The dust has settled on the Sleaford and North Hykeham byelection with the depressing outcome that a party, comfortably second at the last general election, is now fourth, with a huge mountain to climb.
So many aspects of the campaign were positive. It was great to have such a fantastic team from East Midlands region, together with the ever-present Vernon Coaker, working hard in what’s generally regarded as an unwinnable seat. Our candidate, Jim Clarke, too, with his working class credentials and easy manner was a boon to those trying to get him elected.
Thanks must also go to the keen volunteers from neighbouring constituencies who made the journey and pitched in. With an active membership that rarely reaches double figures, and that spread over an area of some 400 square miles, covering so much ground is something we’ve never done before. The canvass returns and sampling we’ve gained will set us up for years to come. It was wonderful to see so many, and it’s clear one of the best ways rural Labour parties can prosper is through such mutual assistance with stand-alone campaigns.
A handful of members of parliament and shadow ministers visited and made good photo opportunities. I’d particularly applaud Andy McDonald and Jon Ashworth. The leader’s ‘stump’ speech early in the campaign was inspired, and took the front page of the local paper. Unfortunately though, too many shadow ministers were absent from the fray, and gifts to a capable opposition went begging.
Whilst Sleaford & North Hykeham was cast as the ‘Brexit’ byelection, nobody in the leader’s office thought it might be a good idea to send someone from the shadow Brexit team to address the issue locally. In an area with such a high RAF presence the shadow defence team were a no show. Nobody from Work and Pensions thought it necessary to come and talk about low wage work, and zero-hour contracts in the agriculture sector. Where, too, was the deputy leader whose role it is to motivate the grassroots?
Whilst our local campaign in the towns of Sleaford and North Hykeham were excellent, and brought some success, the countryside was left untroubled. Large working-class villages where United Kingdom Independence party continues to make inroads had to be ignored through lack of manpower. The more affluent villages, populated by educated Remain voters, were even further down the priority list.
It’s simply not possible to cover most of these places on foot during a short campaign, and this is where a good national media strategy is vital. These are voters reached only by mainstream television and newspapers, and in the absence of a charismatic leadership, and frontbench team who crave the media eye at every opportunity, our message just doesn’t get heard. As a result we ended up being wiped out in small villages where we’d routinely expect to pick up ten percent of the vote.
In my opinion too, our position on Brexit was too heavily pro-Leave; a difficult sell for an overwhelmingly Remain activist base, while sending educated middle-class Labour voters scurrying away to the Lib Dems who cashed in on it. We were left competing for Leave votes with parties which are far more convincingly pro-Brexit.
As many have said before, Sleaford & North Hykeham is a Tory area. With that I won’t disagree, but where’s the ambition to change it? Certainly not with the national party machine. As a local Labour activist on the ground it was hard to escape the feeling that we’d been written off before we even started. There was no polished byelection fighting machine that swung into action. No national coordinators anxiously looking at their watches, ensuring that everything was done just so.
Yet here, historically, Labour has always been the second party. A position we held comfortably in 2015, but which we have now lost. And the cost of this neglect? Come the boundary changes, North Hykeham will move into ultra-marginal Lincoln, and sadly we’ll bequeath them a tiny Labour vote as a result of the national party’s almost total indifference to rural constituencies.
This all adds up to a catastrophic failure of leadership, and it’s there that the buck must stop. We can argue all we like about whether the party goes to the left or the centre, but it doesn’t alter the fact that there’s no discernible media strategy. Being a credible opposition requires full time commitment, and it’s blindingly obvious that the hard graft is not getting done. The whole outfit is inept, lazy, and amateurish. The leader and his acolytes need to own that.
But it’s no good tippy-toeing around the fact that even if we had a faultless media-savvy approach and clear policies, when time after time our own voters tell us they’re staying home because of the leader himself, there’s only one way forward.
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Christabel Edwards is a member of Progress
While Nigel Farage was being shown on Question Time for what thus became more times than anyone else apart from David Dimbleby, the votes were being counted in that fairly rare thing, a safe Conservative seat that had voted heavily Leave. UKIP’s candidate entirely failed to defeat the Theresa May soundalike that the Conservatives had put up. People who care that much about Brexit, such that it would affect their vote at a parliamentary election, have already been voting UKIP throughout the present decade, at least.
How numerous are they? Well, UKIP has never won a seat from the Conservatives except with the sitting MP as its candidate, it has only ever done that twice, it has lost one of those seats back to the Conservatives, and it has never won a seat from anyone else at all. UKIP now has fewer members than Momentum. The only UKIP politician whom any normal person could name has instead become a Stateside superstar who fancies himself as a Middle East Peace Envoy. On Saturday, he took to the pages of The Guardian in order to deride UKIP’s members and supporters as “low-grade people”.
Peter Whittle is allowed on the airwaves more often than his supposed boss, Paul Nuttall, a figure perfectly designed to antagonise Northerners and Southerners alike, the working classes and the middle classes alike, left-wing and right-wing voters alike, Labourites and Tories alike. At least Whittle might keep on board those Southern, middle-class, right-wing, basically Tory voters whose support has hitherto provided UKIP with such momentum, so to speak, as it has ever had.
They have no desire for a party that wants to appeal to traditional Labour voters in the North, and they have no understanding of the consolidation of the anti-Labour minority vote in Labour areas, something that in any case would rarely or never translate into parliamentary seats. Arron Banks is about to offer those existing UKIP supporters something far more to their taste, and vastly better resourced. Although that might not be a political party.
Having been laughed out of the South last year, UKIP’s last hope is that it will make inroads in the North, about which it believes everything that it is told by resident right-wing pub bores and by their transplanted children in the London media. Either by declining to contest the Leigh by-election, or by doing so and losing it, Nuttall will destroy both his own political career and his party. We are living in the last months of UKIP. How many months it has left is now wholly a matter for Andy Burnham.
Yes we certainly need a central strategic vision matched by the energy to improve our prospects in most of these less hopeful type of communities. After all most of Britain is made up of these non city areas.
The Labour candidates were Tory-lite. We’d have done better with socialist candidates.
The one at Sleaford seems to have been Left, but the one at Richmond Park was trying for the wrong House. He’d make a good Labour Peer. Labour was only contesting the seat at all because of Red Labour’s intervention. Barnaby Marder deserved the nomination, and he would at least have taken more votes than there were members of the CLP.