Cllr Lewis Stanniland is the Leader of the Conservative Group on Bassetlaw District Council.
Thursday May 4th was a difficult day for Conservatives across the country, seeing so many hard-working councillors and friends lose their seats. However, there were small pockets across the country where the Conservative Party had a good night, one of which was in Bassetlaw. We managed to hold all of our seats from 2019, and take three extra seats. Two from Independents and one from Labour.
Our vote share increased across the Bassetlaw District by 6.6 per cent and we secured an extra 2751 votes from 2019. Our vote share was up in almost every individual ward too. In some wards as much as 16 per cent, such as Worksop North-East, and 14 per cent in Beckingham.
The foundations for these elections were laid in the 2021 County Council elections when we won six out of the nine wards in Bassetlaw. From there, we ensured that we worked every week to speak to people on the doorstep. We went out across Bassetlaw and spoke to the electorate, and formed our manifesto on this basis. People told us that they were fed up of their council tax going up year on year, sick of Labour not listening to them about their unpopular Local Plan, and fed up with their District Council failing them.
Our manifesto was a positive one, and we knew by cutting the amount of money spent on vanity projects in Bassetlaw, used by the Labour Parliamentary Candidate for the Bassetlaw Constituency to boost her profile, we could deliver. Their Parliamentary candidate being a Bassetlaw Labour Councillor for over a decade, and the wife of the former lacklustre MP, John Mann.
We knew we could deliver on freezing people’s council tax for the first time in over a decade, introduce kerbside glass collections at a time when Bassetlaw is reducing the number of bottle banks, and change the Local Plan to put an emphasis on infrastructure and good employment.
We knew this year was going to be tough, so we limited our targets as the election drew closer. Our goal was to take back some of our core seats taken by Independents in 2019. This included Clayworth Ward & Everton Ward. We managed to win both. The Independents were soft Labour supporters who knew their respective wards would never elect them under a Labour banner. Support from Brendan Clarke-Smith MP’s hard work on issues in these wards helped us massively in securing the wins.
We also wanted Ranskill after losing it to Labour in 2019, and it then being won by an Independent through a by-election. Furthermore, Worksop North-East was a ward in which the Labour Councillors were not popular, and we felt we could challenge them. This included the former Leader of the District Council and the former Leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, whose County Council ward we had already taken in 2021. We lost this ward by just over 50 votes. However, there were 2 recounts on the night here as the result was close, but somehow Labour found 30+ votes in the final recount. As such, we have decided to challenge this count and requested that the ballots be sealed. We felt we could’ve taken two seats here, which would have put us into double figures.
Labour declared victory on the Friday morning as they claim to have ‘taken’ one of our wards in Retford South. In reality, they won here in 2019 and lost it to us by five votes in 2021 due to a Labour councillor resigning over a major housing issue in the ward. We didn’t expect to keep it and we couldn’t defend it properly this year with the incumbent councillor deciding not to re-stand.
I feel we were able to make moderate gains and massively increase our vote share for several reasons. The two major ones were an unpopular Labour council, and sheer hard work for the past few years.
Labour has made itself extremely unpopular in Bassetlaw through a series of blunders. They tried to evict Council tenants using a law that didn’t exist; they proposed providing free suncream dispensers across the district at the taxpayers’ expense; they bought a failing house building company using taxpayers’ money that is barely breaking even; and failed to submit their levelling up bid on time for £20 million. They also forgot to attach the file to their late email, which was rather embarrassing. To top it off, one of the Labour councillors in Worksop North was living in Australia for about half of their term. There are many other issues, but Labour councillors didn’t help themselves and the residents in Bassetlaw knew this.
We have put in hundreds of hours of sheer hard work and campaigning over the last few years. The secret is getting to the door and talking to people, and not just four weeks before election day. We ran a data-driven campaign to identify our targets and ensure we could win there. I know many associations who may not be used to defending wards could have been let down by lack of data. We collected thousands of voting intentions and data in the run-up to this election. Our local team knows we would have made further gains if many Conservatives hadn’t decided to stay at home. Unfortunately many did, but we did enough to make moderate gains.