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Posts Tagged ‘UKIP’

Labour is in danger of being the big loser in EU referendum

05/06/2016, 12:17:25 PM

by David Ward

Labour been largely out of the limelight in recent weeks as the EU referendum approaches. So savage has been the feuding on the Tory benches, Labour almost seems like a confused onlooker at a wedding where a punch up has broken out among other people’s relatives.

Perhaps because of this a strange mood seems to have broken out among some activists and commentators. Labour supporters laugh behind their sleeves at the latest developments. In the Times a few days ago, Adam Boulton speculated “If the Tory civil war rages on, Jeremy Corbyn may not be so unelectable after all, especially if he can forge some kind of red-tartan coalition”.

In these idle daydreams one imagines the timeline would begin with a narrow remain win, sparking a Conservative leadership challenge. The challenge finishes Cameron, or fatally wounds him, and an unpopular brexiteer is picked to replace him for the next election. Who knows if Labour would win, but it looks more winnable. And that can only be a good thing right?

Maybe, but maybe not. Let’s think these scenarios through. Let’s imagine Cameron is challenged for the leadership this year. There’s no guarantee he would lose. He would then be a Prime Minister who had faced down his own party twice and just won a renewed mandate as leader. He could use the opportunity to renege on his promise to step down. Or wait for the economy to improve and pass on to a preferred successor.

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How loud will Jamie Reed’s ‘quiet crisis’ get?

24/05/2016, 09:33:03 PM

In a series of posts, Uncut writers look at the constituencies featured in Labour’s Identity Crisis, England and the Politics of Patriotism. Here, Jonathan Todd gives his perspective on Copeland.

“Under leaden skies and beneath the ground a culture of solidarity, independence, community self-reliance and ambition was forged,” writes Jamie Reed of his constituency, Copeland, where I grew up.

Whitehaven, the town where I was born, Reed notes, “was north west England’s most important centre of early Methodism as John Wesley used the town as the starting point for his travels to Ireland and the Isle of Man.” While Whitehaven is a rugby league town, I was more football than rugby league as a child, watching matches both at Holker Street, home of Barrow AFC, a non-league club since the 1970s, and Brunton Park, Carlisle United’s ground, a lower league club for much of its history.

Nowhere does Labour more need to listen and change, according to Reed, than, “in our rugby league towns and lower league football cities, in the places most people have heard of, but never been to.” In places, in other words, like Whitehaven, Barrow and Carlisle.

“Daily life looks and feels very different in our de-industrialised towns, struggling rural villages and smaller cities and these communities are now engulfed in a quiet crisis – not just in the north of England, but in every part of our country.”

We picketed a County Council meeting when I was at primary school to keep the school open. While tiny, the school remains. Two pubs, two banks, and two petrol stations have departed the village or thereabouts in the intervening period. “These jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back,” as Springsteen sings in My Hometown.

In the sense that the primary school was threatened 30 years ago, we might react to Reed’s ‘quiet crisis’ by asking, if localities are perennially threatened, is it a new crisis so much as an ongoing, inevitable way of life in an ever more urban country?

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The hypocrisy of Brexiteers who moan about Project Fear is ridiculous

09/03/2016, 10:33:56 PM

by Samuel Dale

A few years ago I had an interesting lunch at the East India Club in Pall Mall.

I was a guest of then-Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom and was joined by Janice Atkinson, before she was an MEP.

It was an enjoyable meal and they were both good company.

But look at us now. Bloom was kicked out of UKIP just days later when he hit Channel 4’s Michael Crick over the head and called a room of women sluts.

Atkinson became an MEP but was expelled for expenses irregularities. She had also insulted a Thai constituent as a “ting tong”. She later apologised.

And me? A forlorn Blairite journalist in the era of hard left Corbynite dominance. All of us disgraced within our own parties!

Politically, I couldn’t be further from Atkinson and Bloom but they are not always wrong.

For example, at the said lunch Bloom told me that UKIP should support Scottish independence as so much of the SNP’s arguments resembled Ukip’s anti-EU points.

At the very least, Bloom opposed UKIP campaigning forcefully to keep the UK together.

He pointed out how easy it would be to brand them hypocrites when big business opposed an EU exit in the same way they opposed Scottish independence.

Godfrey, we don’t agree on much but you were right.

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Voters want security at home, at work and for the country. Right now, Labour’s not offering it

02/03/2016, 02:18:22 PM

by Ian Moss

The course to the next election seems set, unless the Labour party decides to re-engage with the basics of being a political party. The Conservatives will have a significant majority whoever leads them and the opposition vote will splinter – to the SNP in Scotland and in the rest of the country a smattering to Labour, a rump to UKIP and loose change to a Liberal Democrat party that left power regretting it so much that it fled without a credible position to challenge from.

Historic generational support for Labour has been broken in Scotland. The Midlands is also weak for Labour, and the north will go next. Voters that would have turned out for “anything with a red rosette on” are taking a look at Labour and will decide it is time to give up their unconditional support. Instead of having a healthy core to build on, Labour is redefining its core. It risks setting a ceiling on its support through its ongoing mission to alienate voters that disagree with the narrow, ideological view of the world its leadership has championed since 1980.

The first past the post system means parties have to build a coalition before they go to the polls. The only way back to victory for Labour is working across the soft left to the centre to build an electoral block that can challenge for 35-40% of the votes. The Conservative party attracted UKIP voters back to its own coalition with the threat of a Miliband government. Labour has its own UKIP problem which is currently more intractable unless it can re-connect with the working class, small businesses and people who work in trades in its heartlands.

The Conservative party has set its strategy for Labour under Corbyn in one slogan: a “threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security”. Slogans don’t work if they don’t go with the grain of people’s thoughts.

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If Jeremy Corbyn wants to do some lasting good, he should take a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book

14/12/2015, 12:18:08 PM

by Samuel Dale

Labour Uncut editor Atul Hatwal recently wrote an excellent blog about how Trump has shifted the Overton window of US politics with his plan to ban Muslims from entering the US.

First came the condemnation.

But now politicians such as Ted Cruz and influential commentators such as Piers Morgan and Rupert Murdoch are already triangulating.

“Yes, Trump has probably gone too far but Obama needs to do more on Muslims. A lot more,” so their argument goes. They triangulate. The sweet spot of political discourse (unless you are Nick Clegg).

The debate is then reframed and policy is made in a different political context, which over time translates into a different nation. That’s what outriders like Trump do.

There are lessons for the UK.

There were outriders in the last parliament. The SNP did it with Scottish independence, Ukip did it with an EU exit and Ed Miliband did it with his focus on inequality.

The SNP have got devo-max, Ukip have a Eurosceptic government & EU renegotiation while Ed Miliband has George Osborne stealing many of his ideas.

Let’s be clear: they are all losers. But they moved debate and that is a form of success.

Jeremy Corbyn is a loser too. He will never be prime minister. He will never come close to be prime minister.

But he can go down in UK history – like the SNP, Ukip and Ed Miliband – as a loser who shifted the debate.

He should take a leaf out of the Trump playbook and pick a position way outside the mainstream that will shock the nation and jolt politicians into occupying the space he leaves behind.

He must be specific. And I have a suggestion for him: be the anti-Trump. Cobryn could and should issue the following statement:

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Let’s not kid ourselves. Labour won in Oldham despite Jeremy Corbyn

04/12/2015, 05:34:06 PM

by Atul Hatwal

By any measure, Labour passed the Oldham West test last night. Almost an 11,000 majority, an increased share of the vote and an increased percentage lead. Job done.

So does this mean Jeremy Corbyn is in fact electorally viable?

Of course not.

Here are three takeaways from the result.

1.Politics is local if you’ve got a local candidate

Jim McMahon was a very good candidate made exceptional because of his local roots.

Often candidates will strain to demonstrate a local connection.

Having spent a couple of years at college in the town several decades earlier, lived nearby for a bit, once stopped at the motorway services – any link is seized upon to claim local authenticity and disguise the reality that the candidate actually works in London, in politics, as a party adviser, union official or lobbyist.

In contrast, Jim McMahon was the real deal.

His name recognition on the doorstep was off the charts. Through his work as leader of the council and daily family life in the town, he personally knew hundreds of voters and thousands knew someone who knew him.

The word back from canvassers was that whatever voters’ thought of Jeremy Corbyn – usually not a lot – Jim McMahon was uniformly well regarded.

Labour’s campaign was distinguished as being a Corbyn-free zone. One appearance at the start and one picture hidden on the back of a leaflet does not tell a tale of local Labour faith in the leader.

This was Jim McMahon’s win.

2.Oldham West and Royton should never have been under threat

At the general election, Labour won Oldham West and Royton with a majority of almost 15,000. Self-evidently it’s one of Labour’s safest seats.

Since May, the Tories have been in turmoil over tax credits, are split from top to bottom over Europe and are in the early stages of a leadership civil war.

That a Labour victory should even have been doubted is illustrative of the disaster which has befallen the party.

If Oldham West and Royton was to be lost in a national poll, on a uniform swing, Labour would be reduced to 60 seats.

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Why did Labour do so well in Oldham?

04/12/2015, 02:12:10 PM

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.

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Labour needs to harden its line on immigration

24/05/2015, 07:56:25 PM

by Robert Williams

Labour’s defeat feels even more crushing a couple of weeks after the election. There have been any number of reason postulated to explain why we lost. Too new, too old Labour, too left wing, too right wing.

Certainly on the right, many believe the reason Labour lost is because its agenda was far too left wing. This argument is summed up by Tony Blair who claimed last year that when “a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, you get the traditional result”.

Before the election the consensus view was that UKIP would cost Labour votes, and the Tories seats. That was one of many predictions the political class got wrong. Labour’s vote share in seats across the Midlands, seats it should have won, and also in the ones it lost, generally went up slightly or didn’t move. Neither did the Conservative vote share. The LibDems collapsed completely and UKIP saw their vote soar. They are now second in over 100 seats. Of course, in individual seats there are different stories, but this is accurate as a trend. We are nowhere near recovering the trust of Middle England and we have lost a large segment of the White working and lower middle class vote.

Why did Labour lose? Ed Miliband was part of it, certainly. Savage attacks in the media over five long years didn’t help, but it is also true that he is part of an Oxbridge metropolitan establishment that has dominated the Labour Party for years, and is absolutely out of touch with voters. We lost because, outside London, we are seen as more out of touch than the privately educated millionaires in a Conservative cabinet. That is no mean feat.

We lost, too, because Labour is still blamed for the unprecedented increase in immigration over the last decade and a half, and for ignoring the concerns of voters. Whether mocking tweets of “white van man” and his St George flags in Rochester, comments about bigots in Rochdale (yes, memories are long when it comes to insults), all the way up from Kent and along the M1 corridor from Hendon to Leeds, Labour was perceived as elitist, obsessed with identity politics, gay rights, minority rights, rights without responsibilities.

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Reasons to be cheerful, 1, 2, 3…

11/05/2015, 07:00:37 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Of course, it would be pretty difficult to pen a piece entitled: ’10 reasons it’s not as bad as it seems for Labour,’ but as the dust settles on last Thursday’s calamitous result, there is cause for optimism – cautious optimism – that the task of rebuilding Labour’s position is not as hopeless as many assume.

Policy isn’t a mess

First off, the party’s positioning in terms of its policy offer is actually pretty good. The manifesto was not “the longest suicide note in history” as 1983’s version was famously described. Sure, there’s work to do in dialling-down some of the rhetoric that has made it so easy to characterise the party as anti-business, but Jon Cruddas, Miliband’s policy supremo, must have had an eye on the long term because there is a lot here to salvage (apart from that wretched headstone).

By way of illustration, there was no real moment during the campaign where a Labour policy unravelled under scrutiny, or different shadow ministers found themselves saying different things. That’s what commonly used to happen in the 1980s.

And for those pointing out that, electorally, Labour is now 100 seats behind the Tories, just as it was in 1987, consider that, back then, the party was committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. Ed Miliband was promising to renew Trident. There is no massive internecine struggle in prospect in order to get policy in the right place.

SNP and UKIP insurgencies will fade

Nicola Sturgeon and the unresigned Nigel Farage, now have it all to prove. Both parties haven’t so much evolved as exploded out of the test tube.

Both have benefitted from charismatic leaders exploiting their (relative) outsiderness and a (temporary) decline in the fortunes of the mainstream parties.

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Five dangers for Labour as the finish line approaches

06/05/2015, 10:10:03 AM

by Rob Marchant

And so the election goes down to the wire.

A shaky start for Labour; then two very good weeks; and now a late push by the Tories takes us to the photo finish. The Tories look better for winning the most seats; but Labour seems to have a better shot at forming a government.

It seems that the slightest gust of wind may decide who forms the next government. But for that very reason, both parties must tread very carefully. Here are a list of five dangers for Labour as the finish line approaches.

One: UKIP collapse and last-minute swings to the Tories

While we might, as good left-wingers and non-xenophobes, be delighted to see Nigel Farage apparently getting his comeuppance, we should be careful of what we wish for. Most of the votes which disappear from the UKIP section of the ballot paper reappear as “X”s in the box marked The Conservative Party. That is, UKIP’s collapse is highly dangerous for Labour.

As Lord Ashcroft’s final round of polling in marginal constituencies shows, there is a clear swing back to the Tories, where Labour was far ahead for most of the last year. The pattern is exemplified by Croydon Central: in six months, there has been a ten per cent swing from Labour to Tory, nine of which can be attributed to a collapse in the UKIP vote. Many more cases like that and Labour is in deep trouble.

What can Labour do? Not much. Get out the vote, and cross our fingers.

Two: the SNP

Not before time, Labour has finally started to hit the SNP where it hurts: in the fundamental futility of their message, that another referendum is more important than solving Scotland’s problems. And the thuggishness of some of their supporters, on- and offline.

But they still have the capacity to hurt Labour a lot – in fact, were it not for the SNP’s unexpected surge, Miliband would probably be measuring up the rooms at No. 10 for furniture as we speak.

What can we do? More of the same. We will not do well, but we may avoid a wipeout.

Three: poor judgement calls

Some have argued that Ed Miliband being interviewed by Russell Brand, a comedian noted for previously urging young and impressionable people not to vote, was a good way to tap into his millions of Twitter followers and YouTube viewers, and claim their votes.

It was not. It was no more a good idea than Neil Kinnock appearing in Tracey Ullman’s video of “My Guy” in 1984 (lovingly preserved on YouTube here). It is always a temptation for politicians to try and borrow celebrity glamour, and sometimes it can work. But it must be managed.

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