Previewing the four council by-elections of 15th May 2025
"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"
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Four by-elections on 15th May 2025:
Whetstone
Barnet council, London; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Liron Velleman.
We'll start the week in the high ground of outer London. Long since swallowed up into the urban sprawl of the Great Wen, Whetstone lies on the old Great North Road (here called the High Road) around eight miles north of Charing Cross: it's in between the High Barnet branch of the Northern Line and the East Coast Main Line, which are respectively the western and eastern boundaries of this ward. The Northern line station at Totteridge and Whetstone (opened in 1872 and transferred to the Underground in 1940) and the mainline station at Oakleigh Park (opened in 1873 to serve a housing development of that name) connect the ward to central London.
In the dictionary, a "whetstone" is defined as a stone for sharpening knives. In this corner of North London, the eponymous Whetstone is a stone of some antiquity which lies outside the Griffin pub on the High Road and which was probably used in centuries past as a mounting block. It's located diagonally opposite Barnet House, a 12-storey modernist office block which was built in 1966 as the head office of the battery manufacturers Ever Ready. Barnet House subsequently served from 1986 to 2019 as the main office building for Barnet council, and it is now being converted into housing.
This is a middle-class area which is now part of a Labour-held council and constituency: it's covered by the Chipping Barnet parliamentary seat, gained last year from the Conservatives by Labour MP Dan Tomlinson, while Labour have a majority on Barnet council. But Whetstone would have voted strongly for Margaret Thatcher when she was the local MP back in the day.
Whetstone ward was created in 2022 from territory which was previously in Oakleigh ward or Totteridge ward, and both of these were safe Conservative areas. Totteridge was the powerbase of Conservative councillor and controversy magnet Brian Coleman, who represented Barnet and Camden on the London Assembly from 2000 to 2012. After losing his Assembly seat amid criticism of the amount he was spending on taxi fares, Coleman was then thrown out of the Conservative party following an assault conviction; he stood for re-election to Barnet council in 2014 as an independent candidate but polled only 6%. Before his fall from grace Coleman had assiduously forged strong links with the area's Jewish and Greek Cypriot communities: Whetstone ward is 9.1% Jewish and has 1.75% of residents born in Cyprus or Malta, both of which rank among the top 40 wards in England and Wales.
So perhaps it helped that Labour nominated a slate of two Jewish candidates here for the inaugural Whetstone ward election in 2022. Ella Rose and Liron Velleman, who defeated the Conservative slate by 51-36, were both heavily involved in the Jewish Labour Movement: Rose is its national vice-chair, while Velleman (who is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor) had been an organiser for the JLM alongside his day job as head of politics for the Community union.
However, Velleman quit both the council and his job in April in rather mysterious circumstances, shortly after his party affiliation on Barnet council's website had changed from Labour to independent. It's not clear whether he jumped from the party or was pushed, and despite mutterings at the time from the Conservative group that Velleman had been forced to resign "under a cloud of darkness" no further details appear to have come into the public domain at the time of writing.
Defending this seat for Labour is Ezra Cohen who is fighting his first election campaign. The Conservatives have reselected Tom Smith, who was a councillor for the predecessor Oakleigh ward from 2018 to 2022 and was runner-up here three years ago. Last time the Greens were the only other party to stand in Whetstone ward, but this by-election has attracted a much larger field with Charli Thompson nominated for the Green Party, Luigi Bille for the Lib Dems, Richard Hewison for Rejoin EU, Martin Hudson for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, independent candidate Brian Ingram who will be hoping for an improvement on the 20 votes he polled in the last Barnet council by-election (in Finchley Church End ward in March), and Adrian Kitching for Reform UK.
Parliamentary constituency: Chipping Barnet
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: EN5, N12, N20
Luigi Bille (LD)
Ezra Cohen (Lab)
Richard Hewison (Rejoin EU)
Martin Hudson (TUSC)
Brian Ingram (Ind)
Adrian Kitching (RUK)
Tom Smith (C)
Charli Thompson (Grn)
May 2022 result Lab 1898/1625 C 1336/1308 Grn 456
Previous results in detail
Acle
Broadland council, Norfolk; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Lana Hempsall.
Our rural by-election today comes in the Norfolk Broads. The market town of Acle lies on the main road and railway line between Norwich and Great Yarmouth, roughly halfway in between them. It is located at the only crossing-point of the River Bure between Great Yarmouth and Wroxham, and the town also lies at the western end of the Acle Straight - an arrow-straight road across the marshland which was built in 1831 and remains today the only road link to Great Yarmouth from the west.
In the 2021 census Acle ward, which has the same boundaries as Acle parish, made the top 100 wards in England and Wales for residents aged 85 or over (6.6%) and registered a large retired population. Until recently this would have suggested a true-blue demographic, and this is borne out by Acle's recent election results. The ward is part of the Broadland and Fakenham parliamentary seat which has been represented since 2019 by Conservative MP Jerome Mayhew, son of the former Northern Ireland secretary Patrick Mayhew.
The Acle ward of Broadland council and the larger Acle division of Norfolk county council have consistently returned the Conservative candidate over the last two decades, although the outgoing district councillor Lana Hempsall won by just one vote over an independent candidate when she was first elected to Broadland council in 2011. Her majority in 2023 was only a little more comfortable, at 47-42 over Labour. The Conservatives lost control of Broadland council that year, and a Lib Dem-led traffic-light coalition is now in control.
Lana Hempsall has also been the Norfolk county councillor for Acle since 2021, and she has stood twice for Parliament as a Conservative candidate (contesting Denton and Reddish in 2015 and Norwich South in 2017). She has held cabinet positions on both the county council and Broadland council, and she has recently drawn on her professional experience in the energy sector to co-found a think tank called "Conservatives in Energy". Add all this to Hempsall's charitable work with Guide Dogs for the Blind (she is herself partially sighted), and one suspects that there simply weren't enough hours in the day to do everything: she has resigned her Broadland council seat but remains on the county council at least for the time being. Norfolk is one of the counties which had their scheduled elections this year postponed, so Hempsall's county seat will be up for re-election next year.
Before then we have a district council by-election which is defended for the Conservatives by local resident Vincent Tapp: he is a former Broadland councillor, who represented Wroxham ward from 2015 to 2019 when he stood down. Labour have reselected Emma Covington, who is a teacher, following her near-miss here in 2023. Also standing are Philip Matthew for the Lib Dems, Peter Carter for the Greens and Jimmi Lee for Reform UK.
Parliamentary constituency: Broadland and Fakenham
Norfolk county council division: Acle
ONS Travel to Work Area: Norwich
Postcode district: NR13
Peter Carter (Grn)
Emma Covington (Lab)
Jimmi Lee (RUK)
Philip Matthew (LD)
Vincent Tapp (C)
May 2023 result C 395 Lab 357 LD 91
May 2019 result C 422 Lab 243 LD 130
May 2015 result C 844 Lab 356 UKIP 343
May 2011 result C 408 Ind 407 Lab 196 LD 74
May 2007 result C 595 LD 133 Lab 110
June 2004 result C 482 Ind 224 LD 143 Lab 126
Previous results in detail
Birches Head and Northwood
Stoke-on-Trent council, Staffordshire; caused by the disqualification of Labour councillor Steve Blakemore.
We now travel to the Six Towns of the Potteries, which fused together in the kiln of local government reorganisation in 1910 to create the city of Stoke-on-Trent. But Stoke itself is primarily the railhead and administrative centre of the Potteries: the commercial centre has always been Hanley, which was a county borough of its own before the Federation.
Birches Head and Northwood is one of the modern wards which cover Hanley: Northwood lies immediately to the east of the city centre, with the more isolated estate of Birches Head further out. The ward also includes Central Forest Park, a large area of green space on the site of the former Hanley Deep Pit which was opened by Elizabeth II in 1973. This park is claimed to have Europe's largest "street style skate park", although one suspects that the late Queen might not have tried that out herself.
Central Forest Park was namechecked on the Six Towns' ward map until 2023, when a boundary review renamed "Birches Head and Central Forest Park" to "Birches Head and Northwood" with minimal boundary changes. Since the previous ward was drawn up in 2011 this area has been fought over in local elections between Labour and the City Independents group, who ran Stoke-on-Trent in coalition with the Conservatives from 2015 until the Tories dumped their coalition partners and started to rule alone in 2020. The 2023 Stoke elections saw Labour gain overall control of the city with the City Independents reduced to one seat, and Birches Head and Northwood was part of the Labour majority: vote shares here two years ago were 44% for Labour, 32% for the City Independents and 20% for the Conservatives. In the 2024 general election the Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency was a Labour gain from the Conservatives, with Gareth Snell recovering the seat which he had won in a 2017 by-election and lost in 2019; second place in the seat last year went to Reform UK.
Top of the poll here in 2023 was Labour candidate Steve Blakemore, who is associated with the Unite union. At the time Blakemore worked for a company called Unitas, which was responsible for repairs and maintenance to Stoke's council house stock and public buildings. Unitas was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the city council, but following changes in housing law the council cabinet decided last year that this service should be brought back in-house. Accordingly Blakemore became a council employee, via the magic of TUPE, at the start of April. This by-election is a direct consequence of that transfer of employment, because Blakemore's new status as a Stoke council employee disqualifies him from being a Stoke councillor.
Defending the resulting by-election for Labour is Maggie Bradley, who has previously served as a Stoke-on-Trent councillor albeit some years ago: she represented Stoke West ward from 1996 to 1999 and Hanley Green (the predecessor to this ward) from 1999 to 2002 under her former surname of McQuillan. Another candidate with a long history here is the City Independents' Jean Bowers, who has served twice as Lord Mayor of Stoke: Bowers was first elected as a Liberal Democrat councillor for Hanley Green ward in 2000, she represented Northwood and Birches Head ward for that party from 2002 to 2011 and she then served from 2015 to 2023 as a City Independents councillor for Birches Head and Central Forest Park. The Conservatives have selected Khawar Ali, who had a poor outing at the last Stoke-on-Trent by-election in Meir North ward last May and will be hoping for better this time. And completing the ballot paper is Reform UK's Luke Shenton, who finished as runner-up when he was the party's parliamentary candidate for Stoke-on-Trent Central last year.
Parliamentary constituency: Stoke-on-Trent Central
ONS Travel to Work Area: Stoke-on-Trent
Postcode districts: ST1, ST2
Khawar Ali (C)
Jean Bowers (City Ind)
Maggie Bradley (Lab)
Luke Shenton (RUK)
May 2023 result Lab 957/830 City Ind 694/509 C 432/412 Grn 98
Previous results in detail
Clydebank Waterfront
West Dunbartonshire council; caused by the resignation of Scottish National Party councillor James McElhill.
Our last poll this week is north of the Border, in a town which previously featured in this column last June. On that occasion we covered the Clydebank Central ward of West Dunbartonshire council; now it's time to look at the other Clydebank ward, Clydebank Waterfront. Which means taking a trip through the town's rather short history.
The story begins in the 1870s when J & G Thomson's shipyard in the Glasgow suburb of Govan was compulsorily purchased by the Clyde Navigation Trustees, who wanted those premises for new quays. Forced to find a new home, Thomson's found a new location to work from a few miles downstream. Their chosen site was on the north bank of the Clyde, close to the main Glasgow-Dumbarton road and to the Forth and Clyde Canal. Work on the new shipyard started in 1871.
Initially Thomson's arranged to literally ship its workers to and from their homes in Govan by paddle steamer, but before too long a small town had grown up around the growing Clyde Bank shipyard. In 1882 the railways came to Thomson's works, and in the same year construction started on something even bigger just half a mile away. When it opened in 1884, the 46-acre Singer plant was the largest sewing-machine factory in the world, with its 7,000 employees turning out 13,000 sewing machines every week. In 1886 the residents of this town successfully joined the local government map with the creation of a police burgh: the new town took the name of Clydebank, after the shipyard which had created it.
J & J Thomson's shipyard was bought out in 1899 by John Brown and Company, which had previously been a Sheffield steelmaking firm that supplied a large amount of armourplating for warships. Brown's quickly picked up high-profile orders not just for the Royal Navy but also for the Cunard Line: the ill-fated RMS Lusitania was the largest ship ever built when she was launched from John Brown's shipyard on 7th June 1906, the building of the original RMSs Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth kept the Clydebank yard in operation during the lean years between the two wars, while notable vessels constructed at John Brown's shipyard after the Second World War include the former royal yacht HMY Britannia and the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2. The QE2 was the last passenger ship built at Clydebank: John Brown's was one of the five Glasgow yards which merged into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1968, but shipbuilding here ceased after that consortium went bust in 1971. After this the Clydebank yard was used to construct North Sea oil rigs before finally closing in 2000. The massive Titan crane, which appears on the Clydesdale Bank £5 note alongside a portrait of William Arrol whose firm built it in 1907, has survived the wrecking ball and is now a tourist attraction.
Further down the Clyde there was an even larger shipyard at Dalmuir, built in 1900 by William Beardmore and Company, which had rather shakier finances and went bust in 1930 despite an attempt to diversify into making railway locomotives. In 1939 the former Beardmore site was bought by the Ministry of Supply and became ROF Dalmuir, making anti-aircraft guns for the war effort and armoured vehicles thereafter. Part of its site is now occupied by the Golden Jubilee University National Hospital, which was built as a private hospital in 1994 but is now run by the NHS.
Old Kilpatrick, located yet further downstream, was the western terminus of the Antonine Wall in the second century and was home to yet another shipyard in the twentieth century. This yard, run by Napier and Miller, likewise did not survive the Great Depression. The village of Old Kilpatrick now lies in the shadow of the Erskine Bridge, a cable-stayed structure which was opened in 1971 by Princess Anne and is the lowest fixed crossing of the Clyde.
All this industry made Clydebank an obvious target for enemy action in the Second World War, and on the nights of 13th and 14th March 1941 the Luftwaffe conducted two massive bombing raids on the town which left only eight houses undamaged in the whole of Clydebank. Around 1,200 people died and 35,000 were left homeless. The Polish naval vessel ORP Piorun, under repair at John Brown's at the time, did its bit for the town's defence by firing its guns at the enemy aircraft; Piorun's captain Eugeniusz Pławski subsequently confirmed his reputation for bravery by engaging the much-larger Bismarck in battle a couple of months later and getting away with it. Many of the Piorun's crew settled in Clydebank after the war was over, including the ship's last survivor Richard Polanski who died here in 2022.
Since this is the internet and there is nothing which cannot be improved by a cat picture, we should mention that the ORP Piorun had two ship's cats, Żaba and Tygrys, seen here in 1940 meeting a stowaway from another vessel. And there was also the ship's kitten Spitzky, who was nearly washed overboard during the battle with the Bismarck, seen here courtesy of the archives of the Imperial War Museum.
Clydebank is now the north-west corner of Glasgow's built-up area, but it has never been incorporated into the city. The local authority here is West Dunbartonshire council, which combines the Clydebank area with the town of Dumbarton further down the estuary, the Vale of Leven to the north of Dumbarton, and the southern shore of Loch Lomond. All the communication links between Dumbarton and Glasgow run through Clydebank, including two commuter railway lines which merge together at Dalmuir station; Yoker, Clydebank and Kilpatrick stations also lie within the ward boundary.
The stereotype of "Red Clydeside" has its roots here in Clydebank thanks to a major strike at the Singer factory in 1911, when 10,000 or more of Singer's workers walked out in support of twelve female colleagues who had come out very badly from a workplace reorganisation. Singer's subsequently sacked all of the strike organisers and other trade unionist troublemakers, including one Arthur McManus who went on to become the first chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain and - some years later - was allegedly one of the writers of the notorious Zinoviev letter. Ever since then Clydebank's politics has had a decidedly left-wing bent.
The Labour party have won two of the four seats for Clydebank Waterfront ward at every election since the ward was created in 2007, and this helped Labour to win an overall majority on West Dunbartonshire council in the 2012 and 2022 elections despite the use of proportional representation. In three of the four elections to date to this ward, the other two seats went to the Scottish National Party: the exception to this pattern was 2012 when outgoing Labour councillor Marie McNair sought re-election as an independent candidate and won, knocking out SNP councillor Jim McElhill.
McNair then joined the SNP and was re-elected on their ticket in 2017, before she went on to greater things by being elected in 2021 as the SNP MSP for Clydebank and Milngavie. She stood down from the council in 2022 and successfully passed her seat on to returning SNP candidate Jim McElhill who topped the poll and was elected on the first count. This by-election is to replace McElhill, who has stood down on health grounds. The SNP had an absolute majority of votes cast in this ward in 2022, leading Labour 52-37; as stated, the use of proportional representation meant that the ward's four seats split between two SNP councillors (McElhill and Lauren Oxley) and two Labour councillors (Daniel Lennie and June McKay).
As stated Labour won an outright majority on West Dunbartonshire council in May 2022, with 12 seats against 9 for the SNP and one for the West Dunbartonshire Community Party. The latter seat is held by long-serving left-wing councillor Jim Bollan, who had previously been one of the few elected representatives for the Scottish Socialist Party. Following the 2022 elections Labour councillor Douglas McAllister was elected as the council's Provost, a position similar to a ceremonial mayor in England and Wales but with a longer term and with more of an expectation of political leadership. He then went on to greater things in his turn in July 2024 by being elected as the Labour MP for West Dunbartonshire, gaining his seat from the SNP, and he resigned his council seat in Kilpatrick ward to concentrate on his duties in London.
This set off a bizarre series of events. McAllister's resignation meant that West Dunbartonshire needed a new Provost, and the Labour leadership put forward Michelle McGinty for the role. She is a councillor for Leven ward which covers Alexandria, Renton and other locations in the Vale of Leven north of Dumbarton. This selection annoyed the two Labour councillors for Clydebank Waterfront ward, apparently on the grounds that they felt Clydebank was being overlooked, and Daniel Lennie and June McKay both quit the Labour group and went independent.
When the meeting to elect a new Provost came around in August 2024, Lennie and McKay voted for the SNP's nominee Karen Murray Conaghan who was elected by 12 votes to 10. This changed the balance of power on the council, because the Provost has the casting vote in the event of a tie. The Labour administration concluded from this from they had lost the confidence of the council, so the council leader Martin Rooney resigned and invited the SNP to take over the administration. However, the SNP declined to do so after concluding that they did not have the numbers to run the council, and so Labour are now back in control as a minority. The Kilpatrick ward by-election was subsequently held by Labour in November 2024.
A Labour gain in this by-election would give them half of the seats on the council, but it looks like a tall order. As stated, the SNP had a 52-37 lead over Labour on first preferences in 2022; if we rerun the count for a single vacancy, then the SNP's Jim McElhill would defeat Labour's Daniel Lennie 55-45 after transfers. Labour did overturn that sort of lead to successfully defend a by-election in Clydebank Central ward last June, but their national polling in Scotland has fallen back since then.
Defending for the Scottish National Party is Kevin Crawford, who drew on his experience of adjusting to life with a disability to set up a local disability charity in 2018. The Labour candidate Maureen McGlinchey is a retired headteacher who chairs a charity supporting local victims of asbestos. Also standing are Brian Walker for the Conservatives, Andrew Muir for the Scottish Family Party, Eryn Browning who is on the ballot as the Scottish Greens candidate but has been disendorsed by that party due to sexual misconduct allegations, Kristopher Duncan for Alba, David Smith for Reform UK and Cameron Stewart for the Liberal Democrats. Votes at 16 and the Alternative Vote apply here.
Westminster constituency: West Dunbartonshire
Holyrood constituency: Clydebank and Milngavie
ONS Travel to Work Area: Glasgow
Postcode districts: G13, G14, G60, G81
Eryn Browning (Grn)
Kevin Crawford (SNP)
Kristopher Duncan (Alba)
Maureen McGlinchey (Lab)
Andrew Muir (Scottish Family Party)
David Smith (RUK)
Cameron Stewart (LD)
Brian Walker (C)
May 2022 first preferences SNP 2456 Lab 1757 C 362 Scottish Family Party 121
May 2017 first preferences SNP 2438 Lab 1569 C 531 Ind 292 Ind 146 Ind 42
Previous results in detail
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Andrew Teale