Local Council by-election 28th February

[Tony Otim]

Just the one to finish the month.

STROUD DC; Berkeley Vale (Con died)
Candidates:
ASHTON, Liz (Labour)
GREEN, Lindsey Jane (Conservative)
STAYTE, Mike (Liberal Democrats)
WILLETTS, Thomas William Edward (Green)

2016: Con 1279, 1172, 1050; Lab 951, 672, 646; LD 370, 317, 234; Grn 227

The Labour and Lib Dem candidates were the top candidates for their respective parties the last time round. The Green was also the Green candidate last time.

As far as I can work out, Berkeley Vale was formed from the whole of the old Berkeley ward, most of Vale ward and a part of Severn ward. Berkeley ward had generally been Conservative, although Labour sometimes came close and in 2012 Liz Ashton took one of the Conservative seats for Labour, which might explain why she outperformed her running mates so much in 2016. Vale ward was very safe Conservative and Severn was safe Conservative. The 3 Conservatives elected in 2016 represented 1 incumbent councillor from each ward.

Any local insights from Adam in Stroud or @europeanlefty are of course very welcome.

[Adam in Stroud]

I have to be careful what I say in case I incriminate myself. Probably safe to say for the benefit of competition entrants that we're not expecting to win this one.

Could be quite competitive between Lab and Con; strong Conservative vote but Liz Ashton is a strong candidate for Lab.

Mike Stayte was our highest placed candidate in the ward at the last full elections. He runs a family agricultural supplies and animal feeds firm (John Stayte).

[Adam in Stroud]

On the ward itself: this is the bit of Stroud District that is Not The Cotswolds. Flat as a pancake, with the M5 and A38 (the old Roman road) powering straight as a die through the middle of it. Red brick, not stone.

Berkeley is a lovely old town with one of the finest castles in England (also the Edward Jenner birthplace Museum) which just happened to have a sodding great nuclear power station just outside it up to a few years' ago. Also in the ward is Sharpness, home of the rather run-down Docks. These (ex)industrial blobs co-exist with several very attractive villages along the Severn.

There are proposals in the Area Plan to build quite a lot of housing around Sharpness, which is a bit of a local issue - might be just the thing to perk the place up IMO but alongside the usual BANANAism there are legitimate fears about adequate facilities to go alongside the quick profit on house building, also the usual bloody awful Barratt Homes aesthetics of big housing schemes. 

2940 addresses in the ward.

[Deleted]

This ward is actually covered by my local Labour Party branch, although it's a little further from my house than Dursley is.

Berkeley vale is a nonsense ward created in 2016 to gerrymander three Tory seats in the area for reasons known only to the boundary commission. It is composed of 6 civil parishes, namely Alkington, Berkeley, Ham & Stone, Hamfallow, Hinton and Slimbridge. The parish boundaries of Hinton and Hamfallow make nearly as little sense as the ward boundary, but more on that in a minute.

Berkeley Vale contains 4 main towns and a lot of rural areas in between. They are, in order of population:

Berkeley: Famous home of Berkeley Castle and the Lords of Berkeley. It was here that King Edward II was famously assassinated in a rather brutal manner, and legend has it that the scream could be heard throughout the town, waking some of its inhabitants from their sleep. It is also the town where Edward Jenner first discovered the smallpox vaccine, as the result of observing local milkmaids and a rather horrifying experiment on a local 8-year old boy. His house is still there, now open as a museum although very sadly threatened with closure. Despite having a reputation for being rather posh, some of the town has demographic statistics that look more like Gloucester City centre, and contains some incredibly large, detached houses as well as much smaller hoses more reminiscent of a post-industrial northern town. The parish also has a high number of people who claim they are in bad or very bad health and a low rate of home ownership when compared with the ward, as well as the second highest proportion of people with no qualifications in the ward at 24.9%. To have won the seat at the general election, Labour must have been close to winning Berkeley as a town. This is also the home of Labour candidate Liz Ashton and Tory candidate Lindsey Green.

Sharpness: Split, for some bizarre reason, across Hinton and Hamfallow parishes. This town contains an old dock, which is apparently the eighth largest port in the Southwest, which was built at one end of the Gloucester & Sharpness canal, at one point the broadest and deepest canal anywhere in the world. The town built up around the docks and has the profile to match. The town itself is very working class and the old Hinton & Sharpness ward was something of a Labour fortress. Hamfallow has the highest proportion of residents with no qualifications at 27.5%, and the highest proportion of socially rented housing at 18.9% (I think). 

Slimbridge: Something for wildlife lovers now, especially the bird watchers among you. The headquarters of the WWT are located here, and it is one of the district's major tourist attraction, and home to a captive-ish population of the world's rarest goose, the Nene or Hawai'ian Goose. This is one of the richer parishes in the ward, but a well educated one with 31.5% of the population having level 4+ qualifications, so it will be interesting to see if Labour's improving performance among university graduates is reflected here. This area is rich, but not eye-wateringly so, well-educated and likely remain voting, so there could be some potential for a Labour vote, which we will need if we are to win the seat. However, this is also the home of the LibDem candidate who was a district councillor when Slimbridge and Cambridge were in a separate ward from the rest of Berkeley Vale.

Stone: The fact that this appears on this list is testament to just how rural this ward is. Rich, educated and Tory, there are apparently a few streets with strong Labour votes.

The candidates
There 4 candidates for this ward. Liz Ashton is the Labour candidate, a former mayor Berkeley and former councillor for this ward's predecessor, she is well known throughout Berkley and Sharpness. Lindsey Green is the Conservative. I know very little about her, but her politics seem to extend to living in Berkley and hating Dianne Abbott. Which might well be enough to win. Mike Stayte is, as mentioned, a former councillor from Slimbridge. He is also a current parish councillor and very well-known in his area. His candidacy will probably hoover up a lot of the potential Labour vote in Cambridge and Slimbridge (perhaps Adam in Stroud might know more). Thomas Willetts is the Green, although I know nothing about him.

Overall
This is a Tory ward. Any successful challenge from Labour involves Liz as candidate, a world-beating get out the vote operation in Berkeley and Sharpness, and an effort to win over potential LibDem or Green voters in Cambridge and Slimbridge. We then just have to hope that turnout in these areas outstrips turnout in the may tiny, true-blue hamlets that make up the rest of the ward. Unfortunately we are hampered by plans to build enough houses to double the size of Sharpness in the village, which may dampen people's enthusiasm for us in our strongest area. That said, it hasn't been a huge issue on the doorstep so far, and most people seem to support the houses, just in a slightly smaller number.

Prediction: Conservative hold.

[edgbaston]

Hamfallow is a top name for any place, not least a parish in the Stroud district.

[finsobruce]

Feb 17, 2019 7:23:16 GMT @wattyler81 said:

Feb 17, 2019 1:05:55 GMT @europeanlefty said:

This ward is actually covered by my local Labour Party branch, although it's a little further from my house than Dursley is.

Berkeley vale is a nonsense ward created in 2016 to gerrymander three Tory seats in the area for reasons known only to the boundary commission. It is composed of 6 civil parishes, namely Alkington, Berkeley, Ham & Stone, Hamfallow, Hinton and Slimbridge. The parish boundaries of Hinton and Hamfallow make nearly as little sense as the ward boundary, but more on that in a minute.

Berkeley Vale contains 4 main towns and a lot of rural areas in between. They are, in order of population:

Berkeley: Famous home of Berkeley Castle and the Lords of Berkeley. It was here that King Edward II was famously assassinated in a rather brutal manner, and legend has it that the scream could be heard throughout the town, waking some of its inhabitants from their sleep. It is also the town where Edward Jenner first discovered the smallpox vaccine, as the result of observing local milkmaids and a rather horrifying experiment on a local 8-year old boy. His house is still there, now open as a museum although very sadly threatened with closure. Despite having a reputation for being rather posh, some of the town has demographic statistics that look more like Gloucester City centre, and contains some incredibly large, detached houses as well as much smaller hoses more reminiscent of a post-industrial northern town. The parish also has a high number of people who claim they are in bad or very bad health and a low rate of home ownership when compared with the ward, as well as the second highest proportion of people with no qualifications in the ward at 24.9%. To have won the seat at the general election, Labour must have been close to winning Berkeley as a town. This is also the home of Labour candidate Liz Ashton and Tory candidate Lindsey Green.

"..It was here that King Edward II was famously assassinated in a rather brutal manner"

or not as the case may yet be....(both the method and the outcome that is)

Worth noting that had Edward's elder brother lived England would have had a King Alphonso.

[The Bishop]

Feb 17, 2019 1:05:55 GMT @europeanlefty said:

Famous home of Berkeley Castle and the Lords of Berkeley. It was here that King Edward II was famously assassinated in a rather brutal manner, and legend has it that the scream could be heard throughout the town, waking some of its inhabitants from their sleep

The version I was told was "the screams could be heard in Gloucester"

[Adam in Stroud]

Feb 17, 2019 1:18:40 GMT edgbaston said:

Hamfallow is a top name for any place, not least a parish in the Stroud district.

Ham and Stone is one of my favourite parish names, always making me think of a terrible sandwich recipe.

Sir Peter Scott and the WWT site at Slimbridge is, I was told, why the BBC Natural History Unit was based at Bristol. (It's also IMO the finest garden in the county that no-one knows is a garden.)

On Mike Stayte: he is a good strong candidate and could do well for us in Slimbridge and Cambridge, which are probably our strongest areas in the ward, but I fear that we will be subject to a squeeze from Labour as Liz Aston is also a very strong candidate and I fear it may come down to Tory vs The Non-Tory on Ballot Day.  FWIW and by contrast the Tory candidate is described as inexperienced and their campaign as half-hearted.

The binary contest in Berkeley itself might be judged from one of our members' bit of local advice ("I don’t think there is much point in spending effort on Park view (strong Labour) or Forrest View (UKIP/Nazi).")

[Deleted]

Or Fieldview (Labour/UKIP). I don't think we'll hurt you much in Cambridge and Slimbridge, although it has to be said I was pleasantly surprised when I ran the clipboard for our canvass there yesterday.

Hopefully having Emily Thornberry come down to canvass with us will help.

[Pete Whitehead]

I went on a trip to Slimbridge with my primary school, I guess around 40 years ago. Dismal, boring place, probably not helped by the fact it was pissing down with rain the whole time we were there. Worth mentioning because on the same trip (we stayed near Cheltenham for two or three nights) I have a recollection of visiting some kind of textile factory in a grim looking little industrial town and I've never known where it was, but it makes some sense that it may have been in the Stroud area (possibly Stonehouse or somewhere like that)

[Deleted]

Feb 17, 2019 21:53:19 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

I went on a trip to Slimbridge with my primary school, I guess around 40 years ago. Dismal, boring place, probably not helped by the fact it was pissing down with rain the whole time we were there. Worth mentioning because on the same trip (we stayed near Cheltenham for two or three nights) I have a recollection of visiting some kind of textile factory in a grim looking little industrial town and I've never known where it was, but it makes some sense that it may have been in the Stroud area (possibly Stonehouse or somewhere like that)

We still have a working textile mill here in Cam (it's just over the road and can almost be seen from my sister's bedroom window). It wasn't that one was it?

[Deleted]

And, for the record, you are dead wrong about Slimbridge. It's a wonderful place.

[Deleted]

Feb 17, 2019 10:42:35 GMT The Bishop said:

Feb 17, 2019 1:05:55 GMT @europeanlefty said:

Famous home of Berkeley Castle and the Lords of Berkeley. It was here that King Edward II was famously assassinated in a rather brutal manner, and legend has it that the scream could be heard throughout the town, waking some of its inhabitants from their sleep

The version I was told was "the screams could be heard in Gloucester"

That's the more sensationalist version! This version comes from Holinshed's Chronicles, written in 1587 but based on much earlier sources.

[The Bishop]

Feb 17, 2019 23:34:41 GMT @europeanlefty said:

And, for the record, you are dead wrong about Slimbridge. It's a wonderful place.

Went there a few times when young, it wasn't so bad IMO.

Btw my late father, who played in the local football leagues, always said the team from Slimbridge were the biggest animals he ever came across

[Chris from Brum]

Feb 18, 2019 10:08:40 GMT The Bishop said:

Feb 17, 2019 23:34:41 GMT @europeanlefty said:

And, for the record, you are dead wrong about Slimbridge. It's a wonderful place.

Went there a few times when young, it wasn't so bad IMO.

Btw my late father, who played in the local football leagues, always said the team from Slimbridge were the biggest animals he ever came across

Did he give them the bird?

[Pete Whitehead]

Feb 17, 2019 23:34:14 GMT @europeanlefty said:

Feb 17, 2019 21:53:19 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

I went on a trip to Slimbridge with my primary school, I guess around 40 years ago. Dismal, boring place, probably not helped by the fact it was pissing down with rain the whole time we were there. Worth mentioning because on the same trip (we stayed near Cheltenham for two or three nights) I have a recollection of visiting some kind of textile factory in a grim looking little industrial town and I've never known where it was, but it makes some sense that it may have been in the Stroud area (possibly Stonehouse or somewhere like that)

We still have a working textile mill here in Cam (it's just over the road and can almost be seen from my sister's bedroom window). It wasn't that one was it?

Well as I said I don't know where it was (though I have quite a clear visual recollection of the place so might recognise it from Google Street view if you tell me the location). Obviously the range of possibilities is not limited to those places which still have a working mill today but encompasses the much larger set of places which had working mills in 1979 or 1980.
The possibilities also cover a very wide geographic range - unless I'm conflating two or more different trips, we also visited much of Warwickshire (Coventry cathedral, Warwick Castle, Stratford, Edge Hill etc) so I had always imagined this place was somewhere in Warwickshire and it is only now (with Slimbridge being mentioned) that it has occurred to me that it might in fact have been in this part of Gloucestershire (hence the thinking aloud on this thread). I expect I will never know unless some itinerary turns up, but there is an objective truth whether I know it or not (it was in Cam or it was in Stonehouse or it was somewhere else).
My comments about Slimbridge on the other hand are clearly a subjective and impressionistic view (qualified by the description of the weather at the time) and represent an entirely accurate recollection of my experience of visiting the place. Therefore I am not 'wrong' and no correction of 'the record' is required . I'm happy to accept of course that your own experiences of the place have been entirely different.

[Deleted]

Went canvassing in Cambridge earlier. The gang of 7 seem to have made an already difficult task just about impossible. Thank goodness the all-out elections aren't until next year.

[Devil Wincarnate]

Feb 17, 2019 21:53:19 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

 Dismal, boring place, probably not helped by the fact it was pissing down with rain the whole time we were there... I have a recollection of visiting some kind of textile factory in a grim looking little industrial town 

Are you sure it wasn't Oldham in July?

[Devil Wincarnate]

Feb 19, 2019 20:01:00 GMT @europeanlefty said:

Went canvassing in Cambridge earlier. The gang of 7 seem to have made an already difficult task just about impossible. Thank goodness the all-out elections aren't until next year.

Tell us more.

[robert1]

The Cambridge concerned is a village in Gloucestershire near Slimbridge, I presume.