Andrew's Previews 2020: The year 2020, told through local by-elections

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We should be in a Conservative-majority period at the moment, but for some years now the Plymouth Conservatives have been in a state of civil war which makes the Republican group in the US House of Representatives look coherent and united. It’s a long story. Let’s join the action immediately after the 2021 local elections (mapped above), at which the Conservatives performed very well and Labour lost their majority on Plymouth council.

In May 2023 the Tories lost their majority on Broadland council, falling from 33 to 21 seats out of a possible 47, and that cost them power. All the other councillors (14 Lib Dems, 8 Labour and 4 Greens) have joined together in a traffic-light coalition, under a Lib Dem leader. The result in Thorpe St Andrew North West was closer than in the October 2022 by-election, but a Labour lead of 48–42 was enough for Labour to take all three seats in the ward.He had done well to get that far in political as well as health terms. The 2019 Guildford borough elections were a disaster for the Conservatives, who crashed from 35 seats on the council to just 9. The Liberal Democrats became the largest party with 17 seats, 15 seats went to the Residents for Guildford and Villages, four to the Guildford Greenbelt Group, two to Labour and one to the Greens. The Lib Dems and the Residents for Guildford and Villages run the council in coalition. This section has been corrected — Littlemore became part of Oxford in 1991, not 1974 as originally stated. Rose Hill and Littlemore Including Portchester. The Saxon Shore fort here, generally identified as Portus Adurni, is located on a promontory at the head of Portsmouth Harbour. It is described as the best-preserved Roman fort north of the Alps, with nearly all of the Roman outer walls and bastions still standing today. Some of the space within the fort is now occupied by a Norman castle, which was a frequent destination for English kings from Henry II onwards. Portchester was a regular embarkation point for English armies looking for a fight with the French; as late as the Napoleonic Wars, over 7,000 French prisoners of war were incarcerated here.

Unlike in Oxford earlier, there is no crossover between the county and borough by-election candidates in Tamworth. For Belgrave ward the defending Conservative is Paul Thompson. The Labour candidate is Craig Adams, who stood for the council last year in Mercian ward. Charlie Taylor is standing as an independent candidate, and the ballot paper is completed by Adam Bayliss for the Greens and Ian Cooper for Reform UK. Counting for both Tamworth by-elections will take place on Friday morning. Watling South 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.

This by-election is also crucial for control of East Sussex county council, where the Conservatives have a small majority with 27 out of 50 seats. Two of those Conservative seats are currently vacant, and if the Tories fail to hold both this by-election and another by-election next week in Eastbourne then the county council will fall into No Overall Control. Local by-election results don’t always reflect the national political scene, and we shouldn’t always expect them to. A rising political tide will normally work to lift all boats, but some get lifted more than others and there’s always something going on in the local picture to confound the national one if you look hard enough.

Plymouth council, Devon; caused respectively by the resignations of Conservative councillors Shannon Burden and Dan Collins. The local authority here is Folkestone and Hythe council, where the Conservatives lost their majority in a messy 2019 election. The Tories won 13 seats, the Green Party and Labour six each, the Lib Dems and UKIP two each and the remaining seat went to an independent. The Conservatives still run Folkestone and Hythe council, but they now have to rely on a coalition with UKIP and the independent councillor. The other North East council to watch is Hartlepool, whose entire representation was up in 2021: the parliamentary seat was a historic Conservative by-election gain, while the party may also be ruing its decision not to stand more candidates in the simultaneous Hartlepool council election. The whole council was up for election last year on new ward boundaries, but the Conservative dominance in the ward map only netted them 13 seats out of 36 because they only stood 13 candidates: there are 12 independent and/or localist councillors and 11 Labour members, giving a very balanced council. There is little scope for Labour gains in Hartlepool because the party are defending seven of the 13 seats up for election this year; holding what they have got will be a decent result. Labour are defending this by-election following the death of Labour councillor Diana Friend, a retired teacher who passed away in May at the age of 72. She was the serving deputy mayoress of Warrington, as her husband and fellow ward councillor Graham Friend was the borough’s deputy mayor for 2022–23. They married in 2017 within the ward, at the Church of the Resurrection in Cinnamon Brow; Diana was already a ward councillor then, having been first elected in 2016 under her previous surname of Bennett, and she and Graham had met through their political work. Which brings us to the five by-elections on 20th October 2022. It’s a very different set to last week, with the Conservatives defending three seats and the Lib Dems and Labour one each. Let’s start on the south coast, with the Lib Dem defence: Portchester EastLater in 1926 the last male head of the Tatton family finally gave in and sold the rest of Wythenshawe to Manchester Corporation, who over the last century have filled it with council houses. The “garden suburb” of Wythenshawe is a claimant for the title of Europe’s largest council estate, and the five wards of Manchester city council which cover it today had a combined population of 79,000 in the 2021 census. Anywhere else in the country this would be a major town; but Wythenshawe has never even had town status, instead being just a Manchester suburb. Finally, we have the last election to North Yorkshire county council, which returned a Conservative majority at its previous election in 2017: 55 Conservatives against 10 independents, 4 Labour and 3 Lib Dem councillors. There are new division boundaries this year with an increase from 72 councillors to 90. As a result of local government reorganisation the county council will become North Yorkshire’s unitary council in April 2023, with all the district councils underneath it disappearing then. The Tories were much weaker here in the 2019 district council elections: Scarborough council is run by a Labour-Independent coalition, Ryedale by a Lib Dem-independent arrangement, Richmondshire by an independent-led anti-Conservative coalition. The Conservatives do, however, have majorities in Selby, Hambleton and Harrogate districts and hold half of the seats in Craven.

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.The Heathfield and Mayfield county division is currently split between two safe-Conservative parliamentary seats. Heathfield is covered by the Bexhill and Battle constituency represented by Huw Merriman, Mayfield is part of Nus Ghani’s Wealden constituency. Merriman and Ghani are both currently junior ministers: Ghani holds the industry brief, while Merriman is responsible for the government’s railways and High Speed 2 policy. Boundary changes for the next general election will transfer Heathfield into the Wealden seat, which will take on the new name of “Sussex Weald”. Fareham council is one of the few English councils which re-elects half of its members every two years. Despite this, it has an odd number of councillors: the current composition is 25 Conservatives, 4 Lib Dems plus this vacancy, and an independent. The odd one out here is Portchester East ward, which — perhaps because of its position in a corner of the borough — has three councillors rather than the usual two. As a result Portchester East alternates between electing one and two councillors at each poll, which is an electoral cycle it shares with only one other ward in the country. For the other East Midlands region we take another trip to England’s “smallest” “county” as we come to Uppingham, which with a population of just under 5,000 is the second-largest metropolis in Rutland. Uppingham is best-known to outsiders for its public school, which clearly shows up in its 2011 census return: the ward’s proportion of 16- and 17-year-olds (10.2%) is the sixth-highest of any ward in England and Wales and the highest figure for any ward in the East Midlands, and Uppingham ward is also in the top 50 for those employed in education (22.4%). The pupils are of course too young to vote, and for the adults Uppingham’s elections are curiously balanced affairs with no party ever standing a full slate for the three available seata. Four of the ward’s five ordinary elections this century have returned candidates from three different political traditions, including the 2019 election at which the Tories’ Lucy Stephenson and independent Marc Oxley were re-elected, while the Green Party’s Miranda Jones (who had been the Labour candidate here in 2015) defeated Tory councillor Rachel Burkitt for the final seat. To allow consistent comparisons to be made across local elections from year to year, the BBC make an estimate of how the vote would have gone across the whole country based on vote changes in a representative sample of wards. Their Projected National Share for the 2018 local elections put the Conservatives and Labour level on 35% each and the Lib Dems on 16%. We can see from the differences between these and the figures above that the wards holding elections tend to be stronger for Labour, and weaker for the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, than the GB average.