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

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From May, you will need photo ID to vote in person at a parliamentary election in Great Britain or a local election in England. If you don’t have one of the accepted forms of photo ID, you can apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate or a postal vote from your local council elections office. Do it now and beat the rush. Defending this by-election for Labour is Una Gillham, who is described as a former lecturer, charity worker and community volunteer. The Conservatives have selected Howard Klein, a chartered surveyor who represents most of the ward on Poulton-with-Fearnhead parish council. The Greens and the independent candidate from last time are not trying again, so the Lib Dems’ Timothy Harwood completes the ballot paper. Sir Edward Codrington resigned from the Commons in 1840. Now, one does not simply resign as an MP: instead you have to be appointed to an Office of Profit under the Crown which exists for the sole purpose of vacating your parliamentary seat. There are two such offices of profit in use today, the Chiltern Hundreds and the Manor of Northstead; but other similar offices have been used in the past. Codrington was the last MP to resign by being appointed as Steward of the Manor of East Hendred, and the appointment went through despite the fact that the Crown had actually sold that manor in 1823. It seems that nobody had told the Parliamentary authorities about this at the time, and at least seventeen later appointments were made to the Manor of East Hendred before the penny dropped. Codrington died in 1851, and the post of Steward of the Manor of East Hendred has been vacant ever since. This county division also covers a large rural area. Overlooking the Saxon shoreline is the high ground of Lympne, which was the location for a number of early aeronautical records: Amy Johnson set out from here in 1932 on a flight to Cape Town, which broke the record for a solo flight. On the modern shoreline is the fast-growing village of Dymchurch. Both of these were also fortified to guard the shore: Lympne by the Romans, Dymchurch in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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. Perhaps appropriately for the political home of Sir Robert Peel, Tamworth is firmly in the Conservative column at the moment. The parliamentary seat has been held since 2010 by Chris Pincher who enjoys a 2019 majority of almost 20,000 votes. Pincher’s behaviour as deputy chief whip was the final straw that led to the removal of Boris Johnson as prime minister last year; it also led to Pincher losing the Conservative whip and speculation of a possible parliamentary by-election. This column will believe that when it sees it.

Like most local election years in the UK (with the exception of 2021), there is patchy coverage this year with some districts going to the polls while others don’t. On the bill for May 2022 we have all the councillors up for election in Scotland, Wales and Greater London, together with elections for the whole of North Yorkshire and Somerset county councils, and for two brand-new councils in Cumbria. There is a general election to the Northern Ireland Assembly. In the rest of England only those councils in England which return a third or a half of their councillors at each election will be going to the polls; these are generally the most urban districts and include nearly of all of England’s metropolitan areas. If you live in rural England, chances are that you’ll be sitting this year’s elections out. At its eastern end the Royal Military Canal passes through Hythe, which was one of the five ancient Cinque Ports charged with defending England from the French in mediaeval times. Hythe is not a port now: its harbour silted up long ago, and vessels crossing the Channel now have to use the ports of Folkestone or Dover to the east. The town, however, remains and is mostly located within the Hythe West division of Kent county council. So, defending this seat for the Conservatives is Neil Waller, an NHS finance manager and former Wealden councillor who lost his seat two months ago in Crowborough South West ward. The Greens have selected Anne Cross, an interfaith minister who lives in Heathfield. The Lib Dems also put a nomination in, but their candidate has withdrawn and will not be on the ballot; that leaves this by-election as a straight fight between Waller and Cross. Other elections since May 2019 suggest that things have not improved for the Guildford Conservatives. Tillingbourne ward is part of the Shere division of Surrey county council, which the Conservatives held only narrowly in the 2021 county elections against a strong campaign from the Guildford Greenbelt Group. The ward is part of the Mole Valley parliamentary seat, which is safe for the Conservative MP Sir Paul Beresford but swung strongly to the Liberal Democrats in December 2019 against the national trend. Which perhaps explains why North West ward has had a full slate of Conservative councillors since the current boundaries were introduced in 2004. At the last Broadland elections in 2019 the Conservatives had a 56–29 lead over Labour. The Conservatives also hold the Woodside division of Norfolk county council, which covers this ward. The Parliamentary Boundary Commission have not been fooled by the fact that this ward is outside the Norwich city limits and they have sensibly placed the area within the Norwich North constituency; this has been held since a 2009 by-election by the Conservatives’ Chloe Smith, who joined the Cabinet last month as Work and Pensions secretary. Smith’s majority is only just over 10 percentage points, and Labour will have their eye on this seat at the next general election.

Before this column leaves Plymouth, a tribute is due to Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher of the Local Government Elections Centre, who for many years have been professors of politics at Plymouth University. The study of British local elections owes an immeasurable debt to Rallings and Thrasher, who have collected and analysed local election results from this country for decades. Their dataset is second to none with over 900,000 candidacies, and I do refer to it quite a lot on the occasions when I need to consult results from before my own records start in 2002. Michael Thrasher has generously described this column in my hearing with the words “wonderful reports”, and I’d like to return the favour by putting on the record here my thanks to Rallings and Thrasher for their decades of hard work. I look forward to hearing their insights and analysis for many years to come. Moor View Kelly has now formed an Independent Alliance group on the council which includes other defectors from both the Conservatives and Labour. As we shall now discuss, in November a further Conservative councillor was suspended and two more resigned altogether. Brooklands is the north-western of Wythenshawe’s five wards, covering Wythenshawe Park, Northern Moor, a large chunk of Baguley and the Southmoor industrial estate. It’s served by the Northern Moor, Wythenshawe Park, Moor Road and Baguley tram stops on the Wythenshawe/Airport branch of the Metrolink tram system. This tram line opened only in 2014; before then Wythenshawe was very poorly connected to the outside world, with no railway station and with the motorway network having to take much of the strain. Before the Yorkshire textile industry collapsed, Batley’s mills became a focus for immigration: large numbers of people came to work here from Gujarat and the Punjab, and they stayed and raised families. Batley East ward is in the top 90 wards in England and Wales for Asian ethnicity (58.4%), in the top 50 wards for Islam (58.3%), and in the top 20 wards for people with a “British only identity” (73.7%). The fact that the Pennine textile industry is no longer what it used to be can be gleaned from the fact that Batley East is also in the top 80 wards in England and Wales for those working in sales or customer service occupations (12.9%). For the city council by-election the defending Labour candidate is Sandy Douglas, an associate professor at Oxford University who works in vaccine development; he was one of the team which developed the manufacturing process for the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. There is a lot of crossover between the county and city council ballot papers, with independent Michael Evans, the Conservatives’ Tim Patmore, the Greens’ David Thomas and the Lib Dems’ Theo Jupp all contesting both polls; the strong independent candidate for Littlemore ward last year is not standing again and she has signed Evans’ nomination papers. The only party other than Labour to nominate a different candidate for the city council is the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, who have selected Rachel Cox for the Littlemore by-election.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.