2004–2024: 20 years of local elections in Ilkley for Bradford Council

A potted history of how elections have gone down in the town – with some local and national context for good measure 🗳️

All elections are historic, shaped as they are by the unique set of local, national and international circumstances in which they occur. The 2026 local elections in Bradford and across the UK will be no different.

And what of this year? Will it, like 2025, which saw the political map of the country redrawn with, in particular, formerly dependable Conservative and Labour-leaning councils like Kent County Council and Doncaster Council being swept aside by Reform UK, reflect the growing consensus – at least for now – that there are no longer any safe seats?

Or will it, for instance, be increasingly shaped by the ongoing war in Iran and the impact it has, away from the violence and tragedy across the Middle East, on people’s finances in the UK throughout the month and beyond (hard as it is to make sense of the confused, conflicting and bizarre statements that come primarily from Donald Trump)?

There is no easy answer. As the MP by-election win for the Greens in Gorton and Denton proved, which pushed Labour into an abysmal third place, as well as the council by-election win for Labour in Murton in Durham, which saw the party reclaim the seat back from Reform UK, all bets are off.

As we edge closer and closer to this year’s local elections in Bradford, we thought we’d take a closer look at how the overwhelmingly white (95.6%), Christian (53%), household-owning (78.2%), least deprived (ranked 29 out of 30 in the deprivation index, with one being the most deprived and 30 the least) and older population of Ilkley (it has the highest percentage of people aged between 64 and over) has voted since 2004 with some local and national context thrown in for good measure.

What does it, if anything, tell us about how people will vote this time around in May 2026? We’d love to know what you think.

2024

🟢 Ros Brown, Green Party: 38% (elected)

🔵 Joanne Sugden, Conservative: 35%

⚪️ Anne Gillian Hawkesworth, Independent: 15%

🔴 Michael Andrew Baldwin, Labour: 11%

🟡 John Briggs, Liberal Democrats: 1%

The 2024 local elections resulted in a huge upset with the Green Party’s Ros Brown ending Anne Hawkesworth’s impressive 34-year run as an Ilkley councillor, which had seen her first serve as a Conservative and later as an independent.

“I am obviously very disappointed,” Hawkesworth said the day after she lost her seat to Brown. “However, I have been fortunate and honoured to represent my wonderful Ilkley for 34 years. I shall have to find another route to keep Ilkley special.”

This was a massive victory for Brown who had been gaining more and more support (aka votes) with every election she contested since at least 2018. It was also a historic moment for the town – she is the first Green Party councillor ever to be elected in Ilkley. Looking back on her first six months she said:

“I hope to see more Greens elected to serve our community over the coming years because I believe that we offer a fairer, greener style of politics that puts people and planet before profit – something that is often sorely missing from local government.”

The poor results for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats reflected, in large part, the prevailing political status quo in Ilkley. The town has largely had a diehard, pro-Conservative base of voters who have, over many, many years, remained staunchly committed to the party through thick and thin – both locally and nationally.

(Whether they stick around in 2026, with Reform UK looking more and more like an alternative, more right-wing version of whatever the Conservatives had become when Rishi Sunak led them to a catastrophic defeat – they have been hoovering up former Tories like Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick – is going to be one of the big stories of this election.)

In fact, it appears that Labour – nor any other political party – has ever managed to win a seat in Ilkley since as far back as 1974, when the Bradford Metropolitan District Council was established (though actual elections took place in 1973 following the massive overhaul of local government that was introduced by Edward Heath’s Conservative government via the Local Government Act of 1972).

Brown’s election in 2024, therefore, represented more than just a big win for the Greens. It also marked a momentous break with the town’s exclusively Conservative past. Just how significant this was is hard to gauge for three reasons.

One, Brown is well known in the community, meaning her win could potentially be seen as a vote more for the individual than the party she represents.

Two, it can also (or alternatively) be seen as part of a wider trend in politics, with growing support for the Green Party across the district indicative of increasing support for the Greens more generally across the UK.

The election of Zach Polanski, a member of the London Assembly and, whether you agree with his worldview or not, a gifted public speaker, as its new national leader in September, has obviously had a massive impact on the party.

Or three, a small but in the end influential number of people in Ilkley were simply fed up with the Conservatives after 14 years of national government, which was then reflected, in part, locally as it always inevitably is (they ended up losing more than 450 councillors alongside the 251 MPs that year). They may have given her the edge over Joanne Sugden. How Brown does in May will potentially make things a little clearer.

2023

🔵 David Nunns, Conservative: 42% (elected)

🟢 Ros Brown, Green Party: 39%

🔴 Michael Andrew Baldwin, Labour: 15%

🟡 Caroline Rosemary Jones, Liberal Democrats: 3%

Although she had to once again settle for the runner-up spot with the Conservative candidate David Nunns taking first place – he campaigned on protecting the green belt, fixing the town’s roads and saying no to speed bumps, as well as reopening the Ilkley Police Station helpdesk (which closed in 2017) – it was now clear that Brown had become a clear threat to the Tories in Ilkley (Hawkesworth may well have been an independent councillor but her politics always been on the centre right).

The numbers say as much. For instance, she received 39% of the vote in 2023, which was another personal best. The year before she got 33% (2% less than the winner), while in 2021, she ended up in third place on 26% (3% less than the winner). You can contrast that with 2019 when she got 25% of the vote, which was some distance from that year’s winner winner (25% versus 36%).

The Conservative success in Ilkley bucked the party's national trend in the 2023 local elections. It got hammered by the electorate, losing more than 1,000 councillors and 48 councils. Labour was the main beneficiary of this drubbing and became the largest party of local government for the first time in 21 years.

In Bradford, Labour comfortably held onto the council, with its majority strengthened (it ended up with 56 of the 90 councillors). The Conservatives ended up with 16 councillors overall, the Greens eight and the Liberal Democrats five.

The 2023 local elections were the first to require ID to be presented at polling stations. After the elections, the former Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said that the controversial change had backfired on his party.

“Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding that their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections,” he told attendees at a Conservative conference …

“We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.”

An interim analysis by the Electoral Commission of the impact of having to show ID at the local elections – which found that 4% of people who didn’t vote had cited new ID requirements as the reason – concluded that “further work is required in order to ensure that elections remain truly accessible to all”.

2022

🔵 Andrew John Patrick Loy, Conservative: 35%

🟢 Ros Brown, Green Party: 33%

🔴 George Scaife, Labour: 20%

⚪️ Mike Gibbons, Independent: 8%

🟡 Caroline Rosemary Jones, Liberal Democrats: 4%

The biggest shock in 2022 was the third-place finish for Mike Gibbons, who ran as an independent having previously long been a Conservative councillor. The Tories were instead represented by Andrew Loy, a local accountant who, since 2021, has also been a councillor for Ilkley Town Council. He just about managed to hold off Brown to win in 2022.

Gibbons shockingly ended up with just 8% of the vote, having been elected with 50% in 2018, 52% in 2014 and 50.6% in 2010. Explaining why he was contesting the Ilkley ward as an independent, Gibbons said at the time that while he was still a Conservative at heart, he felt as though the party had not only lost its way but that standards had also slipped.

Speaking to The Ilkley Gazette the month before the local elections in Bradford, he said he now knew that a lot could be achieved outside of the limiting confines of party politics than in it:

“I’m not turning to any other party. I see other parties as too focused on their own narrow issues or dogma. Too often this leads to opposition in name only.”

Gibbons would retire from public service a year later in 2023 after 32 years in local politics. During that time, he was elected lord mayor of the Bradford District, became a member of the Wharfedale Music Festival and kickstarted a campaign to save Ilkley Coronation Hospital.

He had also enjoyed a long spell on Ilkley Town Council, where he had sat on every committee and was elected as chairman a total of four times. He was also the town council’s first deputy town mayor in 2018, with Steve Butler being elected as Ilkley’s first town mayor following the decision of the town to replace its status as a parish council with that of a town council.

2021

⚪️ Anne Gillian Hawkesworth, Independent: 29% (elected)

🔵 David Nunns, Conservative: 27%

🟢 Ros Brown, Green Party: 26%

🔴 George Scaife, Labour: 15%

🟡 Steve Spoerry, Liberal Democrats: 2%

The Electoral Commission described the local elections in May 2021 as “one of the most complex sets of polls held in recent times”. The reason? The Covid-19 pandemic, which had resulted in local elections being postponed in 2020 as countries around the world grappled with the biggest global health crisis in years.

Despite the obvious challenges, with varying restrictions still in place – you couldn’t, for instance, socialise indoors outside of your household or bubble, while also being advised to minimise travel as much as you could – turnout was, more or less, commensurate with previous elections.

Although Hawkesworth was re-elected, she received what was then the lowest share of the vote of her political life. Only 29% of voters backed her in 2021 compared with 42% in 2016, 49% in 2012 and 64.3% in 2008.

It was inevitable. Sitting as an independent meant she had closed the door to swathes of locals whose loyalty to the Conservative party would never change (or had changed back after briefly voting for her). But that wasn’t the only reason she was picking up fewer votes.

The Greens, arguably with Brown as its figurehead, were beginning to cut through more dramatically in Ilkley. Brown had ended up in third place with an impressive 26% of the vote, just 1% less than second-place Nunns, while the year before she had received 25%. It was a marked contrast to 2017, when she got only 12%.

With Brown’s eventual election in 2024, which was a record-breaking year for the Greens – the party recorded its biggest haul of councillors ever – and Polanski’s personality-driven style of politics achieving greater cut through with the electorate since 2025, there is every possibility in 2026 the Greens could see their numbers on Bradford Council exceed their wildest expectations (and who knows, maybe even cause more of a stir in Ilkley).

2019

🔵 Kyle Jameson Green, Conservative: 36%

🟢 Ros Brown, Green Party: 25%

🔴 Kath Steward, Labour: 20%

🟡 Thomas Robert Franks, Lib Dems: 18%

The local elections in 2019 were held separately to the general election that year, with the latter emerging over the impasse at Westminster over Brexit. Three years on from the calamitous 2016 referendum, it was clear that the decision to leave the European Union (EU) had so far proved to be a mistake –  nothing more than a complex mess with no tangible payoff to its supporters and opponents (which remains true also almost a decade on). Instead, it had effectively ground parliament to a halt.

The local elections, as per usual, took place in May, but half a year later, a general election was announced. It was argued that it was the only way that the Brexit deadlock could be ended – and the House of Commons agreed.

It would end up going swimmingly well for the Brexiteers and the Conservative Party with Boris Johnson, who had taken over as prime minister from Theresa May in July, being elected as PM with not just a big majority (the biggest in 30 or so years) but a mandate to “get Brexit done”. On 31 January 2020, the UK officially left the EU after 47 years of membership. A YouGov poll from earlier this year found that 61% of Brits saw Brexit as a failure.

That year the Conservative candidate for Ilkley, Kyle Jameson Green, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a “parliamentary and stakeholder engagement professional with a strong record of influencing UK policy and delivering strategic campaigns”, was successfully elected. He was quoted by the Wharfedale Observer ahead of the election as saying:

“I am determined to ensure that Ilkley remains a stunning spa town with a wealth of history and tradition at its core whilst offering the sort of diverse opportunities that all residents deserve – not just over the coming months and years, but for my daughter’s generation and beyond.”

He stepped down in 2023.

2018

🔵 Mike Gibbons, Conservative: 50%

🔴 Aidan David Higgins, Labour: 27%

🟢 Ros Brown, Green Party: 12%

🟡 Thomas Robert Franks, Lib Dems: 11%

With Labour’s Aidan David Higgins some distance away from the top spot – but with a fairly respectable share of the vote (27%) – it was still a walk in the park for Gibbons. As for the Liberal Democrats, Thomas Robert Franks’ third-place finish was standard electoral fare for the party in Ilkley – aka never a serious threat but still able to muster a decent number of voters regardless.

Although support has diminished significantly for the Lib Dems in Ilkley since 2019 – they got 1% in 2024, 3% in 2023 and 4% in 2022 – if 2025’s surprise local elections are anything to go by, there’s no reason why they can’t bounce back here.

Consider the local elections in May 2025. The Lib Dems won 23% of seats and control of three councils with a sizable chunk of those seats coming from the Conservatives. You had to go back to 2008, two years before the disastrous national coalition it had with the Tories, for a comparably stellar performance (that year, under the leadership of Nick Clegg, they picked up 25% of the vote).

Reform UK notwithstanding – although the variable here is that party will have had one year of local government under its belt by May 2026 – not to mention the Greens, there is still some opportunity for the Lib Dems to grow their numbers across the district, even if it’s simply down to the fact that its numbers are presently pretty low.

At the moment they currently have five councillors sitting on Bradford Council: leader Brendan Stubbs (Eccleshill ward), deputy leader Riaz Ahmed (Bradford Moor ward), chief whip Alun Griffiths (Idle and Thackley ward), Aislin Naylor (also Idle and Thackley ward) and Jeanette Sunderland (also Idle and Thackley ward).

In contrast, Labour currently has 46 (the number required for a majority), the Conservatives 14, the Greens 10, the Bradford Independents Group nine and independent councillors six.

2016

⚪️ Anne Gillian Hawkesworth, Independent: 42%

🔵 Paul Marcus Barrett, Conservative: 26%

🔴 Henri Forbes Murison, Labour: 21%

🟢 Claire Darling, Green Party: 6%

🟣 Paul John Latham, UKIP: 4%

🟡 Kay Kirkham, Lib Dems: 2%

What might have seemed like a big test for Hawkesworth, who was contesting the seat as an independent for the first time – she had resigned from Bradford Council’s Conservative group in 2013 after falling out with the then leader Glen Miller – ended up being anything but.

She comfortably retained her seat with the second-place Conservative candidate offering no serious competition. It suggested, somewhat, that even in a Conservative stronghold like Ilkley, personality could, at times, quite easily trump support for the party.

Sort of. Hawkesworth was, as noted above, still politically a conservative, so it wasn’t as if voters were doing away with long-held views. Brown’s election to her seat in 2024 can also be seen through this lens.

Elsewhere this was the last time that Paul John Latham, who had lived in Ilkley since 1984, would stand as a local candidate for UKIP, a party that has, post Brexit, moved radically away from its almost single-issue Eurosceptic days (more on this below).

Although his ambitions for local government appeared to have ended that year, the picture was different nationally. Having previously and unsuccessfully been a candidate in the 2010 and 2015 general elections, Latham once again threw his hat into the ring for Keighley and Ilkley in 2017.

Again he was unsuccessful, ending up in third place with 2% of the vote, behind the Conservatives on 46% and Labour on 47% (John Grogan just about pipped the incumbent Kris Hopkins to be elected as MP). Latham passed away in May 2025 at the age of 77 after a long illness.

2015

🔵 Martin Smith, Conservative: 48% (elected)

🔴 Ann Cryer, Labour: 34%

🟣 Paul John Latham, UKIP: 7%

🟢 Brian Richard Ford, Green Party: 6%

🟡 Michael Robert Thomas Powell, Lib Dems: 5%

Although she announced back in 2008 that she would step down from parliament in the 2010 general election after 13 years as an MP – her seat ended up going to the Conservative Hopkins – it was clear that Ann Cryer wasn’t quite done with politics.

But 2015 wouldn’t be the first local election that she would contest. That happened three years prior, in 2012, when she tried to get elected as a councillor. That year she lost out to Hawkesworth who had pretty much established herself as a town favourite when she was first elected to the seat in 1990 with 54.6% of the vote in what has been a Conservative stronghold.

Cryer, who was 75 at the time, would find herself runner-up again in 2015, losing out this time to the Conservative candidate Martin Smith, who himself had been a familiar face in local politics in both Ilkley and the wider Bradford District. Acknowledging perhaps what then was an impossible task – less so today – it would end up being the last time that Cryer would contest the seat.

Although these days she has long since retired from public political life, Cryer continues to be part of current political discourse, often mentioned, for instance, in relation to grooming gangs. In the very early noughties, in what was her second term as the MP for Keighley, she was alerted to and then shone a spotlight on claims of organised abuse of young girls predominantly by men from a largely Pakistani/Asian background. You can read more about one of the victims, Fiona Goddard, here and here.

Despite bringing attention to grooming gangs in the district – she told Keighley News in 2015 that she went public because she “could not interest Bradford Social Services or West Yorkshire Police” – it was never properly followed up. Reflecting on this period in her life, Cryer told The Yorkshire Post in 2016 that she “almost bust a gut” trying to get Bradford Council and the police to act:

“It was terribly difficult. I just felt at one point that nothing was ever going to happen. I could only assume, rightly or wrongly, that there was too much hesitation about it. It was seen as being racist.”

Over 20 years later, not only has a national inquiry into grooming gangs been announced – with the appointment of a local figure as chair in December making it highly likely that Bradford will get a long overdue inquiry – but the draft terms of reference have requested the panel and team look at how “ethnicity, religion or culture played a role in responses at a local and national level” and to “consider the background (including ethnicity, religion and culture) of perpetrators and victims”.

2014

🔵 Mike Gibbons, Conservative: 52% (elected)

🔴 Sandy MacPherson, Labour: 25%

🟢 Brian Richard Ford, Green Party: 10%

🟡 Peter Alan Ferguson, Lib Dems: 7%

🟣 Paul John Latham, UKIP: 7%

Even during its heyday, support for UKIP in Ilkley had always been on the more marginal side. The 7% that Latham got in 2014 was, as he would again achieve in 2015, as high a share of the vote that the party would ever get in the town.

And with Reform UK absorbing and appealing to a comparably more moderate cohort of its former voters/supporters on the right – UKIP is now very much a far-far right political organisation promoting policies as extreme as remigration to an arguably very different audience – and the Conservatives, more or less, holding their ground with party faithfuls come rain or shine, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll ever achieve similar levels of success in Ilkley.

UKIP did get one seat on Bradford Council that year, though – which was, for the first time in 15 years, now under Labour control –when Brian Morris took the seat for Keighley West (he edged out Labour’s Keith Edward Dredge with 40% of the vote compared to the latter’s 35% share).

Morris would quit the party two years later, telling the Telegraph and Argus that it didn’t have anything to do with the party “as a whole” and that he felt his impending battles with Bradford Council, on behalf of Keigley, made more sense to him sitting as an independent than a UKIP representative. He said:

“From 1974 Keighley and surrounding towns and villages have been part of … Bradford Council and have seen a massive reduction in services, even though our town pays the lion’s share of the taxes collected by Bradford. Services have been reduced. I and many others believe they have been reduced unjustly to benefit the city centre.”

UKIP would, however, do very well in the 2014 European Parliament elections. That year, under the then leadership of Nigel Farage (the party is now headed up by Nick Tenconi, who is also COO of the right wing organisation Turning Point UK), they made history by becoming, somewhat ironically, the largest British party in the EU’s law-making body (the Lib Dems, for wider context, lost 10 out of 11 of its MEPs at that election).

2012

🔵 Anne Gillian Hawkesworth, Conservative: 49% (elected)

🔴 Ann Cryer, Labour: 34%

🟣 Paul John Latham, UKIP: 7%

🟢 Brian Richard Ford, Green Party: 5%

🟡 Peter Alan Ferguson, Lib Dems: 5%

Hawkesworth’s last election as a Conservative councillor was the first real test she had faced since being elected to city hall for Ilkley in 1990. And she wasn’t up against your average wannabe councillor. This time she was up against Cryer, the respected former Labour MP.

Though Tory HQ would have been wary ahead of the count, they really had nothing to worry about. Though Cryer put a serious dent in Hawkesworth’s share of the vote – the latter had previously recorded wins with 64.3% of the vote in 2008 (second place Labour on 14.3%) and 60.6% in 2004 (with the Lib Dem runner up on 20.9%) – she was still 15% short of Hawkesworth’s winning total.

It was therefore an inevitable and respectable second-place finish for Cryer – too far behind to be a serious enough threat to Hawkesworth but still close enough to suggest that there was something in it to give her and her team the confidence to try again three years later. Alas, as noted above, they would find out once again that many people in Ilkley at the time remained dyed-in-the-wool Tories.

One of the main headlines emerging from the local elections across the Bradford District was the seats picked up by the now long-defunct Respect party. In total, it got five seats, one of which had belonged to the late Ian Greenwood, the then Labour leader of Bradford Council (he’d been in charge of the council since 2010 and a councillor for 17 years). It was so close that it took three recounts to settle the contest.

Speaking at the time to the BBC, Greenwood, who would be awarded an OBE in 2013 for services to local government, said:

“I’m sad to lose, obviously, but I’ve been a politician for very many years and some elections you win and some you lose. The people can deliver you into office and they can take that away and I think that all politicians should treat that with the humility that’s appropriate … I’ve never taken it for granted.”

2011

🔵 Martin Smith, Conservative: 53% (elected)

🔴 Neil Fraser, Labour: 28%

🟡 Samuel Edwin Harris, Lib Dems: 13%

🟣 Paul John Latham, UKIP: 6%

It was business as usual in Ilkley, with over 50% of voters turning up for the Conservative candidate Smith, Labour comfortably finishing in second place, the Liberal Democrats expectedly trailing in third and UKIP ending up in a familiar fourth place.

Voters in 2011 weren’t just deciding on who they wanted as their councillors though. They were also letting the coalition government know – namely the liberal democrat side of the uneasy alliance – what they thought about the idea of an “alternative vote” (AV) in a referendum.

It was the first referendum to be held nationally in the UK since 1975, too, when members of the public were asked whether they thought we ought to stay in the European Community (common market). They would vote overwhelmingly to remain (67%).

This time around politicians wanted to see what the appetite was for scrapping the first-past-the-post system. What was being pitched was AV, where instead of voting for a single candidate, you would rank the candidates in order of preference.

In this system, the first preferences are totted up first. If one of the candidates gets more than 50% of the votes, they get elected. If no one gets more than half, the candidate with the fewest votes is cut. The votes for that candidate are then redistributed to the remaining candidates based on who voters had down as their second choice. This goes on and on until the 50% threshold is reached.

Voters weren’t in any mood for this, with 67% voting to reject AV. Clegg, the then leader of the Lib Dems and deputy PM, described the result as a “bitter blow”, adding:

“I wish I could say this was a photo finish but it isn’t, the result is very clear. I’m a passionate supporter of political reform but when the answer is as clear as this, you have got to accept it.”

The Lib Dems would also end up losing 748 councillors in the local elections that year, with many attributing the heavy losses to the party propping up the Conservatives in Number 10. Despite this, they still won three seats on Bradford Council, with one seat for Bolton and Undercliffe and two seats for Idle and Thackley.

2010

🔵 Mike Gibbons, Conservative: 50.6% (elected)

🔴 Andrew Dundas, Labour: 20.4%

🟡 Vaughan Bruce, Liberal Democrat: 18.4%

🟢 David Hesmondhalgh, Green Party: 6.9%

🟣 Paul Latham, UKIP: 3.7%

The local elections in 2010 coincided with what would turn out to be a historic general election that returned no overall majority, leaving the country effectively without a government for five days.

This was because following the election, the Conservatives (who had won 306 seats), Labour (258 seats) and the Liberal Democrats (57 seats) were knee deep in negotiations to resolve the problem of a hung parliament (which had last troubled politicians back in 1974, resulting in a minority Labour government that then went back to the electorate later that year to secure what was in the end a Labour majority and the last time the party would win a general election until 1997).

Recognising that he had run out of steam, the PM, Gordon Brown, eventually conceded defeat, paving the way for David Cameron, then aged 43, to become the youngest PM to be elected since Robert Jenkinson’s election in 1812 (he was 42, slightly younger than Rishi Sunak when he was selected by his colleagues to be PM following Liz Truss’ fleeting but calamitous 49 days in office).

Locally, Labour actually did pretty well. The party made a net gain of 417 councillors compared to a net loss of 121 for the Conservatives and a net loss of 132 for the Lib Dems, according to figures recorded at the time.

It was a similar story for Labour on Bradford Council with the party’s final tally of councillors totalling 39 compared to 32 for the Conservatives and 14 for the Lib Dems. Though they were short of a majority they were able to take control of the council. Ironically they were looking to the Lib Dems for support. Greenwood told the Telegraph & Argus at the time:

“We will talk to the liberals but I live in hope rather than expectation. Our view is that we would be prepared to enter into an agreement with them, but they may well make demands that we are unable to accede to.”

2008

🔵 Anne Hawkesworth, Conservative: 64.3% (elected)

🔴 Andrew Dundas, Labour: 14.3%

🟡 Vaughan Bruce, Liberal Democrat: 11%

🟢 Bryan Websdale, Green Party: 10.4%

The very late 90s and early noughties saw Hawkesworth at the peak of her popularity, comfortably winning one election after the other for Ilkley with over 60% of the vote each time (in 2004 she got 60.6%, in 2000 she got 64.2% and in 1998 she got 65.5%).

She was also arguably at the peak of her political powers, which, two years later, in 2010, culminated with her being elected as leader of the Conservative group on Bradford Council by her fellow party members. It would, however, be short-lived, with her then deputy taking over leadership duties in 2011.

The circumstances surrounding this change caused ruptures in the local branch of the party that would prove irreconcilable. “After he took over, I found myself sitting in the back – which I wasn’t used to,” Hawkesworth told The Ilkley Journal. By 2013, enough was enough:

“I never thought I’d leave the Conservative party. I suddenly got to the point where I thought, no, you’re not interested in climbing up the greasy pole, as Disraeli described it. You’re here for your ward.”

Speaking to the Telegraph & Argus at the time, Miller, who took over as leader, responded to news of Hawkesworth’s resignation by first describing it as a surprise before adding that it was also not that surprising:

“Since losing the position of leader of the conservative group, Anne has played very little part in the group and has even been unsupportive of the Conservative Group in council meetings whilst publicly being critical of national Conservative Party policies without forewarning colleagues and the whips.”

2007

🔵 Martin Smith, Conservative: 58.7% (elected)

🔴 Andrew Dundas, Labour: 21.1%

🟡 Barbara Pierscionek, Liberal Democrat: 12.3%

🟢 Betts Fetherston: Green Party 7.9%

In 2006, the Electoral Administration Act was passed. One of the biggest changes it introduced was that for the first time, teenagers would be able to stand for election as MPs or councillors. Although there had been some curious instances of teens being elected before – for example, Christopher Monck was 13 when he became the MP for Devon in 1667 – up until then, the minimum age had technically been 21.

They would get their chance to shape local government in 2007, with 13 councils in England recording candidates aged between 18 and 21, the BBC reported at the time. Bradford wasn’t one of them.

It was a good set of local elections for the Conservatives, who were a year and a half into Cameron’s leadership (and who was moving the party in the direction of so-called progressive conservatism, which the current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s brand of Toryism is anything but).

They won 927 council seats and 39 councils, compared to a net loss of 642 councillors and 16 councils for Labour – incidentally, Tony Blair was a month away from resigning as PM – and a net loss of 257 seats and four councils for the Lib Dems who were led by the late Ming Campbell at the time (he would resign five months later having only been elected as leader in March 2006. Clegg would replace him at the end of the year).

Ilkley, predictably, turned out another Conservative councillor, as it had in the previous election, as it did in the subsequent election and so on and so on. Smith held onto his seat, increasing his majority from 53.9% in 2004 to 58.7%.

As for Bradford Council, Labour went home with 13 councillors, the Conservatives 10, the Lib Dems six and the Green Party and the BNP one apiece. Among the parties picking up no seats was the Blah! Party. Founded in 2006 by the musician known as Captain Sensible, it offered “a protest vote to the politically disaffected”. A total of 69 voted for its candidate Carl Finlan.

In 2008, it deregistered as a political party. Seabrook Crisps, bizarrely, was briefly a sponsor of the party. “The Blah! Party stands for no-nonsense, straight-talking politics, values that Seabrook firmly identifies with,” it was quoted by Marketing Week as saying back in 2006.

2006

🔵 Colin Powell, Conservative: 58.1% (elected)

🔴 Andrew Dundas, Labour: 23.0%

🟡 Douglas Beaumont, Liberal Democrat: 18.9%

The BBC described the 2006 local election results as “grim” for the Labour Party, which lost 320 seats and 11 councils. The Conservatives, meanwhile, picked up 317 seats and 11 councils, which its then chairman, Francis Maude, described as being “at the top end” of their predictions.

It was a good night for the Greens who won 30 seats (representing a sizable increase of 21), as well as the BNP, which picked up 32 seats (27 more than they had going into the election). Nick Griffin, the far-right party’s leader, was quoted by the BBC at the time as saying that the BNP had picked up support from “people wanting to kick the Labour Party really hard and we’re the politically incorrect way to do it”. He also said:

“We’re not a Nazi party. People can look at our manifesto online and see we’re committed to a libertarian position in many things, and most certainly to the extension, let alone the maintenance of democracy.”

In Bradford, there were echoes of the growing popularity and sympathy for far-right parties and right wing policies among some voters today – and the increasing normalisation of racially charged language and ideas, too – with the Guardian quoting one supporter of the party as saying while he’s not “an out-and-out fascist”, he was of the opinion that the BNP had a role to play in politics. He liked the fact that they “speak the unspeakable”.

The results in Bradford resulted in no single party having overall control of the council, with Labour ending up with the largest number of councillors. The leadership of the council, however, remained with the Conservatives, with Hopkins taking over from Margaret Eaton who had been in charge since 2000 (again with no overall control).

2004

🔵 Anne Hawkesworth, Conservative: 60.6% (elected)

🔵 Brian Smith, Conservative: 53.9% (elected)

🔵 Colin Powell, Conservative: 52.8 (elected)

🟡 Richard Quayle, Liberal Democrat: 20.9%

🟡 Samuel Harris, Liberal Democrat: 19.7%

🔴 Christopher Ramage, Labour: 18.5%

🟡 Tomasz Pierscionek, Liberal Democrat: 17.3%

🔴 Peter Cheney, Labour: 17.3%

🔴 James Pressley, Labour: 15.1%

These were the first local elections to take place in Ilkley and the wider Bradford District following boundary changes (for a perspective on the more recent boundary changes, check out councillor Matt Edwards’ piece here).

Three seats were up for grabs in the town and it was an unsurprising and convincing win for the Conservatives, with their closest rivals, the Liberal Democrats – who appeared to be in their Ilkley heyday in the very early noughties – finishing a relatively distant second.

Although the Conservatives secured 38 seats on Bradford Council, it wasn’t enough for a majority and the local authority remained under no overall control. Second-place Labour bagged 29 seats, the Liberal Democrats picked up 15 and the Greens and the BNP each got four apiece.

The local elections in England and Wales were not held in May that year, as per usual. Instead, they were moved to early June to coincide with the European parliamentary elections. It was to make it more convenient for voters (i.e. no need to head to the ballot box twice) and to encourage a higher turnout.

Labour took a battering nationally in the local elections, losing a whopping 464 seats, with many attributing this to Blair’s support and participation in the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003. The late Labour MP, Robin Cook, who had resigned from the cabinet that year in protest, said after the local elections:

“The tragedy is that hundreds of very good Labour councillors have lost their seats as a result of something which many of them themselves would have opposed.”

The Conservatives, under the leadership of Michael Howard, meanwhile, picked up 288 more councillors, while the Liberal Democrats, under the late Charles Kennedy, secured an extra 123 seats.

Unfortunately, for the Tories, local success in 2004 didn’t translate into national success the following year, with Labour holding on to government with a reduced majority (although there were further gains locally).

Howard resigned and was eventually replaced by Cameron, who would, five years later, return the Conservatives to power, albeit as prime minister of a coalition with the Lib Dems. His legacy? Austerity and Brexit.