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

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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. Over the same period Plympton Chaddlewood ward has normally been a safe Conservative area, but that suddenly changed in 2021 when the Green Party contested the ward for the first time. From literally nowhere the Greens came very close to winning, and they then built on that performance to gain Chaddlewood ward from the Conservatives in May 2022 with a large majority: 58% for the Green Party, 35% for the Conservatives. Our last council by-election today is to Sevenoaks council, in the west of the county. Fawkham and West Kingsdown ward is located in the North Downs, either side of the M20 motorway as it approaches the Great Wen. This is a ward associated with high speeds. Lizzy Yarnold, the most successful Olympic skeleton athlete of all time, grew up in West Kingsdown; also in West Kingsdown is the Brands Hatch racing circuit, which hosted the Formula 1 British Grand Prix in even years from 1964 to 1986. 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.

Tamworth council, Staffordshire; both caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Richard Ford. In the 2021 census Poulton North made the top 50 wards in England and Wales for those working in the water, sewerage or waste management sector. Warrington is the home of North West England’s water company United Utilities, and one wonders whether the census enumerators might have got a bit confused by that; UU do have their fingers in a number of other pies. Our Welsh by-election this week takes place in the south-eastern corner of the county. Devauden ward is a hilly and rural area lying between the Wye valley to the east and the Usk valley to the west.Anyway, we are where we are so let’s look at Wathvale ward. This covers thirteen parishes to the north and east of Ripon, including North Stainley with Sleningford parish which is cut off from the rest of the ward by the River Ure — one of the Boundary Commission’s more curious decisions. That parish takes in the theme park of Lightwater Valley, while the territory east of the Ure includes the large military airfield at Dishforth next to the A1 motorway. Harrogate council last went to the polls in 2018 when this ward was safely Conservative; their defending candidate Sam Green is challenged on this occasion by Chris Knight of the Lib Dems and Hannah Corlett of the Green Party. Knight and Corlett are also seeking election to the North Yorkshire county council, in the larger division of Wathvale and Bishop Monkton. East Midlands 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%). In the UK, we ensure that the public have oversight of all this through regular local government elections. Every year, on the first Thursday in May, new councillors are elected while old councillors retire. In 2022 the UK’s local elections will most likely be the biggest electoral event of the year. Let’s have a look at what we might expect from them. Setting the scene The Labour slate included (Zeena) Iysha Begum, who was elected at the age of just 18; at the time she was a student at Winstanley College in Wigan and doing volunteer work for a local community interest company. She had moved to St Helens in 2018 with her mother and brothers, fleeing domestic violence. Unfortunately Begum’s time on the council lasted only a few months before she resigned due to a change in her personal circumstances. 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.

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.Defending for the Conservatives is Peter Berry, who represents the area on Thorpe St Andrew town council. Labour have selected the wonderfully-named Calix Eden. Brian Howe completes the candidate list for the Lib Dems. The large Conservative majority on Fareham borough also reflects national politics. Fareham has returned Conservative MPs continuously since the Fareham constituency was first created in 1885. Since 2015 its incumbent has been wisdom-free zone Suella Braverman, who finished sixth in the recent Conservative leadership election; her resulting tenure as Home Secretary lasted until, er, yesterday.

We have the same party lineup in Plympton Chaddlewod. The difficult task of holding that ward for the Conservatives has fallen to Ashley Ward, who runs an electrical services company. He is likely to face a strong challenge from the Greens’ Lauren McLay, who describes herself as a local communications specialist. The other candidates for Chaddlewood are Lindsay Gilmour for Labour, Benjamin Davy of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Mike Gillbard of the Lib Dems and independent candidate Andrew Hill. The Plymouth Herald have received statements from all the candidates in today’s by-elections except for the Lib Dems, and you can read more here for Moor View (link) and here for Plympton Chaddlewood (link). Outgoing councillor Baker-Smith doesn’t appear to have completely left her Isle of Wight roots. She was working remotely in an NHS job which is nominally based there, and she quit Manchester council in July to spend more time on the island caring for a family member.

For more information and to apply for a VAC or postal vote, go to electoralcommission.org.uk/voterid. Rose Hill and Littlemore Defending for Labour is Carol Ferris, who stood in the other Thorpe St Andrew ward (South East) in May; she was elected to Thorpe St Andrew town council, but missed out on a seat on Broadland council then. Another Thorpe St Andrew town councillor on the ballot is the Conservatives’ Peter Berry, who finished as runner-up in the 2022 by-election and the 2023 Broadland district election in North West ward. Completing the ballot paper is Victor Morgan for the Liberal Democrats. 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. Moving over to Greater Manchester, it’s time yet again to talk about the Greatest Town in the Known Universe. I swear, every time I talk about my town’s politics things get more complicated. It’s only just over four years since I wrote in this column that 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.

During Jarvis’ term the South Yorkshire mayoralty has been significantly beefed up, with new powers over transport, strategic planning and suchlike together with a salary. Jarvis has decided to concentrate on his Westminster role and he is not seeking re-election as mayor. Since 2004 this ward had been represented on Monmouthshire council by the Conservatives’ Bob Greenland, who was elected without a contest in 2008 and had large leads over the Lib Dems in 2004, 2012 and 2017. All of those local elections also resulted in Conservative-led government of Monmouthshire county council, the party winning an overall majority in 2004, 2008 and 2017 and ruling from 2012 to 2017 in coalition with the Lib Dems. 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. Folkestone and Hythe council wards: Hythe Rural, Hythe (part: part of Hythe parish), Romney Marsh (part: Dymchurch parish) 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.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. 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.