected here last year and has now stood down because he is moving away from the city for family reasons. The defending Lib Dem candidate is Richard Murphy, an actuary who was the party’s candidate for Hampshire police and crime commissioner in 2021.
Our other Hampshire by-election is for a marginal ward in the Gosport constituency. Grange and Alver Valley ward covers housing on the western edge of Gosport town, close to the River Alver. The name comes from two schools in the ward; also here is the Little Woodham Living History Village, a recreation of a rural Hampshire village from the seventeenth century. Grange and Alver Valley ward has a working-class demographic, but Labour are very weakly organised in Gosport (where the council is run by the Lib Dems); even in the dire conditions of May 2024, the Conservatives still held this ward albeit by only 11 votes over Labour. This poll is to replace Conservative councillor Margaret Morgan who passed away in April. In this military town the defending Conservative candidate is Robbie Beech, who has recently retired from a 24-year career in the Army nursing corps; he has served in Northern Ireland and Iraq, and he was awarded a military MBE in the 2023 Birthday Honours when he held the rank of Warrant Officer Class 1. Labour have reselected their candidate from May Jonathan Brown, who will hope to find the 12 extra votes he needs to become the first Labour councillor for Grange and Alver Valley ward.
The other Conservative defence in the South East’s by-elections is in Maidenbower ward. This is a middle-class area in the south-east corner of the New Town of Crawley, where the Conservative situation is getting more and more dire as time goes on; in May’s local elections the Crawley Conservatives held just two of the seven council seats they were defending. Crawley’s outgoing Conservative MP Henry Smith has seen the writing on the wall and he is not seeking re-election; his wife Jennifer Millar-Smith, who ran her husband’s parliamentary office, is also standing down from Crawley council. Her Maidenbower ward was one of the two Crawley wards which stayed Conservative in May, and the party’s defending candidate Imtiaz Khan is favoured to hold.
Further down the Brighton Line we come to the Brunswick and Adelaide ward of Brighton and Hove, which lies on the seafront and is part of a parliamentary seat whose boundaries are unchanged but whose name has changed from Hove Actually to Hove and Portslade Actually. Brunswick and Adelaide is the eastern end of Hove, with the ward’s south-eastern corner being at the Peace Statue which marks the point where Hove ends and Brighton begins. Brunswick Town itself is a development from the 1820s which is noted for its Georgian architecture. Brighton and Hove council was gained by Labour in the 2023 local elections, with the party not only defeating a minority Green Party administration but also unseating the council leader Phélim Mac Cafferty in Brunswick and Adelaide ward. Labour councillor Jilly Stevens has now stood down on health grounds forcing a by-election in a ward which remains marginal: production editor Alice Burton will try to defend the seat for Labour against Green candidate Ollie Sykes, who lost his seat in another Brighton and Hove ward last year and is trying to return.
Mention of the Greens brings us to our last English by-election of the day, which is also our only Green Party defence of the day. You might have thought that the Kent town of Tonbridge would be true blue, but this is not the case. In the 2019 Tonbridge and Malling council elections the Green Party gained Judd ward which covers the western side of Tonbridge, pocketing the blues in the process; the Greens followed up on that in 2021 by gaining Tonbridge’s two seats on Kent county council, and following the 2023 elections they are now the third-largest party on Tonbridge and Malling council. This is finely balanced, with the 2023 elections returning 20 Conservatives, 11 Lib Dems, 8 Greens, 3 Labour and 2 independents; the Tories and independents formed a coalition which currently relies on the mayoral casting vote for its majority. A Conservative gain in this by-election would be very helpful to the ruling administration but would require a big swing from 2023. Green councillor George Hines has resigned to concentrate on a new teaching job and his Open University studies; Stacey Pilgrim, who is a quarry manager in his real life (yes, this Stacey is a he), is the defending candidate.
Scotland
This week’s edition of Andrew’s Previews has been all about England, and the reason for that is Voter ID. Local elections in Scotland and Wales are devolved matters, and the Scottish Parliament and Senedd Cymru have not followed Westminster’s lead in legislating for voter ID on the grounds that it’s a waste of money and erects barriers to voting. Instead, Scottish and Welsh electoral reforms in the last few years have reduced barriers to voting by extending the right to vote in local and devolved elections to 16- and 17-year-olds and to all foreign citizens who are legally resident in Scotland or Wales. Wales has also recently legislated for councils to adopt proportional representation if they so wish, and a few areas are seriously considering this.
Voter ID is not just a barrier to voting, it also creates huge problems in administering local by-elections in cases where some elections require it and others do not. For this reason Scottish and Welsh returning officers have been desperate to avoid having to run local by-elections on general election day, which is a difficult thing to do when the date of the general election is in the gift of the Prime Minister. The returning officer for the Western Isles lost this particular game, because he didn’t realise that you could work out the general election date by looking at the betting slips of Conservative Party officials, and he is having to run two separate elections under these conditions.
As a result the only Scottish by-election taking place alongside the general election is in the constituency with the UK’s smallest headcount, Na h-Eileanan an Iar. Na Hearadh ward will be better known to Anglophones as the Isle of Harris, a mountainous area in the south of the island of Lewis with Harris. The main settlements here are Tarbert, from which ferries run to Uig on Skye, and Leverburgh which has a ferry connection to Berneray and on to North Uist. (The Lever in Leverburgh is a reference to William Lever, the businessman who founded Lever Brothers and who invested some of his business fortune in Harris.) The ward also includes the island of Scalpay which was joined to Harris by a bridge in 1997; uninhabited islands here include Taransay where the TV series Castaway 2000 was filmed. The Atlantic islands of St Kilda and Rockall were historically administered from Harris, but the latest ward map for the Western Isles placed the St Kilda archipelago in the ward based on North Uist and didn’t have Rockall on it at all. If anybody can ever last long enough on Rockall to establish residence for electoral purposes, which ward they are in might be an interesting conundrum for the returning officer to sort out.
The present Na Hearadh ward was created in 2022 as a cut down version of the former Na Hearadh agus Ceann a Deas nan Loch (Harris and South Lochs) ward, with a reduction from three councillors to two. So, when all three of the previous ward councillors sought re-election here in 2022 somebody was going to lose out. In the end the two independent councillors Grant Fulton and Paul Finnegan were re-elected, with the SNP’s John Mitchell losing his seat. Fulton had won a by-election here in October 2020; he resigned in May expressing frustration with the council’s management and referring in particular to the sale of a council house in Tarbert at a time when Harris has a serious housing shortage.
The candidate list for this by-election confirms its status as a wildcard. One new independent candidate has come forward: Kenny Macleod lives on Scalpay and runs a company which provides boat trips for tourists and maritime charter services. His only opposition comes from Steven Welsh, a retired psychiatrist from Stornoway who is standing both here and in the general election for the Scottish Family Party.
Final thoughts
That puts Andrew’s Previews to bed for the 2019 Parliament, which if nothing else has been one hell of a ride. You, the reader, will now have the chance to make your voice heard at the end of it: the opportunity to make a judgment on the past or to look towards the future. Or both. Whichever way you decide to vote, Take Your Photo ID To The Polling Station or, like a certain recent Prime Minster, you’ll be the numpty that gets turned away.
Your ancestors will look kindly upon you in the polling booth. Two centuries ago, the right to vote in the UK was vested in the privileged few. One hundred years ago, British men could vote at 21 but women had to wait until they were 30. In a year when most of the world’s largest democracies are going to the polls, with elections earlier this year in India and across the EU and later this year in the USA, we should reflect that even now there are many people in the world who — by no more than an accident of birth — cannot express a free, fair and secret judgment on their rulers through the medium of the ballot box. In Ukraine, Europeans are fighting to retain that privilege: to be able to participate in elections, rather than electoral-type events.
So, celebrate in this festival of British democracy on Thursday 4th July at your local polling station between 07:00 and 22:00. Your vote will be free, it will be fair, it will be secret, and it will count in the same way as my vote and everyone else’s vote. But if you don’t vote, your voice will not be heard when the contents of the ballot boxes are counted, to determine your candidates’ future — and yours.
On Friday morning, the campaign teams can toast their victory or drown their sorrows before putting their feet up for a well-earned rest. As will Andrew’s Previews: there is no column next week. But there is no peace for the wicked nor rest for the righteous: before too long the electoral cycle will turn, and we’ll go through all this again. That’s democracy.
This column will return on Thursday 18th July for the first by-elections of the 2024 Parliament: in east London, in Oxford, and in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Until then, whoever you support, have a good election and I’ll see you on the other side.
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
