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

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Folkestone and Hythe council wards: Hythe Rural, Hythe (part: part of Hythe parish), Romney Marsh (part: Dymchurch parish) Quite the contrast with the far side, the Lancashire side, of the Mersey: there lay Didsbury, a suburb of the crowded, industrial city of Manchester. Didsbury was and remains an attractive suburb for the middle classes, but in 1923 inner-city Manchester had a lot of substandard slum terraces which needed something doing to them for reasons of public health. But what to do with all the people living there?

Parliamentary constituency: Bexhill and Battle (Heathfield North and Heathfield South wards), Wealden (Mayfield and Five Ashes ward) 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. On the same day Redfern was also elected to the county council, making safe a seat which the Conservatives had gained from Labour in 2017 by just 80 votes; shares of the vote here in 2021 were 59% for the Conservatives and 32% for Labour. This reflected the large Conservative majority for the local MP Heather Wheeler in December 2019 in the South Derbyshire constituency, which has the same boundaries as the council of that name. In 2021, the Conservatives won a clean sweep of all the county divisions in South Derbyshire.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. 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. We finish with the Labour defence of the week, which comes at the northern end of St Helens. This town was called into existence by the Industrial Revolution as a centre of heavy industry, partly thanks to its location on the Lancashire coalfield, and it became a major centre for pharmaceuticals and glassmaking. Pilkington Glass is still a big employer in St Helens but no longer has the dominance it once did; the company was taken over by a Japanese firm in 2006, and some of its St Helens factories have since ceased production. This includes the Cowley Hill works to the north of the town centre, which is now being redeveloped.

The Moss Bank ward has a fairly unremarkable census return, except that it just squeaks into the top 100 wards in England and Wales for Christianity (79.7%). This is a feature of the census return for north-west England; lapsed Christians, particularly lapsed Catholics, in this region are much more likely to put their old religion down on the census form than lapsed Christians elsewhere in the country. Of the 98 wards with a higher Christian percentage than Moss Bank, 95 are in north-west England including all of the top 20. 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.The big prize in the South West will be the election to Somerset county council, which will become the unitary council for Somerset in 2023 when the districts under it are abolished. This last went to the polls in 2017 when the Conservatives won a large majority — 35 seats, against 12 Lib Dems, 3 Labour, 3 independents and 2 Greens. The county council is doubling in size this year, so multiply those figures by 2 for a par score. This Conservative majority is large but not particularly strong, and there are a lot of marginal divisions here. That’s not a majority which bodes well for this by-election, which — like the last Batley East by-election — has come out of the Councillors Behaving Badly file. The Councillor Behaving Badly here is Fazila Loonat, who was first elected in 2016 (under her previous surname of Fadia) and re-elected in 2021. What did for Loonat was the same thing that did for the Labour MP Fiona Onasanya and the Lib Dem MP Chris Huhne — lying about a speeding offence.

Five of the six Green district councillors represent either Hythe Rural ward, all of which is within this division, or Hythe ward. Dymchurch is covered by Romney Marsh ward, which returned the two UKIP councillors. They are still in that party. UKIP aren’t dead yet, you know. 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. At the time of writing the Wikipedia entry for Penmaen states that the ward is represented on Caerphilly council by two Plaid Cymru councillors, a statement which is more than a decade out of date. In fact Penmaen has been in Labour hands since 2012, and the Labour slate was re-elected last year with a 64–36 lead over Plaid Cymru in a straight fight. Those two parties are the only parties represented on Caerphilly council, which has a large Labour majority with Plaid and independent councillors in opposition. 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.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. The timeline means that it may be difficult for the Labour party to turn that lead into significant gains this time. The Labour party are defending over half of the seats up for election this year, and a large proportion of this set of elections is Greater London where Labour performed particularly well at the last local elections in 2018. Additionally, the big Conservative lead in the 2021 local elections turned into major gains in the rotational councils, and with those seats now in the bank for the Conservatives until 2024 the opposition parties will have to do just as well, in the other direction, to make significant headway. 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. St Helens is the smallest of England’s 36 metropolitan boroughs in terms of council size, with a total of 48 councillors. All of them were up for re-election in May with new ward boundaries being introduced; this resulted in an increased Labour majority with 35 council seats against 4 Lib Dems and three seats each for the Conservatives, Greens and independents. Moss Bank ward was left almost untouched by the boundary changes so we can read its political history over quite a long period: it was a safe Lib Dem ward until the Merseyside Lib Dem vote evaporated in 2010 on the formation of the Coalition, and has been a safe Labour ward since then. In May the Labour slate polled 52% here with the Conservatives and Lib Dems on 17% each.

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