UK local by-elections, 2024

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Thursday 28 March

Andrew Teale’s preview

Neath Port Talbot; Neath East

Lab 409 (43.8%, +10.6)
Ind Finn 247 (26.4%, new)
Plaid 157 (16.8%, -17.7)
Ind Harris 121 (13.0%, new)
(changes from 2022 "top vote")

Lab hold; ward still 1 Lab 1 PC 1 Ind

Somerset; Somerton

Lib Dem 1212 (50.1%, -1.0)
Con 878 (36.3%, -2.2)
Lab 174 (7.2%, -0.5)
Green 154 (6.4%, new)
(changes from 2022 "top vote")

Lib Dem hold; ward still 2 Lib Dem

Orkney Islands; Stromness and South Isles

Ind Park 757 (85.8%, new)
Ind Thompson 125 (14.2%, +8.2)
(changes from 2022)

Ind Park gain from Ind Stockan


As an aside, while trying to understand bloc voting share changes (top vote vs average vote wtf lol) I was reminded of the insane old method many NSW councils used to use. Preferential bloc voting!
So you go to all the hassle of having preferential ballot papers (with group voting tickets and everything!) you then distribute preferences till one candidate gets a majority. Then you start the count again with their votes redistributed... till you fill as many seats as vacant.
Spectacularly pointless. The Australian obsession for preferential voting. We even invented double preferential open list d'Hondt, but that's another story.
A results pdf of us actually counting votes like this

[Duke of York]

Thursday 28 March

Andrew Teale’s preview

Neath Port Talbot; Neath East



Somerset; Somerton



Orkney Islands; Stromness and South Isles



As an aside, while trying to understand bloc voting share changes (top vote vs average vote wtf lol) I was reminded of the insane old method many NSW councils used to use. Preferential bloc voting!
So you go to all the hassle of having preferential ballot papers (with group voting tickets and everything!) you then distribute preferences till one candidate gets a majority. Then you start the count again with their votes redistributed... till you fill as many seats as vacant.
Spectacularly pointless. The Australian obsession for preferential voting. We even invented double preferential open list d'Hondt, but that's another story.
A results pdf of us actually counting votes like this

What's the reason for mostly independents running in the Orkney Islands?

[Tintrlvr]

"It's always been that way" is probably not a very satisfying answer, but it's true. More generally, small political divisions often lack partisan dynamics, with local issues that are completely divorced from national politics dominating. Orkney is the third-least-populated local government district in Britain (after the City of London and the Isles of Scilly, both also dominated by independents) and just doesn't face the same issues that might be considered relevant even somewhere relatively close by like Inverness or Aberdeen.

You can see this in other places around the world, too. Nunavut and the NWT in Canada are similar.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

You can also look back to the 70s and see just how far the Independent tide has ebbed.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Though a lot of those independents were party members, there was just a belief (with various degrees of hypocrisy involved) about "keeping politics out of local government."

This isn't entirely unknown these days. A few years ago I was elected as a parish councillor (the bottom level of English democracy, with very few powers) as Labour. Aside from myself and the other Labour councillor, at least 12 of the remaining 13 councillors were members of political parties (and I think the remaining one was ex-UKIP.) But they all stood as "independents", even though several of them served at the same time as party candidates at other levels of local government.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

On the subject of the days by-elections, Neath East is notable for its not entirely geographically accurate name. Must be in the top percentile for absurd Boundary Commission names.

[Tintrlvr]

You can also look back to the 70s and see just how far the Independent tide has ebbed.

I was going to add something about this, too, but wasn't completely confident in the dates. My understanding is that there was a time when all local politics in Britain outside of London and the other big cities was Labour vs. independents (or before Labour really emerged, just independent dominated), and the Tories and Liberals had almost no local election presence at all. It was Labour running in local elections and winning that led the other parties to start to view local politics as important and worthy of participation. By the 1970s, you can see on this map that the Tories seriously contested in urban areas but rural areas were still predominantly independent-dominated. Of course, most "independents" were de facto Tories (or Liberals, if you go back far enough, and nowadays remnant independent presences tend to side with the LDs over the Tories).

There was also a period where the Tories and Liberals had local allies but didn't run candidates themselves - the Municipal Reform Party for the Tories and the Progressive Party for the Liberals.

[Duke of York]

http://opencouncildata.co.uk/byelections.php

according to this there are 42 by elections scheduled for May 9th! Why not hold these with the May 2nd elections?

[Property Representative of the Harold Holt Swimming Centre]

http://opencouncildata.co.uk/byelections.php

according to this there are 42 by elections scheduled for May 9th! Why not hold these with the May 2nd elections?

Only Kilwinning, North Ayrshire has the date next to it so I assume the others haven't been scheduled yet.

[Duke of York]

http://opencouncildata.co.uk/byelections.php

according to this there are 42 by elections scheduled for May 9th! Why not hold these with the May 2nd elections?

Only Kilwinning, North Ayrshire has the date next to it so I assume the others haven't been scheduled yet.

Oh ok. I misread the chart. Wonder why those elections weren't but with local elections.

[Tintrlvr]

http://opencouncildata.co.uk/byelections.php

according to this there are 42 by elections scheduled for May 9th! Why not hold these with the May 2nd elections?

Only Kilwinning, North Ayrshire has the date next to it so I assume the others haven't been scheduled yet.

And Scotland has no elections, so nothing to schedule alongside. Most of these are probably either in places that likewise have no elections on May 2 so there’s no advantage to scheduling then or became vacant too recently for a May 2 by-election.

[MaxQue]

http://opencouncildata.co.uk/byelections.php

according to this there are 42 by elections scheduled for May 9th! Why not hold these with the May 2nd elections?

Only Kilwinning, North Ayrshire has the date next to it so I assume the others haven't been scheduled yet.

And Scotland has no elections, so nothing to schedule alongside. Most of these are probably either in places that likewise have no elections on May 2 so there’s no advantage to scheduling then or became vacant too recently for a May 2 by-election.

Also, Wales doesn't want any local by-elections on May 2, as they don't have the same electorate as the PPC elections.

[EastAnglianLefty]

http://opencouncildata.co.uk/byelections.php

according to this there are 42 by elections scheduled for May 9th! Why not hold these with the May 2nd elections?

Only Kilwinning, North Ayrshire has the date next to it so I assume the others haven't been scheduled yet.

Oh ok. I misread the chart. Wonder why those elections weren't but with local elections.

Most of them are: https://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/18861/local-council-elections-2nd-2024

I think the answer is that the website hasn't been updated.

[CumbrianLefty]

Good result for Labour in the misnamed Neath ward - new Welsh leader bounce?

[Duke of York]

Good result for Labour in the misnamed Neath ward - new Welsh leader bounce?

its plausible.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Good result for Labour in the misnamed Neath ward - new Welsh leader bounce?

Given Labour had an exceptionally bad result in NPT in 2022 losing the council for the first time since the 70s, I don't think it says as much. They're starting from a very low base in spite of the 2022 national environment.

[CumbrianLefty]

Good result for Labour in the misnamed Neath ward - new Welsh leader bounce?

Given Labour had an exceptionally bad result in NPT in 2022 losing the council for the first time since the 70s, I don't think it says as much. They're starting from a very low base in spite of the 2022 national environment.

There were a couple of byelections for NPT earlier this year - Labour did OK in one gaining it from an Indy, but in the other they fell back further as an Independent took a previous Plaid Cymru seat.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The council was only created in 1995. But random rogue results are common in Welsh local government and usually reflect local grumblings or scandals of one sort or another.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

The council was only created in 1995. But random rogue results are common in Welsh local government and usually reflect local grumblings or scandals of one sort or another.

Which is quite ironic given it's home to a long running national story with Tata Steel, which doesn't seem to have had an impact on the council. Instead random discontent in the Neath end seems to have boiled over.
(and my reference to the 70s included the three predecessor districts)

[Duke of York]

http://opencouncildata.co.uk/byelections.php
open council is now updated to include 68 by elections that will be held with the regularly scheduled elections on May 2nd

seems there is one scheduled for May 9th. with ten by elections yet to be scheduled. though according to a link shared earlier three of those including one in Manchester will be held May 2nd.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So, the issue of partisan contestation of local elections in Britain is a complex one. Before the middle 1970s (middle 1960s in London) local government was organized in a very different way to the various systems that people will be more familiar with now. From 1889 the main unit of local government in England and Wales¹ was the county, beneath which there were a serious of small districts with a variety of different names² and few actual powers in practice and even less after the 1940s when they were cut out of the planning process. What they mostly did in practice was raise the rates that they county councils then spent. Some urban areas were allowed to run their own affairs outside the county system and were, in effect, treated as their own counties: these were called County Boroughs and included most large provincial cities. Local democracy was not new to the county boroughs (as Municipal Corporations under the previous system most had over fifty years of experience of contested partisan elections of one sort of another) but it was to most of the country. It was also the case that party labels were not printed on ballot papers (and would not be until the 1970s) which meant that the exact organization of local political groups ended up being a largely local affair: things were very formal in some county councils right from the start, but took on a very informal character in others, with some not even really abandoning that model until the abolition of the old county councils in the 1970s. Group names and organizational structure was also not uniform: on the London County Council the Liberals formed an alliance with local trade unionists to create the Progressive Party, while the Conservatives organized first as the Moderate Party and then as the Municipal Reform Party. In Birmingham the Conservatives continued to be known as the Unionists after the Liberal Unionist Party formally merged into the Tories and only abandoned the name in the late 1940s after the shock of losing control to Labour for the first time and due to the tarnishing of the Chamberlain name. Antisocialist 'alliances' (which always ended up simply as Conservative groups in practice) using labels such as 'Progressive' were also common in Scotland and existed elsewhere, especially in the North of England. The point, though, is that everyone knew who all of these groups actually were, and the same was true of places with more informal arrangements: if you lived in, say, Caernarfonshire and your local county councillor was a union official at Dinorwic you knew perfectly well which party he was a member, or at least, a supporter of. The pattern was similar at district level, though matters were usually more relaxed (as, again, these councils didn't actually do much).³ This was was especially true of the rural districts: except in some mining regions (and even then not all of those) it was generally thought to be a complete waste of time to make district elections a partisan matter, especially as finding candidates could be a pain: there were RDs that never saw a contested election in their entire history. A final complicating issue was that of Aldermen: these were councillors elected by the council (rather than the electorate) and were a feature of county, county borough and municipal borough councils, but not the other types. Councils were free to elect these according to whatever system they liked, and things could get quite nasty when the balance of power was tight. This provided a strong incentive for people who preferred a more collegiate way of running things - as power brokers in rural areas are apt to - to argue against the formation of party groups

<sub>1. Scottish local government was organized in a different way again, though the broad outlines were similar.
2. Which related more to the level of civic dignity granted to the district than to its actual powers. In order of seniority the principal types of district were Municipal Boroughs (known as Metropolitan Boroughs in London), Urban Districts and Rural Districts).
3. The big exception turned out to be certain affluent London suburbs and commuter towns, thus the sudden emergence of the Ratepayer groups in the 1920s.</sub>

[YL]

Thursday 4 April

Andrew Teale's preview

Cornwall; Looe West, Pelynt, Lansallos & Lanteglos

Lib Dem 604 (44.8%, -16.6)
Con 414 (30.7%, +0.4)
Lab 254 (18.9%, +10.6)
Green (5.6%, new)
(changes from 2021)

Lib Dem hold

North Northamptonshire; Desborough

Con 1485 (47.3%, +7.5)
Lab 1054 (33.6%, +6.1)
Green 368 (11.7%, +2.7)
Lib Dem 234 (7.4%, -2.3)
(changes from 2021 "top vote")

Con hold

Wealden; Uckfield New Town

Ind French 582 (37.0%, new)
Lab 578 (36.7%, -7.5)
Con 413 (26.3%, +0.3)
(changes from 2023 "top vote")

"Ind hold"; ward remains 1 Lab, 1 Ind

[AustralianSwingVoter]

“Team Representing Uckfield Supporting Transparency” lol

[CumbrianLefty]

Good result for the Tories in Northants, though they had a similarly strong hold in Rushden around a year ago. Didn't tell us much about the parliamentary byelection containing the town earlier this year.

[YL]

Good result for the Tories in Northants, though they had a similarly strong hold in Rushden around a year ago. Didn't tell us much about the parliamentary byelection containing the town earlier this year.

I still find it a little surprising how little the Tories have suffered at local level in Northants (especially North Northants) for what happened to the county council.