Previewing the five council by-elections of 23rd January 2025
"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"
Five by-elections, for six seats, on 23rd January 2025:
Shetland North
Shetland Islands council, Scotland; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Tom Morton.
Three of our five polls today take place north of the Border, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're in Scotland. It took quite a long time for the Scottish mainland to control all of the offshore islands, and the Shetland archipelago only came into Scottish hands in 1472 in lieu of a dowry for Margaret of Denmark, James III's queen. The islands' culture is still more Nordic than Scottish, and the flag of Shetland is a white Nordic cross on a blue background.
The Shetland North ward covers the northern end of Mainland, the main Shetland island. Mainland's coast is deeply indented, and the Northmavine peninsula is joined to the rest of the island by a 90-metre wide isthmus at Mavis Grind, the only place in the UK where you can throw a stone from the North Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. The ward also includes the island of Muckle Roe, which is connected to Mainland by a bridge over the Atlantic. Nearby is the village of Brae, which is the only settlement in North ward of any size and is home to one of Shetland's two secondary schools, but still has a population of only around 750. Ferries to the island of Yell depart from Toft, on the east coast of the ward.
The map of Shetland North ward includes a large expanse of seawater in Yell Sound and its western arm of Sullom Voe. Which brings us to the beating economic heart of this ward - the North Sea oil industry. The seas between Shetland and Norway form Europe's largest oil field, and when this was first being developed in the 1970s all the oil companies wanted to build their own terminal on Shetland to handle the incoming black gold. This was locally controversial, and Zetland County Council, which was then the local authority, obtained an Act of Parliament in 1974 which allowed it to force the oil companies to work together and build a single terminal. The result of that was the Sullom Voe oil terminal, officially opened by Elizabeth II in 1981, to which oil from the Brent and Ninian fields arrives by pipeline. It is one of the largest oil terminals in Europe, and its business rates have made the Shetland Islands Council rather wealthy by local government standards. The Zetland County Council Act 1974 also conferred harbour rights on the council, which is why the waters of Sullom Voe and the western part of Yell Sound are considered to lie within the Shetland North ward boundary.
The Shetland Islands form the majority of the Orkney and Shetland parliamentary constituency, which has been in Liberal and then Liberal Democrat hands since Jo Grimond's first election in 1950. Orkney and Shetland only has around half of the electorate of the average Westminster seat, but it is exempt from rules on headcount due to its remoteness. Alistair Carmichael, the chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee, has been in situ here since 2001 which makes him the longest-serving Scottish MP and the longest-serving Liberal Democrat MP. Shetland is its own constituency in the Scottish Parliament, where it has been represented since a 2019 by-election (Andrew’s Previews 2019, page 260) by Lib Dem MSP Beatrice Wishart.
The Shetland Islands council, on the other hand, is a generally non-partisan body and independent councillors have always held a large majority. In the May 2022 elections 19 out of 23 seats went to independent candidates, with the other four being split equally between the Greens, the SNP, Labour and a vacancy in North Isles ward where only two candidates had come forward for the three available seats. The returning officer reopened nominations, and an independent was elected in the resulting North Isles by-election for the council's 23rd seat (Andrew’s Previews 2022, page 361). There was also not much interest in Shetland North ward, where outgoing independent councillors Emma Macdonald and Andrea Manson sought re-election, independent councillor Alastair Cooper decided to retire, and only one other candidate came forward: that was Tom Morton, who was the first candidate nominated in this century by the Shetland branch of the Labour Party. As there were three candidates for the three available seats, Macdonald, Manson and Morton were declared elected unopposed. Following the election, Emma Macdonald became leader of the council.
Tom Morton is apparently notable enough for Wikipedia. He is a broadcaster and journalist who used to present a show on BBC Radio Scotland while editing Shetland Life magazine. Morton has also written a number of books on food and drink, one of which - on Shetland's culinary delights - was co-written with his son James who was a finalist on the 2012 series of Great British Bake Off. One wonders whether Morton actually expected to be elected as a Shetland Islands councillor, and after he stepped down in October he wrote an article for the Shetland News expressing some disillusionment with how the council is run.
One also suspects that the Labour party's Shetland branch isn't their most effective local party. In last year's Westminster elections the Labour candidate for Orkney and Shetland was actually from faraway Edinburgh - more on that story later - and Shetland Labour have yet to poll a single vote in a Shetland council election this century, given that Tom Morton was elected without a contest. And there is no defending Labour candidate in this by-election to succeed Morton, so we have a free-for-all!
Morton's seat will go to one of two independent candidates. Natasha Cornick, who lives in Mossbank on the east coast, is vice-chair of the NHS Shetland health board; Andrew Hall, who gives an address in Brae, has worked for many years in the council's finance department. This by-election is a straight fight between them.
Westminster constituency: Orkney and Shetland
Holyrood constituency: Shetland Islands
ONS Travel to Work Area: Shetland Islands
Postcode district: ZE2
Natahsa Cornick (Ind)
Andrew Hall (Ind)
May 2022 result 2Ind/1Lab unopposed
Previous results in detail
Bannockburn
Stirling council, Scotland; caused by the death of Labour councillor Margaret Brisley.
The status of the Shetland Islands as Scottish might be debatable to some extent, but there is no such uncertainty when it comes to Bannockburn. This name has gone down in history as the site of a 1314 battle, in which heavily-outnumbered Scottish forces under King Robert the Bruce defeated an English invasion force led by King Edward II, who narrowly escaped with his life. Edward's forces were sent homeward to think again, while Robert's victory consolidated both the status of Scotland as an independent kingdom and his own place on its throne.
Eight centuries on, Bannockburn is now a suburb at the southern end of Stirling, located on the main road towards Edinburgh which crosses the Bannock Burn by a distinctive circular-arch bridge - the work of Thomas Telford. The ward also takes in the villages of Fallin on the south bank of the Forth, and Cowie and Plean to the south. These were all pit villages, and Polmaise Colliery - Fallin's mine - was said to be the pit where the miners were the first to go out and the last to return work during the strike of the 1980s.
That mining heritage meant that the modern Bannockburn ward was a Labour stronghold when it was first contested in 2007, although proportional representation meant that the SNP were able to win one out of three seats. Since then two of the ward's three councillors have been Labour figure Margaret Brisley, until her death last year, and Alasdair Macpherson who was originally an SNP figure but was most recently re-elected as an independent.
In 2007 Bannockburn's third seat went to Labour's Gerard O'Brien, who subsequently earned himself a place in the Councillors Behaving Badly file for his disrespectful behaviour towards officials in the council's planning department. Following repeated complaints, O'Brien was eventually disqualified and ejected from the council in 2009 by the Standards Commission for Scotland, which enforces the code of conduct for Scottish councillors. (Its English equivalent disappeared in the Cameron-era bonfire of the quangos.) The resulting by-election in April 2009 narrowly returned Labour candidate Violet Weir. She lost her seat in 2017 to the SNP's Maureen Bennison, who retired in 2022 and passed her seat on to her party colleague Brian Hambly. Shares of the vote in 2022 were 29% for the SNP, 26% for outgoing SNP councillor Macpherson who was re-elected as an independent, 21% for Labour and 19% for the Conservatives. whose unsuccessful candidate Stuart McLuckie appeared in this column last August when he contested one of the several recent by-elections in Dunblane and Bridge of Allan ward (Andrew’s Previews 2024, forthcoming).
Overall the 2022 Stirling council elections returned 8 SNP councillors, 7 Conservatives, 6 Labour, 1 Green and Macpherson, giving a left-wing majority and a Unionist majority. Labour, who tick both of those boxes, formed a minority administration despite being the third-largest group on the council, under Chris Kane as leader.
Bannockburn is the part of the Westminster and Holyrood constituencies based on Stirling. The Scottish Parliament seat last polled in 2021 when it was held by the new SNP candidate Evelyn Tweed. The Westminster seat of Stirling and Strathallan, on the other hand, ended up as a very impressive Labour gain in last year's election, with Chris Kane making the step up from council leader to MP. He subsequently resigned from the council, and the Scottish National Party gained his seat in Stirling East ward - which borders Bannockburn - at the resulting by-election last month (Andrew’s Previews 2024, forthcoming).
In the meantime Chris Kane had passed the Stirling council leadership on to his Labour colleague Margaret Brisley, who was a political veteran. Brisley was first elected to the old Stirling District Council all the way back in 1980, giving her 44 years of unbroken service in local government which culminated in her election as council leader in September 2024. Unfortunately, Margaret Brisley didn't get long to make her mark in that role: she died in October 2024 after a short illness, aged 79.
Stirling council is yet to elect a new leader following Brisley's death, which perhaps reflects some uncertainty about whether the Labour minority administration remains viable; if Labour lose the Bannockburn by-election, they will be down to just four councillors. Labour were in third place in this ward in 2022, and a single-seat election here would have gone to independent Alasdair Macpherson by 55-45 over the SNP. On the other hand, Macpherson won't be on the ballot this time; if we redistribute his preferences, then Labour would have a 51-49 lead over the SNP after transfers.
High stakes, then, for the defending Labour candidate Yvonne Dickson who works for the council as a website manager. The SNP candidate is Bob Buchanan. Standing for the Conservative is Moira Benny, who was the party's Westminster candidate for Dunfermline and West Fife back in 2019; she works at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Completing the Bannockburn ballot are Marie Stadtler for the Scottish Greens, William Galloway for the Lib Dems and William Docherty for Reform UK.
Westminster constituency: Stirling and Strathallan
Holyrood constituency: Stirling
ONS Travel to Work Area: Falkirk and Stirling
Postcode districts: FK2, FK5, FK6, FK7
Moira Benny (C)
Bob Buchanan (SNP)
Yvonne Dickson (Lab)
William Docherty (RUK)
William Galloway (LD)
Marie Stadtler (Grn)
May 2022 result SNP 1055 Ind 955 Lab 762 C 702 Grn 87 LD 77 Scottish Family Party 41
May 2017 result SNP 1589 Lab 1108 C 640 Grn 104 LD 62
Previous results in detail
Colinton/Fairmilehead
Edinburgh council, Scotland; a double by-election caused by the resignations of Scottish National Party councillor Marco Biagi and Liberal Democrat councillor Louise Spence.
We now come to two wards in rather middle-class suburbs of big cities. Let's start with Fairmilehead, a very expensive suburb of Edinburgh which is the first part of the city that those driving along the road from Biggar will see. To the west of this lies the Oxgangs area and Colinton itself, which lies on the Water of Leith, while to the south of Edinburgh City Bypass the land rises steeply into the Pentland Hills. Allermuir Hill, a summit of 493 metres, lies on the ward and city boundary.
The ward includes the Merchiston Castle boys' boarding school and two large military barracks, Dreghorn and Redford - although these are scheduled for closure later this decade. Redford Barracks is home among other things to the British Army's smallest unit, the Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming, while troops stationed at Dreghorn include the Band of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.
Almost all of this ward is part of the Edinburgh Pentlands constituency in the Scottish Parliament, whose previous MSPs include the former Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray and the former Scottish Conservative leader David McLetchie. Since 2011 the MSP here has been Gordon MacDonald of the SNP. But at Westminster level Colinton/Fairmilehead has Labour MPs. Fairmilehead is part of the Edinburgh South constituency which has been in Labour hands continuously since 1987, and whose MP Ian Murray now sits in Cabinet as the Scottish secretary. Colinton and Oxgangs are covered by Edinburgh South West, where Labour candidate Scott Arthur defeated the SNP's Joanna Cherry in July.
Scott Arthur was previously a professor at Heriot-Watt University as well as being an Edinburgh city councillor, where he had represented Colinton/Fairmilehead ward since 2017. He won his seat narrowly that year, needing Lib Dem transfers to overtake the SNP in the final count, but he was re-elected in 2022 at the top of the poll with 33% of the first preferences. The Conservatives had 30%, the SNP 17% and the Lib Dems 12%, with the ward's three seats splitting evenly between the top three parties - a poor return for the Conservatives, who had won two out of three in 2007-17 but lost their second seat to former SNP MSP Marco Biagi.
Edinburgh's local politics is very fragmented, with all five Holyrood parties having large council groups. The 2022 elections returned 19 SNP councillors, 13 Labour, 12 Lib Dems, 10 Greens and 9 Conservatives; in a 2023 by-election the Lib Dems gained an SNP seat in Corstorphine/Murrayfield ward (Andrew’s Previews 2023, page 90).
There was then a further change in Colinton/Fairmilehead ward at a by-election just two months ago, after Scott Arthur MP resigned his Edinburgh council seat to concentrate on his council duties. Despite Labour running a high-profile candidate - the former Edinburgh East MP Sheila Gilmore - they were upset by a vigorous Liberal Democrat campaign centred around their local candidate Louise Spence, who had been runner-up here in 2022. On first preferences Spence polled 36%, the Conservatives 20%, Labour 19% and the SNP 11%. SNP transfers meant that Labour overtook the Conservatives and got into the final round, where Gilmore was trounced by Spence by a 65-35 margin (Andrew’s Previews 2024, forthcoming).
What happened next was ridiculous. Having won the by-election on 14th November with a campaign which strongly promoted the local credentials of their local candidate as a local champion who would be a local councillor for local people in Colinton/Fairmilehead, newly-elected councillor Louise Spence immediately put her house on the market, quit the Liberal Democrats, and tendered her resignation from the council after just a week in office. Rumour has it that she is now living in Dubai. Andrew's Previews has covered a few laughable council careers over the last decade and a half, and Spence's story is certainly up there with the best of them. Maybe I should start a Councillors Behaving Ludicrously file.
In the meantime, SNP councillor Marco Biagi had already forced a second by-election in Colinton/Fairmilehead ward when he tendered his resignation just after the November by-election had concluded. Biagi was the MSP for Edinburgh Central from 2011 to 2016, and he served on the Scottish Government frontbench for part of that term as a local government minister. (Incidentally, during his Holyrood term Biagi turned up to a quiz circuit event in his Edinburgh constituency, and he achieved a respectable score.) He has left Edinburgh council to go back to the centre of Scottish politics as a special adviser to John Swinney, the First Minister.
There will be a single by-election to fill both Biagi's and Spence's seats on the council, and to win one of the two available seats successful candidates in this poll will need to reach one-third of the vote - either on first preferences or by attracting transfers. Rerunning the last two elections here for two seats gives Labour/Conservative in 2022 and Lib Dem/Labour in 2024, so the SNP seat in particular looks in trouble while the Lib Dem defence may be hampered by the fallout from what happened here with their last candidate.
Nonetheless the Lib Dems were easily top of the poll last time and their defending candidate Peter Nicholson only needs to finish in the top two; he has recently retired from a twenty-year stint as editor of the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. The SNP defence is led by Mairianna Clyde, who finished fourth here in November's by-election; she has recently retired from being an academic at the Open University and she sits on Merchiston community council. Labour will want back the seat which they lost in November, not least because the Labour minority administration running Edinburgh is rather precarious, and they have changed candidate to Conor Savage who works in the finance sector. Savage is certainly well-travelled: he was the Labour parliamentary candidate for Orkney and Shetland last year, and back in 2017 while he was reading marine biology at Bangor University he was an unsuccessful Plaid Cymru candidate in the 2017 Gwynedd council elections (contesting Marchog ward in Bangor). Third place in November's by-election went to the Conservatives' Neil Cuthbert, who was also an unsuccessful candidate for this ward in 2022; he is back for another go. Last time we had 12 candidates on the ballot, and in fact most of them are back for another go: as well as the SNP's Clyde and the Conservatives' Cuthbert, we say hello again to Daniel Milligan of the Greens, Grant Lidster of Reform UK, independent candidates Mark Wilkinson and David Henry, Richard Lucas of the Scottish Family Party and independent candidates Mev Brown and Bonnie Prince Bob. They complete the ballot paper along with two new independent candidates, Nick Horing and Mark Ney-Party. Votes at 16 apply, and please remember to rank the candidates on your ballot paper in order of preference.
Westminster constituency: Edinburgh South West (most), Edinburgh South (eastern part)
Holyrood constituency: Edinburgh Pentlands (nearly all), Edinburgh Southern (Firrhill High School and Bradburn School)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Edinburgh
Postcode districts: EH10, EH13, EH14
Bonnie Prince Bob (Ind)
Mev Brown (Ind)
Mairianna Clyde (SNP)
Neil Cuthbert (C)
David Henry (Ind)
Nick Horing (Ind)
Grant Lidster (RUK)
Richard Lucas (Scottish Family Party)
Daniel Milligan (Grn)
Mark Ney-Party (Ind)
Peter Nicholson (LD)
Conor Savage (Lab)
Mark Wilkinson (Ind)
November 2024 by-election LD 2683 C 1454 Lab 1441 SNP 800 Grn 393 RUK 268 Ind 173 Ind 57 Scottish Family Party 51 Ind 50 Ind 22 Libertarian 9; top 3 LD 3096 Lab 1886 C 1676; final LD 3751 Lab 2055
May 2017 first preferences C 5662 SNP 2359 Lab 2343 LD 528 Grn 487
Previous results in detail
Much Woolton and Hunts Cross
Liverpool council, Merseyside; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Dave Aizlewood.
We now travel south into England for another ward in the south of a big city. Much Woolton and Hunts Cross are affluent southern suburbs of Liverpool, particularly so in the case of Woolton which has many connections with the early history of the Beatles. Most of the Beatles pilgrimage locations are in the neighbouring Woolton Village ward, but pilgrims will note that it's a rather leafy area.
Beyond the Woolton golf club to the south lies Hunts Cross, which is a rather more industrial area: the ward boundaries include the old Triumph Speke site, much of which is still in industrial use. Hunts Cross railway station is the southern terminus of the Merseyrail Northern line, and it also sees less frequent local trains towards Warrington and Manchester.
Much Woolton and Hunts Cross lie within the Liverpool Garston constituency which has returned Labour MP Maria Eagle to Parliament since 1997 with large majorities. Eagle is a long-standing Labour frontbencher who has served in the Blair, Brown and now the Starmer governments at junior ministerial level: she is currently at the Ministry of Defence, with responsibility for defence procurement and industry.
Woolton was the last Liverpool ward to return a Conservative councillor, but that was over 30 years ago now - the city has been a Tory-free zone since 1998, and the Conservative candidate here in 2023 finished last. It was the Liberal Democrats who evicted the Conservatives in this area, and in Liverpool council elections Much Woolton and Hunts Cross is still held by the Lib Dems. This ward was created in 2023 from territory which had previously been in Woolton ward or Allerton and Hunts Cross ward, and it returned the Lib Dem slate with a majority of 54-31 over Labour; that Labour slate included Carol Sung, outgoing Labour councillor for Croxteth ward, who lost her seat. Outgoing councillor Dave Aizlewood was first elected here in 2023, and he stood down from the council last month due to ill health.
Defending this seat for the Lib Dems is Josie Mullen, a retired teacher who is seeking to return to the city council after some years away: Mullen previously represented the Diddymen of Knotty Ash ward from 2004 to 2010, and before then she sat for Broadgreen ward from 2000 to 2004. Hoping to increase the Labour majority on Liverpool council is Tanya Blake, who appears to be a first-time candidate. Also standing are Michael Bates for the Green Party, Adam Marsden for the Conservatives and Adam Heatherington for Reform UK.
Parliamentary constituency: Liverpool Garston
ONS Travel to Work Area: Liverpool
Postcode districts: L24, L25, L26
Michael Bates (Grn)
Tanya Blake (Lab)
Adam Heatherington (RUK)
Adam Marsden (C)
Josie Mullen (LD)
May 2023 result LD 1933/1562 Lab 1132/843 Grn 383 C 161
Previous results in detail
Town
Newcastle-under-Lyme council, Staffordshire; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Wendy Brockie.
We finish for the week in a town which the locals would rather you did not bracket with the Potteries. Despite the fact that its boundary with nearby Stoke-on-Trent cannot be discerned on the ground, Newcastle-under-Lyme is not a pottery town. Its traditional industries were textiles and coal-mining, while the town also benefited from its position on the main road between Manchester and Birmingham.
The eponymous "new castle", of which no trace remains today, was founded here in the Anarchy of the 12th century. A market town grew up around it, which became prosperous and important enough to send two MPs to Parliament from 1354 onwards. The Newcastle-under-Lyme constituency has existed ever since, although it was reduced to one MP by the 1885 redistribution.
From 1906 until his elevation to the peerage in 1942 the MP here was Josiah Wedgwood IV, who served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the first Labour government. Wedgwood also served as mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1930-31 and he successfully fought off an attempt by Stoke-on-Trent to annex the town; s "postcard poll" of Newcastle's residents showed overwhelming opposition to this idea. Local government reorganisers, take note.
The Newcastle-under-Lyme constituency has continued in the Labour vein ever since Wedgwood's day, although it turned in a very close result in 2017 when Paul Farrelly was re-elected as the town's Labour MP by just 30 votes over the Conservatives, 21,124 to 21,094. Well, those were the declared figures; but in 2017 Newcastle-under-Lyme's electoral services department had been seen all its experienced full-time staff leave without being replaced, and the mix of consultants, secondees, temps, part-timers and agency workers who ended up trying to administer that election made a series of rookie errors which ended up costing at least 998 and probably more like 1,500 people their votes (Andrew's Previews 2017, page 374). If the Conservatives had applied to the Election Court, they would almost certainly have had the 2017 election here voided and rerun.
As it was, the Conservatives had to wait until 2019 for Aaron Bell to become the first Tory MP elected for Newcastle since 1880. Bell had come to politics from a career in the gambling industry with a side-hustle in TV quiz shows: he is the only person to have won both Only Connect and The Krypton Factor, and he was on the St John's, Oxford team which finished as runner-up in the 2000-01 series of University Challenge. One of his UC team-mates described Bell at the time as a "sport and politics guru, who would later vary between the brilliant and the inexplicable", which is not a bad summing-up of Bell's subsequent political career: a brilliant win in the 2019 general election was followed by what seemed to be an inexplicable last-minute retirement in 2024. Matters became clearer when in October 2024, after he had left the Commons, Bell was reprimanded by Parliament’s Independent Expert Panel over a 2023 incident of drunken sexual misconduct in the Strangers' Bar. The Conservatives could not defend Aaron Bell's seat following his retirement and Newcastle-under-Lyme now has a Labour MP again, with Adam Jogee successfully transferring here last year from his previous post on Haringey council.
The Conservatives, however, still dominate Newcastle in local government. The Tories won a clean sweep of Newcastle's county divisions at the 2021 Staffordshire county council elections. The borough council has been under Conservative leadership since 2017, when the previous Labour council leader Elizabeth Shenton was forced to resign over the mishandling of the 2017 general election here; the Tories initially took control with the support of independent councillors, but all the independent councillors then joined the party en masse in 2021 giving the Conservatives a council majority. This was confirmed by the electorate in 2022, when the 44 council seats split 25 to the Conservatives and 19 to Labour. Newcastle-under-Lyme has a non-standard electoral cycle, and there have been no council elections here since then.
Town ward, which surprisingly enough covers the town centre and is downwind of the notorious stench given off by the Walley's Quarry landfill site, has a noticeably younger demographic than the rest of Newcastle thanks to the presence of a large number of Keele University students. It has had a full slate of Labour councillors since 2013, when future council leader Elizabeth Shenton defected to the party from the Liberal Democrats - Shenton had previously been the Lib Dem candidate in the 2008 Crewe and Nantwich by-election. She left this ward in 2022 and her seat in Town ward was taken over by new Labour councillor Wendy Brockie; the Labour slate defeated the Conservatives 68-32 in a straight fight. Wendy Brockie tendered her resignation from Newcastle-under-Lyme council in November, one day before she would have been disqualified for not attending any council meetings in six months. In fact, the council actually declared Brockie's seat vacant under that rule before her resignation letter was found a few days later in a rarely-checked email folder.
Defending the resulting Town ward by-election for Labour is Sheelagh Casey-Hulme. The Conservatives' Elliott Lancaster, who has recently completed a PhD at Keele, was appointed MBE at a very young age in the 2023 New Year Honours list for "services to youth empowerment and sustainability in Staffordshire"; his work on these subjects has included developing an app to "enable people to report fly-tipping, check on bin collections, and find out more about recycling policies in their area". It's called "Utter Rubbish". (What you think of it so far?) Also on the ballot papers - which will hopefully be recycled in due course - are Nigel Jones for the Lib Dems and Neill Walker for Reform UK.
Parliamentary constituency: Newcastle-under-Lyme
Staffordshire county council division: Newcastle South (town centre and east of ward), Westlands and Thistleberry (south-west of ward), May Bank and Cross Heath (north-west of ward)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Stoke-on-Trent
Postcode districts: ST4, ST5, ST7
Sheelagh Casey-Hulme (Lab)
Nigel Jones (LD)
Elliott Lancaster (C)
Neill Walker (RUK)
May 2022 result Lab 665/644 C 309/303
May 2018 result Lab 659/654 C 248/219 Ind 181/97 LD 128/95
Previous results in detail
If you enjoyed these previews, there are many more like them - going back to 2016 - in the Andrew's Previews books, which are available to buy now (link) and would make an excellent Christmas present. You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale