Reform UK Tops the East Sussex Poll
PAUL MCLAUGHLIN
Reform UK won the East Sussex County Council (ESCC) by-election held in Ashdown and Conquest last Thursday (20 November).
Aidan Fisher, elected as councillor
Aidan Fisher topped the poll with 797 votes to become the first Reform UK councillor to be elected to ESCC. Paula Warne of the Greens came second with 607 votes, whilst the Conservatives (494), who had previously held the seat, were pushed in to third place. Labour (395) came fourth and the Liberal Democrats (129) fifth.
Ricky Hodges, who had tried to secure the Reform UK nomination for himself, stood as an Independent. The 55 votes he picked up were not enough to threaten Mr Fisher’s majority of 190 and meant he trailed in last. The voter turnout was 30.88%.
The new county councillor lives in Winchelsea. His background is in the financial services industry, and he describes himself as an expert in “sustainable investing”. He said it was an honour to be elected to ESCC as Reform’s first councillor, and he vowed to represent everyone in Ashdown and Conquest.
Mr Fisher said he would use his financial services experience to make local services more efficient, eliminate waste, and save taxpayers money. His priorities also include improving roads, fixing potholes, and protecting green spaces by focusing any new development on brownfield sites. It is worth noting that recently elected Reform UK councillors in neighbouring Kent made similar promises, though they are now considering a 5% increase in council tax.
TORY COLLAPSE?
The by-election followed the death in September of Cllr Peter Pragnell, who won the seat for the Tories in 2021 with almost 60% of the vote. His successor, Caroline Kerswell, secured just 20%.
This dramatic collapse in support, alongside poor local results nationally, suggests a party in terminal decline, potentially being replaced by Reform UK as the right’s new leading force. However, there were local factors in play – not only the loss of popular local incumbent Peter Pragnell but also significant public anger over the mismanaged and extensively delayed A21 roadworks. These have been under the watch of the Tory-run county council, and caused major disruption through the ward.
The experience of the last Tory government is also fresh in the minds of voters. The negative perception of neglect of the NHS, with long waiting times at the local Conquest Hospital, and the pollution of the coastline still resonate. Some Conservatives will be pleased that they still managed to secure almost 500 votes.
Overall, the combined right-wing vote (Conservative and Reform UK) topped that of the left, though to a lesser extent than in 2021.
BY-ELECTION TENSIONS
As to the left, the by-election campaign brought to the surface simmering tensions between Labour and the Greens, which are rooted in the cold, hard logic of electoral mathematics. The two parties, along with the Hastings Independent Group – who backed the Green Party in the by-election – are rivals for the same pool of voters.
This dynamic has created a precarious, potentially zero-sum game which carries with it the obvious threat of splitting the progressive vote. This is exactly what happened last week, when Reform UK swept past both to win with just 32% of the overall poll.
The core appeals of both parties are starkly different. Labour presents itself as a serious, pragmatic party of government, a role it says requires fiscal caution. The Greens, in contrast, free from the shackles of national government, push a much “purer” progressive agenda.
This tension between principle and pragmatism is the central dilemma of the electoral mathematics currently being played out. It is exacerbated by the first-past-the-post electoral system, which creates a powerful incentive for tactical voting.
Previously, progressive voters who may have sympathised with the Greens would stick with Labour believing they were the only viable option to defeat the Conservatives – and now Reform UK. However, last year’s breakthrough by the Greens in defeating Labour in the local elections to Hastings Borough Council showed that the Greens can win – and move from being a party of protest to a party running the local council.
TACTICAL VOTING
In last week’s by-election the Greens and Labour each campaigned to convince voters that they were the ones best placed to stop the advance of Reform UK. Teams of canvassers from both parties criss-crossed Ashdown and Conquest, encouraging tactical voting in their favour and relentlessly pushing the message that a vote for the other party would be wasted.
The Labour campaign seized on early projections from a political forecasting website showing them neck-and-neck with Reform UK to push the message that they were the ones best placed to win the seat. They continued to maintain this line despite feedback on the grounds of a decline in Labour support.
The Greens responded with a leaflet from its candidate Paula Warne, with a graph which included Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats among the parties she had defeated when winning in the completely different ward of Gensing in last year’s borough council elections. The message was clear: she had beaten Reform UK once before and could do so again. The only problem was that neither Reform UK nor the Liberal Democrats had fielded a candidate in that election.
For many voters, such practices in the heat of an election are simply the stuff of politics – an expected, if cynical, part of the campaign game. The intent of these distortions, whether through truncated axes on a graph or cherry-picked data, is not to inform, but to win. It is a numbers game where the objective is to shape a favourable narrative by any means necessary, leveraging mathematical deception to sway just enough voters to top the poll.
If the election is won, the misleading graphs can soon be forgotten. When the election is lost, however, the recriminations can reverberate.
This was an election which saw both Labour and the Greens lose. It can be argued that the true cost, however, will be borne by progressive voters in Ashdown and Conquest. Should the parties fail to learn the lessons, the same could soon be true for left-of-centre voters across the rest of Hastings and St Leonards.
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