Ukip is the big by-election issue between now and May 2015
Me and our kid and our kid’s mate,
We went down to the Wythenshawe estate.
That’s where we get our kicks,
Throwing bricks on the M56!
A satirical piece sung – and maybe composed – by one or two of my mates from my old school in Manchester during the 1970s. It was inspired presumably by Nat King Cole’s Route 66. The song has stuck in my memory ever since. I confess even to singing it out loud now and then.
Sprawling estate
Wythenshawe, to the south of Manchester, is a huge, sprawling overspill estate built on green fields during the mid-twentieth century to house the city’s growing population, and also to accommodate people moved out during the slum clearances of the 1960s.
In its day it was one of the biggest council estates in Europe – mile after mile of simple local authority homes. Depressing, deprived, and the scene in 2007 of the famous moment when David Cameron made a visit to promote his “Broken Britain” theme, only for a local hoodie to make a gesture behind his back pretending to shoot him.
Until 1964 this area actually had a Conservative MP (Eveline Hill), before the Wythenshawe estate turned it solid Labour. She was succeeded by Labour’s Alf Morris, who was best known as a parliamentary champion for disabled people. After 1997 the MP was Paul Goggins, a former minister from the Blair-Brown years who, despite being a Manchester City fan, was extremely pleasant and very popular locally. He died suddenly last month at the age of only 60. Hence this by-election.
With nobody able confidently to predict the outcome of the next general election, much of the political weather of the remaining 15 months of this parliament will depend on where the by-elections fall. And the big question in almost every case will be how Ukip fares. If a by-election crops up in the right place, I can easily see Ukip getting its first elected MP.
But not, I feel, in Wythenshawe and Sale East. Labour’s man, Mike Kane, seems obsessed – when he talks to people, and in his leaflets – by one issue, the state of the A&E department at Wythenshawe Hospital. But his party is too entrenched locally for a major upset.
Ukip will nonetheless poll well, and probably get a vote in the 20 per cent range, as they did in many of the by-elections of 2012 and 2013. At the 2010 general election the Conservatives and Lib Dems came second and third in this seat, on 25.6 per cent and 22.4 per cent respectively (to Labour’s 44.1 per cent). I expect Ukip (just 3.5 per cent in 2010, behind the BNP) to eat into much of the support of all three establishment parties.
The Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election candidates are:
John Bickley, UKIP
Captain Chaplington-Smythe, Official Monster Raving Loony
Daniel Critchlow, Conservative
Mary di Mauro, Liberal Democrat
Mike Kane, Labour
Eddy O’Sullivan, BNP
Nigel Woodcock, Green
The Ukip threat
It’s too simple to see Ukip as merely a threat to the Conservatives, as two interesting statements this week tacitly acknowledged. Labour’s Douglas Alexander revealed his party was taking on new staff to do research on Ukip, while Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg declared there are now only 100 days to stop Ukip becoming a “permanent force” in British politics (at the European elections on 22 May).
It may seem odd to some people that Ukip should take Liberal Democrat votes when the parties’ positions are so very different on the two big Ukip issues – Europe and immigration – and indeed almost everything else. But whereas until 2010 the Lib Dems were the protest party, now it’s Nigel Farage (pictured above) and his merry men.
Ukip’s John Bickley will pick up many Labour votes too, campaigning on the theme that Labour has betrayed the working class. One controversial Ukip leaflet, in Labour red, lists Labour’s millionaires, including Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, though the shadow home secretary told me when she visited on Monday that the claim that she and her husband are millionaires is “nonsense”. But the “millionaires” line has struck a chord, mentioned to me by more than one traditional Labour voter.
And you can also add to Ukip’s figure, many people who have not voted for any party for decades, disillusioned and cheesed off with the whole political establishment.
The Tories have taken quite a risk here. Their man, an Anglican vicar called Daniel Critchlow, is young – just 26 – and very raw, somewhat inclined to say the first thing that comes into his head. His lacklustre campaign, which dwells on local issues such as rubbish bins, graffiti and potholes, will inevitably help Ukip. The Tories, who have three councillors at the Sale end of the seat (on Trafford council) may have calculated that a low-key effort was the best way of embarrassing Labour. But a good Ukip vote would surely give the Tories’ most irritating rivals a big fillip ahead of May’s big Euro and local elections.
The Lib Dems, as in most recent by-elections, can expect a very poor result. The only Liberal Democrat posters we’ve seen are on the candidate’s house, and that of her next door neighbour. Mary di Mauro, a Manchester councillor, is an engaging personality, but admits her campaign has been run from her “dining room table”.
It shows the transformation of Lib Dem fortunes in recent times that if there’d been a by-election here in 2008 or 2009, they’d probably have won it, given that the constituency borders two existing Lib Dem seats – Manchester Withington and Cheadle. Now all they can expect is another lost deposit.
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