IN WITH THE NEW
Green surge in council election shake-up
HUGH SULLIVAN
Hastings Borough Council will have 12 new councillors when it reconvenes later this month. Eight are Greens; four are Labour.
In the council elections last week, when 16 out of 32 seats were voted upon, only four incumbent councillors were returned – Julia Hilton (Green) in Old Hastings, Sorrell Marlow-Eastwood and Paul Foster (Conservatives) in Ashdown and Conquest respectively, and Labour’s Trevor Webb, now representing West Leonards.
Labour captured two seats from the Conservatives, and one each from Reform UK (Lucian Fernando) and the ex-Labour Independent group (former deputy leader Maya Evans). But the overall result was a triumph for the Green party, which took five seats from Labour and three from the Conservatives. The electoral map on page 3 shows Green domination of central and eastern wards of the town. Labour gains and retentions were confined to outer areas – West St Leonards, Hollington, Silverhill and St Helens – while the Conservatives retained only the northern fringes.
The Greens have become the largest party in the full council, which is now composed as follows:
- Greens 12
- Labour 8
- Ex-Labour Independent Group 6
- Conservatives 5
- Ex-Conservative Independent 1
Cllr Hilton will no doubt remain as council leader, now flanked by 11 supportive party colleagues. She could offer to reinstate a coalition, formal or informal, with the ex-Labour Independent group led by former council leader Paul Barnett which together would constitute an overall majority. However, she seems likely to prefer a looser collaborative approach, judging that none of the rival parties are likely to act in concert to oppose any programme which the Greens put forward that isn’t extreme.
In the immediate aftermath of the vote, Cllr Hilton was naturally jubilant, claiming that the Greens had won by running a “positive campaign” and “taking residents’ views seriously”. Her party’s candidates and campaigners would be “foot-weary after undertaking a huge amount of work – not glamorous stuff, but people understood that this is a local election which matters to them, they weren’t interested in sending a message nationally. This is a progressive town, and the results show it”.
The Labour party will have taken comfort not only from winning close contests against incumbent Conservatives in St Helens and West St Leonards, but in seeing off their former deputy leader Maya Evans in Hollington and Reform UK councillor Lucian Fernando. However, their losses included leader Heather Bishop: they will need to elect a replacement in the new council.
The Independent group retain their six seats which were not up for re-election, but none of their eight candidates came near to winning a ward vote. With little funding for organisation and little apparent appetite amongst traditional Labour voters to switch away from their national party allegiance, there was a succession of grim results for them, and especially for Ms Evans, who had hoped to benefit from a strong personal following.
Conservative leader Cllr Andy Patmore, whose seat was not under challenge, congratulated the Greens on their success. He downplayed his own party’s defeats, observing that it was always going to be a hard election for its candidates in the context of the national mood. The ex-Labour Independents had, he thought, “over-egged their own importance” and been wrong to cause a schism in the council by their defection from Labour. Now that this election was over, it was clear that all parties needed to join together to move on from what he described as a “failing council”.
None of the eight Liberal Democrat or three Reform UK candidates polled significant votes in any of the wards they contested. Reform leader Mr Fernando, despite contesting Silverhill as incumbent councillor, was humiliated by attracting less than 10% of the turn-out.
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