Previewing the Stopsley, Luton by-election of 4th September 2025
"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"
Just one by-election on 4th September 2025:
Stopsley
Luton council, Bedfordshire; caused by the death of Liberal Democrat councillor David Wynn.
The schools are back for autumn and the traffic is back on the roads. Autumn is traditionally a busy time of year for by-elections, but this particular September is going to start off quietly with just one poll taking place today. And it's one that on previous form is not likely to see much excitement, but you never know what might happen in UK politics.
Our single by-election today takes place in Luton. Stopsley ward covers the suburbs of Stopsley and Putteridge in the north-east corner of the town, along the main road towards Hitchin; for travellers entering Luton along this road, Stopsley ward is the first part of the town they will encounter. This is mostly 20th-century housing which gets more desirable the further out of Luton you go., with Putteridge in particular having fairly high house prices and coming in among the least-deprived parts of Luton. Boundary changes for the 2023 election, which added a third councillor to Stopsley ward, brought in a more deprived area along Ashcroft Road to the south which is more typical of Luton as a whole.
The ward boundaries include Stopsley High School, which is designated as a specialist sports college. It certainly has the former pupils to suggest the school must be doing something right in this regard. Among the kids to have studied here in the past are Bruce Rioch, who started his football career with Luton Town before going on to win 24 caps for Scotland and a League winner's medal with Derby County; and the spin bowler Monty Panesar, who took 167 Test wickets in 50 games for England. Panesar subsequently had a short-lived foray into politics, announcing in April last year that he would stand in the 2024 general election as a Workers Party of Britain candidate before withdrawing a week later.
The late councillor David Wynn had stuck around in politics for rather longer than that, being first elected to Luton council in 2019 and serving until his unexpected death in June. He was deputy leader of the Lib Dem group on Luton council. Before settling in Luton Wynn's career had been in the engineering and computer industry, and he had first got involved in computers in the days when a single computer would take up most of a room while being much less powerful than the device you're probably reading this Preview on.
On expanded boundaries, Wynn was very easily re-elected for his second term in Stopsley ward in 2023 as the Lib Dem slate thrashed Labour by 78-22 in a straight fight. Despite the fact that Luton Conservative Club is located in this ward, the Tories didn't stand a single candidate here two years ago.
But Labour won the 2023 election in Luton overall with 30 seats against 15 Lib Dems and 3 Conservatives. The two also has two Labour MPs. Luton North is represented by Sarah Owen, who chairs the Commons women and equalities committee, while Rachel Hopkins is the MP for Luton South and South Bedfordshire. The 2024 parliamentary changes moved the pre-2023 Stopsley ward from Hopkins' seat into Owen's, a change which has left the redrawn ward divided between the two Luton constituencies.
Defending this seat for the Lib Dems is Matt Fry, a finance manager and business consultant who has held a Luton Town season ticket for over 50 years. He appears to be fighting his first election campaign as is the Labour candidate, Moazzem Hussain. This might be one of the safest Lib Dem wards in the land on paper, but this time it won't be a straight Lib Dem versus Labour fight: we also have on an all-male ballot Edward Carpenter for the Green Party, Jim Cohen for Reform UK, Roger Nichols for the Conservatives and independent candidate (and former Green Party figure) Marc Scheimann.
Parliamentary constituency: Luton North (most of ward), Luton South and South Bedfordshire (part added to ward in 2023)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Luton
Postcode district: LU2
Edward Carpenter (Grn)
Jim Cohen (RUK)
Matt Fry (LD)
Moazzem Hussain (Lab)
Roger Nichols (C)
Marc Scheimann (Ind)
May 2023 result LD 2185/2142/2137 Lab 629/596/593
Previous results in detail
Election Law Watch
Since it's a very slow week, we've time to look at one of the more bizarre stories to come out of this year's political silly season. It originates in the political machine of Reform UK, which is still showing its inexperience in navigating the more unusual corners of the electoral process.
Grateful thanks for this go to the journalists at the Inside Croydon blog, which had an exclusive (link) on Wednesday last week. The second election for Mayor of Croydon is coming up in May next year, and naturally enough Reform UK want to stand for this relatively high-profile and powerful post - Croydon is one of the largest London boroughs by population, and it's also been exceptionally badly run by the council's previous Labour leadership. So, earlier this year Reform UK's executive committee selected a candidate for their Croydon branch to rubber-stamp: one Sharon Carby, a 70-year-old woman from Bradford.
There was just one problem. Carby had died in September 2024.
Now, surprisingly, being dead is not explicitly listed in the UK's electoral law as something that disqualifies you from standing in an election. Instead, what stops the deceased from cluttering up your ballot paper is the same reason that Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion and that Lord Haw Haw was sent to the gallows for passport fraud. As with so many other things in life and death, it's the red tape that gets you in the end.
Specifically, in order to stand in an election you will need to fill in rather a lot of paperwork. One of the required forms is the "consent to nomination", in which would-be candidates have to make and sign a declaration saying that they agree to be a candidate at the election and that to the best of their knowledge they are not disqualified from whatever position it is they are standing for. Dead people can't sign forms.
So, in order for a deceased person to stand in an election, someone will have to forge their signature on the Consent to Nomination form, and then hand the paperwork in to the returning officer who will, assuming everything else is in order, accept it at face value. Forging a signature in these circumstances is an electoral offence under section 65A or - for Scottish local elections - section 65B of the Representation of the People Act 1983. (Remember this distinction, it will be important later.) The maximum penalty for this offence is a year's imprisonment and an unlimited fine, and doing this sort of thing will also get you disqualified from public office and struck off the electoral register for five years. This behaviour is also straightforward fraud, which carries a higher sentence. Given this obvious legal risk in nominating the late Sharon Carby, Reform UK have taken the wise course of advertising for a new, living, Croydon mayoral candidate.
A wise choice indeed because these are not idle legal threats, and this column is aware of two prosecutions being launched under section 65A - not in relation to dead candidates, but in relation to candidates who never existed. Let's first consider the case of Steve Uncles, who was the leader of the Kent branch of the English Democrats and was responsible for inserting a number of non-existent English Democrats candidates - "Anna Cleves" and "Steves Uncle" were probably the most obviously made-up names - into the 2013 Kent county council elections. Uncles' trial heard that as well as signing the nominations for fictional candidates, he had also stolen the identities of two very elderly persons who had never agreed to stand in the election. He was found guilty on nine charges and sent to prison for 7½ months.
The previous year had seen a bizarre episode when a mannequin was nominated for the 2012 Aberdeen city council elections under the name "Helena Torry". Unlike the fake English Democrats candidates above, the Torry campaign made no secret of the fact that their candidate was inanimate: she was described as "the voice of the silent majority" and was intended to campaign against the closure of social centres for disabled people. But the mannequin didn't get that far: once the returning officer realised that she'd been pranked, she had Torry removed from the candidate list and the election went ahead without her.
Torry's election agent, former Aberdeen Labour councillor Renee Slater, was then prosecuted under section 65A. Those who were listening earlier will realise that that was an error by the Crown Prosecution Service, because section 65A doesn't apply to local elections in Scotland; this caused the subsequent trial to collapse, and so Renee Slater got away with it. She died a couple of months ago, and fittingly her death notice in the local press was written by Helena Torry.
None of this applies to candidates who are alive when their nomination is submitted but who die at some point between then and the election. The usual procedure in this case is that that once the returning officer is informed of the death the election is abandoned, and the poll is then rescheduled for a later date, with nominations reopened to allow new candidates to stand. This happens in a few wards at every year's local elections, and such unfinished business is a regular feature of Andrew's Previews each June.
Even if a dead candidate should somehow manage to get over all these procedural hurdles and be declared elected by the returning officer, then their seat would immediately be vacant (on the grounds of the candidate being dead) and a by-election would follow. This has happened in the past. In the 1945 general election, when counting didn't take place until three weeks after polling day to allow votes to come in from British servicemen overseas, two re-elected Conservative MPs died between polling day and the count and were declared elected posthumously. The most extreme case probably occurred on 15th December 1747, when Royal Navy captain Edward Legge was declared elected unopposed as an MP for Portsmouth; four days later, news arrived in the UK that he had died in the West Indies three months previously.
So, that's how UK electoral law stops dead or fictional people from standing for election. We will have more by-elections - with live candidates - to write about next week in what will be a significant week for Andrew's Previews, as the column celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. You will not want to miss that.
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). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale