Tagged with Heywood & Middleton by-election

How to eradicate UKIP

farage in dustbinThere’s a toxic purple blot on the electoral landscape. Even Madagascan lemurs knew Douglas Carswell would vault his by-election. Marrying a generally well-liked, rooted MP to an anti-politics insurgency was always going to be a rocket from the Clacton crypt. And so the kippers have their first elected member, but what a strange fish he is. UKIP’s odour of prejudice and small mindedness does not attach itself to Carswell.

Don’t get me wrong, his politics are bunk. They are tasteless warm ups for oligarchy with democratic-sounding trimmings, but racism and sexism are not morsels you would find among his unappetising dish. Carswell’s politics were not cooked up on the Great Bigot Bake Off. Quite how his idiosyncracies would sit with the dog whistles and despair of the dominant stop-the-world brigade remains to be seen. If UKIP don’t get a wider breakthrough next May, I’d venture to say “not very long”. Continue reading →

The lessons of Heywood & Middleton

UKIP bandwagonThe by-election result in Heywood & Middleton in the Manchester conurbation is deeply worrying for Labour. It is true that people take liberties in by-elections that they would be unlikely to take in general elections, but it is designed to show their real underlying feelings which it would be unwise to discount or explain away. It is also true that Labour’s proportionate share of the vote rose by 1%, but that was largely because the Tory vote fell dramatically and the LibDem vote plummeted, and it doesn’t explain why the UKIP vote rose by 35%. The real reason for this disturbing result is the disillusionment felt by so many working class people in Labour’s northern strongholds that they have been neglected and that their interests have not been properly represented by the Westminster establishment (shades of the No vote in the Scottish referendum). This was expressed poignantly on the doorstep as ‘the Tories are going to continue with cuts till 2020, and you’ve said you will do the same, so why should we vote for you?’ Continue reading →

Labour needs to make an offer to working class voters, not a shift to the right

enoch powell & nigel farageIn the wake of the Clacton and Heywood & Middleton by-election results, the inhabitants of the Westminster bubble are plunging into a frenzy of speculation. In particular, they are revelling in making each other’s flesh crawl with hysteria about the UKIP menace. Within the Labour Party the cry is to “respond” to UKIP by moving right on welfare and immigration. But, before getting swept away with this narrative, it might be useful to inject some facts.

First, working class alienation from the Labour Party is real, but it entirely predates the rise of UKIP.  It actually has its origins in the New Labour era. It is ironic that the people, who are now most vehement about re-connecting with our core voters, are Labour right wingers of the New Labour persuasion. I served on the National Executive of the Labour Party in the nineteen nineties when New Labour was in all its pomp and power. But, whenever you raised core Labour voters then, you were dismissed. Those people you were told “had nowhere else to go“. Continue reading →