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

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Now, unlike some other cities, Oxford’s ring road doesn’t necessarily mark the end of the urban area: large parts of Oxford’s south-east fringe are outside the ring road. This includes the former village of Littlemore, which has existed for a very long time but only got a parish church in 1838; its first incumbent was John Henry Newman, who later became a Roman Catholic cardinal and a saint. Newman gives his name to the local primary school. Littlemore ward also takes in the Oxford Science Park and the Kassam Stadium, home of Oxford United FC, both of which are on the southern edge of the city. The Tillingbourne valley used to be a major industrial area, with the river providing a reliable source of water power. This industry included the Chilworth gunpowder factory, which was established in 1625 and supplied explosives to the East India Company and other customers for nearly three centuries. Further up the valley is Shere, which has a lot of unspoilt Tudor architecture and is a favourite location for artists and film-makers. Shere is the centre of a large parish which includes Gomshall and some beautiful North Downs landscape. We now come to the only local government unit in the UK which still has Aldermen, the City of London. There are 25 Aldermen of the City, one for each ward, who are the senior councillors from whose ranks the Lord Mayor of London is chosen. The only elections in Cheshire this year are for one-third of Halton council (Runcorn and Widnes), which is culturally closer to Merseyside than to Cheshire and accordingly has a secure Labour majority. The councillors up here were last elected in 2021 following boundary changes. Yorkshire

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. All these shenanigans have left Plymouth council hung again. A further defection earlier this week left Labour as the largest party on the council; the latest composition following a further defection earlier this week gives 24 Labour councillors, 23 Conservatives plus two vacancies, five councillors in the Independent Alliance group (four ex-Conservative, one ex-Labour), two Greens (one of whom was elected as Labour), and an ex-Conservative independent. It’s a very fine balance. Any Conservative losses in these by-elections will mean that Labour increase their lead on the council, although they will remain short of the 29 seats necessary for a majority. There are a number of reasons for this. One is what appears to be poor vote distribution by the Conservatives and excellent targeting by Labour, which allows Labour to punch above their weight. In the 2021 Worthing elections the Conservatives polled 51% against Labour’s 41%, but the two parties won six wards each with the remaining ward going Lib Dem. One is fast-moving demographic change. Worthing is not your typical Sussex-by-the-Sea elephant’s graveyard: the town has diversified its economy to give itself a year-round economic base, and this has attracted people of working age to move here as the cost of living in Brighton has become unaffordable. And one is incompetence on the part of the Conservatives: as this column related last December, one of the Conservative councillors in Worthing was forced to resign last autumn after he was linked to a far-right group, and the resulting by-election in Marine ward (again) was lost to Labour. Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Beaconsfield (Denham and Fulmer parishes); Chesham and Amersham (Gerrards Cross East parish ward of Gerrards Cross parish)The ward is represented on the City Corporation by the Alderman and two Common Councilmen. Since the last City elections in March 2022 one of the two Common Councilmen for Bread Street has been Emily Benn, Tony Benn’s granddaughter. Emily has served as a Labour councillor in Croydon in the past and has stood three times for Parliament as a Labour candidate, but elections in the City don’t work like that; even politicians who are well-known for being partisan in other fields will normally seek election in the City as independent candidates, as Benn did. This memo was seemingly not received by Harini Iyengar, who stood in Bread Street in 2022 as an official candidate of the Women’s Equality Party and finished last out of four candidates. Parliamentary constituency: Bexhill and Battle (Heathfield North and Heathfield South wards), Wealden (Mayfield and Five Ashes ward)

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. 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 East Let’s start the week on the wrong side of the Pennines, in a ward which this column has written about quite a bit in the last seven years. Batley is an industrial town in the Heavy Woollen District of Yorkshire, and the industry here was shoddy. By this I don’t mean that the manufacturing was poor quality, but that it involved shoddy — recycled woollen clothes and rags. Textiles are still important to the local economy — one of the local mills has been done up as The Mill, a factory outlet attracting people from all over West Yorkshire — but the largest single employer in the town is Fox’s Biscuits, whose head office and main factory is here. In days gone by the Batley Variety Club was a major draw to punters and artists from all over the world, with in its heyday such well-known American acts as Louis Armstrong, Roy Orbison and Neil Sedaka treading its boards; but live music is no longer played there, and the old Variety Club building was converted into a gym in 2017.

In the case of South Derbyshire, the Tory collapse on the district council had already started before 2021 with a damaging split in the party; the splinter group on the council voted out the Tory leader in 2020 and installed a Labour minority administration, which went on to win a majority in 2023. Roger Redfern lost his seat on the district council three months ago as Labour won Church Gresley ward by 60–40 in a straight fight with the Conservatives. Swadlincote South division also includes half of the Swadlincote district ward, which Labour won by 62–38 in May. Our other English by-election takes place in the centre of the country, as we are only a few miles from Coton in the Elms, the hamlet generally recognised as the point in England furthest from the sea. Swadlincote is the southernmost town in Derbyshire, and it’s traditionally a mining centre as the town’s civic motto E terra divitiæ — “riches from the earth” — might suggest. As well as coal, the town lies on clay deposits of unusually high quality which were particularly suitable for manufacture of large pipes. On the night of 14th March 2023, contractors moved in on Armada Way in Plymouth. This is a pedestrian boulevard which runs in a straight line through Plymouth city centre: at the north end of Armada Way is Plymouth’s intercity railway station; at the south end is Plymouth Hoe. In the middle is the city’s main shopping district and some mature trees. But not nearly as many as there used to be. 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.