by Kevin Meagher

Well, no-one quite saw that coming. Labour’s better-than-expected win in Oldham West and Royton last night defied doom-mongers (myself included) who thought it would be a close-run thing.

In the end, Labour’s Jim McMahon romped home impressively, winning 62 per cent of the vote and a fulsome 10,722 majority.

Part of the reason lies with McMahon himself, the leader of the council and a working-class son of the town. The campaign played heavily on his local connections and credibility, pointedly avoiding Jeremy Corbyn and Westminster controversies.

The scale of the result highlights two abiding truisms for Labour.

First, the party’s ethnic support simply won’t touch UKIP and with the Conservatives and Lib Dems out of contention (despite the fact they ran the council a decade ago), it stays loyal. However, the same goes for many traditional White working-class voters too. Electoral traditional is engrained in places like Oldham.

Yes, many were flirting with UKIP, or agreed with them on issues like immigration, (a sentiment confirmed by Labour canvassers), but they didn’t make the switch in the numbers UKIP and many commentators thought they would.

That’s not to say there aren’t lots of disgruntled Labour voters in Oldham. There are, and many of the journalists predicting a tight result will have met many of them. But tribal loyalties run deep here.

Perhaps there was also something wrong with the tone of UKIP’s campaign. Northern working-class voters have a different temperament to the Southern English. (Perhaps they are less jingoistic?) This is a gut feel rather than anything empirical, but the sour tone of UKIP’s campaign against Jeremy Corbyn probably didn’t chime with them.

The second truism, is that the Labour machine still knows how to run a by-election campaign. The effort here was massively strengthened because the North West regional office has a lot of experience campaigning in Oldham, accumulated over the past decade fending-off the BNP.

It knows how to run an effective postal vote effort and there was no shortage of volunteers making their way to the town. Veteran organisers like Andy Smith and Mike Amesbury, who know the place inside out, show the value and skill of the party’s organising staff.

So what did UKIP do wrong? First, they are clearly still struggling with the tradecraft, the skills needed to run effective campaigns. They can make noise and get noticed, but they aren’t converting this energy into actual votes. This is the story of the general election, when four million votes didn’t translate into seats won.

They also failed to set expectations that winning in an ethnically diverse seat like Oldham West was always a going to be a struggle. Also, they will have known about the number of postal votes that were issued for weeks, so why not make a play of it much earlier in the campaign if it was such a concern?

UKIP is still a threat to Labour in many other seats and it is foolish to write them off. They will continue to breathe down the party’s neck, even after this lacklustre performance. The collapse of the Conservatives and Lib Dem vote in so many seats makes that inevitable.

Labour won the Battle of Oldham decisively, but there will be many more to fight in the years to come.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Uncut

Tags: Jeremy Corbyn, Jim McMahon, Kevin Meagher, Oldham West and Royton by-election, UKIP

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