UKIP and Labour



Janice Turner wrote an interesting column for The Times the other day in which she highlighted the impact UKIP is making in the former Labour stronghold of Doncaster, home town of the author and parliamentary constituency of the Labour leader, Ed Miliband.

Janice Turner: Why Nigel Farage has his tanks parked in my home town

Delegates show their support at Doncaster
Gareth Fuller/PA Wire


By Janice Turner - The Times

I learnt not to discuss politics with my father in the last decade of his life. Every social wrong came back to “the immigrants”. We’d argue, words turning ugly, I’d get upset by his anger and bitterness. I suspect when far-right populists the English Democrats sparked up in Doncaster winning the mayoralty in 2009 it was with my dad’s postal vote.

Yet he’d voted Labour his whole life. The party was in his bones; his first job aged 14 was as a colliery weighman, his mother, a Labour parish councillor, baked pies for hungry families in the Depression. “There’s no such thing as ‘the good old days’,” he’d say. Watching Crackerjack with me, he’d marvel at its audience of well-nourished children with perfect white teeth, a sign to him of miraculous social progress.

The north is no homogenous mass. But my north, around the long-dead South Yorkshire coalfields and heavy engineering works that fuelled the Industrial Revolution and built the Flying Scotsman, is solidly white working class. Doncaster is the largest English conurbation without a university. Unlike neighbouring Sheffield, with its student culture and Nick Clegg-voting middle class, it has barely a bookshop. Graduate jobs are few: bright kids go to university and don’t come back.

It is by no means — as Matthew Parris painted Clacton — a dead-end place, but when Doncaster tried and failed to get city status I thought: who were you kidding? Like Rochdale or Rotherham or Barnsley, it is decidedly a town.

And it has long been Labour. Now the town’s three MPs are all party top-brass: chief whip Rosie Winterton, shadow energy minister Caroline Flint and Ed Miliband himself in Doncaster North, where I grew up and where my mum still lives. On the local council, apart from a few Tories from the prettier suburbs, there has been no proper opposition to decades of unbroken Labour rule. This corpulent, close-knit complacency bred corruption, leading to the 1997 Donnygate scandal in which councillors were jailed for receiving bribes to approve development on green-belt land. Moreover, even before the Rotherham scandal, Doncaster was deemed by government unfit to run its own children’s services.

So when Nigel Farage declared that Ukip’s conference was in Doncaster “to park his tanks on Labour’s lawns”, I wondered what had taken him so long. Analysis of Ukip’s growth has always focused on the defection of Tory voters — and MPs — but for years I’ve thought that in places like Doncaster, where people yearn to give Labour a kicking but would never vote Tory, a populist right-wing party could clean up.

Last summer my mother’s next door neighbour, a delivery driver, asked if I thought Nigel Farage would win the next general election. He didn’t believe my answer: all his friends and work mates loved Nigel. And in May’s Euro elections, Ukip came first in Doncaster; in the local elections they were just 6 per cent behind Labour, winning a seat then another in a subsequent by-election. Even in Edlington, a very poor former pit village, and run-down Bentley, where Ed Miliband has his constituency HQ, they ran Labour a very spirited second.

In their book Revolt on the Right, Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin list the traits of potential Ukip voters: white, blue collar, older men who left school without qualifications. Doncaster has them in abundance. They and their forefathers were princes of industry: miners, skilled men with decent wages and, within their communities, great social prestige. Now they struggle on the economic edges, driving minicabs and working in retail distribution centres or left to fester on invalidity benefits to keep unemployment figures down.

These are the heartland support from which Tony Blair had to distance himself from to win the aspirational southern middle class. New Labour liked working-class votes but not the working classes socially conservative values: their hang-’em-high views on crime, hatred of welfare scroungers and inward-looking, unmetropolitan suspicion of most things foreign.

When Ed Miliband applied as candidate for Doncaster North, local party officers made him stand on their doorsteps to put his case. They wouldn’t let a north London carpetbagger who knew nowt about Doncaster into their homes. Yet he won for all his outsiderness because he had top-level government connections, promised Gordon Brown would campaign in the constituency — he briefly dropped by — and promised great things for South Yorkshire which many believe never happened.

Now, as I walk about Doncaster market on a bustling Saturday morning, I can’t find a single Ed Miliband fan. The recurrent theme is: “What does he know about us?” In Trades, the ritzy revamped Labour club in the Frenchgate Centre, I talk to a group of retired men who shake their heads at his wealth. “MPs in the days of Nye Bevin used to be working men,” says Len. “Now they’re all public schoolboys and lawyers.”

And the issue everyone mentions first, without fail, is immigration. I hear: “Why should I pay income tax on my work pension at 86 when we give money to foreigners?” Or: “It’s about fairness: we’ve paid into the system all our lives, these people just turn up.”

By “them” they mean Eastern Europeans. Not so much the Poles, who are attracted by daily flights to Robin Hood airport from Warsaw and who are “grafters”; even a very angry BNP voter concedes that the Poles on her street are very polite. No, the town’s rage has focused upon a group of about 200 Slovak Roma gypsies who have settled in Hexthorpe, a short walk from the town centre.

A publican tells me they pickpocket his customers. Others say they defecate in the street. “Look, there’s some there,” says a woman as a family group walks by. A Roma toddler swivels to spit out of his push-chair: “Ugh! See? Disgusting!” The Roma, they say, throw rubbish on the street, let their kids run wild, fight and drink through the night. A council clean-up crew removed 12 tonnes of refuse from Hexthorpe streets and residents held a meeting in which they gave a vote of no confidence in their MP, Rosie Winterton.

To Hexthorpe, the Roma are a nuisance. To others in Doncaster they are emblematic of all that is wrong with Britain. As they put it, work-shy, dirty, benefit-claiming, sub-criminal foreigners, who don’t speak English or respect British customs can take over a neighbourhood and be joined at any moment by untold hundreds more, demonstrates their own powerlessness against open EU borders and the insecurity of a globalised economy in which their own living standards have tumbled. They are ripe for Ukip’s picking.

Time and again people tell me: “I haven’t voted for years, but I’m going Ukip next time.” In the old-Labour north, turnout has fallen more steeply than in the south. Across Doncaster’s three seats, Labour has lost 40,000 votes since 1992. A fifth of Ukip’s professed supporters, according to Ford and Goodwin, didn’t vote at all in 2010. Will they turn out next May? Even my Asian taxi driver is keen: why, he asks, should he battle to bring his wife from Bangladesh when all of Eastern Europe can simply breeze in?

So is Ukip trying to attract the northern working class? Wandering among the very upbeat delegates at Doncaster Racecourse, I see a few less well-dressed types and catch many northern accents, but the double-breasted tendency still predominates. I meet two ex-miners from North Tyneside incensed by immigration, but do many settle in your area, I ask. “No,” says one, “but people from the northeast used to get on their bike for a few months work in London. Now all that is taken by Poles.”

Dotted through the conference agenda are five-minute slots called Leaving Labour in which speakers like Natasha Bolter, formerly secretary of Stepney Green Labour party, explain their road to Kipper-dom. Jane Collins, MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire gives a barnstorming speech on the Rotherham grooming scandal, a key issue as it indicts multiculturalism and Labour complacency. Ukip believes it has a good chance of winning the South Yorkshire PCC election caused by Shaun Wright’s eventual resignation. And this would lift their hopes for winning Rotherham in May.

I meet two of Ukip’s Doncaster candidates, expecting ex-miners or maybe tough-talking former coppers; the sort of blokes who’d have a pint with the old fellas in the Trades club or crack funnies with Donnie market traders. But Chris Hodgson is from Colchester. He makes much of his five years as an electrical engineer in Doncaster but now runs a care agency in Kent. “I proposed to my first wife on Doncaster’s Town Fields,” he tells me. His second wife, Zandie, who is sitting with us, gives him a look. He knows little about the Hexthorpe Roma issue: “I’m going to read up on it all before May,” he says.

The trouble for Ukip, says Guy Aston, who will stand against Caroline Flint in Don Valley, is that it chose candidates for all three seats at once. Only three people applied, so they got a seat each. Aston is a gentle, courteous man who was involved with the English Democrats until they got too friendly with the BNP. He is 63, a business consultant with a quietly flummoxed air. “It’s all this political correctness,” he says. “I mean, my daughter, she’s been through the university system, she’s not like me. An elderly guest came to our house and described something as ‘n***** brown’. My daughter told her that isn’t an expression we use these days. She got quite upset with this lady.”

Both men have the Ukip golf-club look, but without the Nigel-factor, that punchy delivery and jokey common touch that makes people forget he is a Dulwich College stockbroker and could woo Labour voters.

At this weekend’s conference, Ukip was going all out. Pretend doctors in surgical scrubs handed out leaflets against the Tories’ privatisation of the NHS: Ukip is back-pedalling madly on its policy to charge patients to visit their GP. It has airbrushed too its pledge to abolish sickness benefit and holiday pay. A fringe event on workers’ co-operatives and mutuals seems a calculated attempt to steal Labour’s collectivist clothing.

At a packed meeting entitled “How to win the crucial Labour Vote”, Blair Smillie, a Scot whose great-grandfather Robert co-founded the Labour party, damns social inequality — “the minimum wage which has become the maximum wage” — and pit closures that mean Britain relies upon US and Russian imported coal. “British coal not dole” is his slogan, echoing the miners’ strike, yet the next speaker is Ukip councillor Ian Dexter, who proposes a kind of moderated Thatcherism. I ask Smillie how these two wings of Ukip — ex-Labour and ex-Tories — can ever be reconciled. “We will bash ideas together,” he says gleefully. “And find a balance.”

However, it doesn’t matter right now whether Ukip contains ideological polar opposites, that it pledges to protect both free markets and the low-paid. Or whether its spending pledges, which all appear to be magically funded by exiting Europe, ever add up. What counts is the vibe, Ukip’s capacity to be all things to all angry people.

According to Ford and Goodwin, Labour seats contain the biggest numbers of potential Ukip supporters. And angry protest fuelled its Euro election success — but will that prevail in May? Because towns like Doncaster retain a muscle memory of the Labour movement: the NHS hospitals, co-operatives, unions and MPs who razed slums and took families like my father’s out of poverty. In our turbulent and politically disconnected age, what will run deepest: blood or rage?

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