Bassetlaw District

There are 68 parishes in Bassetlaw. The two main settlements of Retford and Worksop are the only areas of the district that are unparished.

The constituency was created in 1885 by the Redistribution of Seats Act. Bassetlaw was for many years a safe seat for the Labour Party. Labour first won the seat in the 1929 general election. However its Member of parliament Malcolm MacDonald was one of the few Labour MPs to join his father Ramsay MacDonald's National Government. MacDonald held the seat as a National Labour candidate in the 1931 election, but was defeated at the next election in 1935 by Labour's Frederick Bellenger.

The constituency was held by the Labour Party until December 2019, when the incumbent Labour MP John Mann stood down to take on a full-time role as the government’s antisemitism tsar. He was later given a life peerage in Theresa May's resignation honours list, styling himself Baron Mann, of Holbeck Moor in the City of Leeds. In the 2019 general election the Conservative Party candidate Brendan Clarke-Smith won the seat with the biggest swing in the election, turning a 4,852 Labour majority into a 14,013 Conservative majority and becoming the first non-Labour MP to represent the constituency in 90 years.[2]

Members of Parliament:

• 1929-1935 Malcolm MacDonald (Labour, National Labour)
• 1935-1968 Frederick Bellenger (Labour)
• 1968-2001 Joe Ashton (Labour)
• 2001-2019 John Mann (Labour)
• 2019-current Brendan Clarke-Smith Conservative

Bassetlaw District Council was founded in 1973 with the first elections to the council taking place in 1973. At these elections the Labour gained control. From 1976 to 1979, no party had overall control, until the 1979 local elections in which Labour gained control once more. Labour went on to control the council for 25 years until once again no party had overall control (2004 to 2006). In 2006, the Conservatives gained control and held control until 2010 when a series of by-election defeats caused them to lose their majority. In 2011 Labour gained control of the council for the first time in seven years. In 2015 the District Council changed to all-out elections with the entire Council's seats being up for election.

The election on 2 May 2019 resulted in the Labour Party retaining its control of the council with an increased majority. The Conservative Party suffered its worst defeat in Bassetlaw since 1973, winning only 5 seats of the 12 seats it was defending. Both Independents and Labour gained seats from the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats gained a seat from Labour in East Retford West, the first Liberal Democrat elected in Bassetlaw since 2006.[3]