Ashfield the seat to watch after Anderson’s Tory axe
ASHFIELD must now be quite accustomed to having a political scene much livelier than its Nottinghamshire neighbours.
Its current MP hits the national headlines on a daily basis and the council leader will stand trial next year on 12 counts of fraud by false representation and four counts of income tax evasion.
Lee Anderson had the Conservative Party whip withdrawn after making comments on GB News, the channel that pays him £100,000 a year. The MP claimed “Islamists” had “got control” of London Mayor Sadiq Khan and that he had “given away our capital” to extremists.
This latest controversy around Mr Anderson has certainly been disruptive, but this is the latest phase of a political career which seems to have drawn huge attention every step of the way.
From his early days as a councillor installing boulders to stop travellers using car parks, to his dramatic exit from Labour which eventually caused the district council to fall to the Ashfield Independents, Lee Anderson is used to being at the centre of a political drama.
In many ways, so is Ashfield. Lee Anderson may have provoked more debate and controversy than most, but Ashfield’s politics were by no means a quiet before he entered the fray. While the conversation around the “Red Wall” has always included Ashfield, the idea that this is a solidly Labour area is not quite be borne out by recent general election results. Labour’s majority in 2010 was incredibly marginal, with just 192 more votes than the Liberal Democrats. And while 2015 saw the party surge again to much more stable electoral ground, the next election just two years later saw them cling on by just over 400 votes after a swing to the Tories.
Since the 1990s, parties to have had a crack at the constituency include the National Front, the British National Party, Justice for Men and Boys, UKIP, the English Democrats, Socialist Labour and the Socialist Alliance. There has also been a much more diverse range of parties represented on Ashfield District Council than many other Nottinghamshire authorities since the turn of the century.
All that history, and recent events around Anderson, make Ashfield the Notts constituency to watch at the next general election.
Such is the unpredictability of the result that while a major recent poll predicted a Labour landslide in every other Nottinghamshire seat, the prediction in terms of which party would gain Ashfield was “other”. It is in that context that Ben Brown, a Conservative councillor in neighbouring Mansfield, thinks his own party has made an error withdrawing the whip from Lee Anderson.
Councillor Brown said: “In my view, the Conservative Party has scored a huge own goal by withdrawing the whip and removing from the Parliamentary party one of its greatest and most admired assets. I have never found him to be anything other than a thoroughly decent bloke and he has my full support. The Conservatives need to be very careful as Lee will retain his seat irrespective of which party he is in.”
Lee Anderson’s popularity among constituents can sometimes be tricky to gauge on the streets of Ashfield, where opinion is often very mixed. The only true test will be at the ballot box, where Mr Anderson has pledged that people will still be able to vote for him.
There has been a lot of talk about Mr Anderson standing for Reform in Ashfield since his Conservative Party exit, but Reform has already chosen a candidate. Henry Grisewood, an Army veteran who has also worked in colleges, prisons and in the police, says he has had enough of the “mediocre representation that has been given to the people of Ashfield and Great Britain”.
Barring a shuffling of the decks from Reform, it therefore looks as though Mr Anderson is destined to stand as an independent candidate
Will Ashfield follow the predicted national trend by going back to Labour, or will it continue down its characteristic road of complete political unpredictability?