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After Brexit, Red Ukip prepares to take on Labour's northern heartlands

Two northern, working-class men are close to grasping the Ukip crown. 

If all political careers end in failure, Nigel Farage is not shy to declare himself an exception. He has resigned as Ukip leader - this time, he proclaims, for good. “I have got my country back,” he said. “Now I want my life back.”

Some reckon that, if Farage does indeed stick to his word this time, it will herald the end of Ukip. After all, if and when Article 50 is triggered, Ukip will have achieved what the party was set up for in 1993, and be without its flagbearer. And yet Farage’s departure as leader might have a very different significance, and lead to Ukip ratcheting up their attempts to displace the Labour Party in the north of England. 

For years Ukip has been parroting the line that they pose more of a threat to Labour than to the Conservatives. Many - including Ed Miliband and his team - were sceptical, preferring to view Ukip as the Conservative Party in exile, and little more than a splinter-group on the right.  

They long ago had to revisit this complacent view. The referendum campaign again exposed the disconnect between Labour MPs and what was once called their core vote. While just 10 of Labour’s MPs supported leaving the EU, and 218 wanted to stay in, 37 per cent of Labour voters opted to leave. Much more ominous for Labour is that their remain supporters were concentrated in relatively few seats - principally in London and Manchester. Of Labour’s current seats, 150 voted to leave the EU, and just 82 to remain. So on the biggest issue in British politics for a generation, two-thirds of Labour MPs had a dissident view to their constituents.

None of this will have passed Ukip by. Over the last five years, the party has attempted to redefine itself: ditching the reputation as the party of crusty retirees in the south, and replace it with an altogether more abrasive image. Even if they only have a solitary MP - and he is a Tory defector - Ukip have been remarkably successful. They came within 600 votes of ousting Labour in the Heywood and Middleton by-election at the end of 2014, and then gained 3.8 million votes in the general election. Ukip came second in 120 seats, 44 of which were held by Labour. In the 20 seats with the lowest turnout, Ukip came second to Labour in nine - and the referendum has highlighted how Ukip’s message resonates with longtime non-voters. 

The rise of Ukip in the north is also the story of the rise of "Red Ukip": a cocktail of anti-immigration and anti-elitism, with a social democratic tinge. Surging European parties of the populist right, like the Danish People’s Party, have cloaked themselves as defenders of the European welfare state, which they claim is irrevocably threatened by mass immigration. Red Ukip does the same. At last year’s by-election, in Oldham West and Royton, Ukip circulated leaflets on "How Labour privatised the NHS: And How Ukip will save it, for you”. 

We could now be about to hear plenty more of this message. The two favourites to be Ukip’s next leader are Steven Woolfe (pictured, left) and Paul Nuttall: two working-class men from the north who grew up in Labour-supporting households. Together, they have led Ukip’s surge into Labour territory. Indeed, it was Nuttall who pioneered Ukip’s use of pavement politics in by-elections in the north, in 2011. 

Either would double down on Ukip’s strategy of targeting disaffected Labour voters. Their backstories - Woolfe grew up on a council estate in Moss Side, and was in the same class as Noel Gallagher; Nuttall’s youth was spent in in Bootle, a dockyard town next to Liverpool, and played football with Jamie Carragher - leave them well-primed to attack Labour for inauthenticity. Woolfe, who is mixed race and endured racist abuse growing up, would become the first ever non-white leader of a major British political party.

As leader, Woolfe or Nuttall would combine social conservatism - especially in the case of Nuttall, a Roman Catholic who supports reintroducing the death penalty for child murderers and limiting abortion to the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy - with opposition to immigration, and decrying Labour for abandoning its roots. Woolfe has even flirted with the idea of renationalising the railways and a turnover tax on companies. 

If either became leader, the ideological schisms that have long been brewing in Ukip would intensify. Opposition to the EU aside, Ukip is a legitimate contender to being the most divided party in British politics. At Ukip’s conference in Doncaster two years ago, one speaker argued for more inheritance tax and progressive taxation, re-evaluating council tax bands for properties, renationalising the railways and rent controls: a vision for Britain that could hardly be further removed from the classical liberalism of Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s sole MP. 

Yet how much these contradictions matter is unclear: until the coalition, the Liberal Democrats were able to run both to Labour’s left and right, depending on which constituency they were fighting. In their post-Farage future, Ukip will continue to fight on two fronts, perhaps balancing a perceived leftward shift in their leader by selecting a former Tory from the south, like Diane James or Suzanne Evans, as deputy. Ukip do not have to worry about balancing ideological tensions while governing, after all. 

Rather than ending Labour’s Ukip angst, the departure of Farage could intensify it, allowing Ukip to deliver a message tailor-made for its northern heartlands by an authentic northern working-class voice. The party will look at Hartlepool for a glimpse of what is possible. Ukip’s support here increased from 2,500 in 2010 to 11,000 - just 3,000 shy of Labour - last year. In the referendum, 70 per cent of the constituency voted to leave the EU, showing contempt for their sitting Labour MP’s support for the UK remaining in. 

The first-past-the-post system discriminates against minority parties with thinly spread support: it took 3.8 million votes for Ukip to return a solitary MP last year. But 2020 was always the general election that Ukip were targeting in the north, and the party has established a substantial footholds in vast swathes of the most deprived constituencies. This bodes ill for Labour: as well as the legacy of the EU referendum and its own descent into ever-greater turmoil, it will now have a new northern-friendly Ukip leader to contend with.

Tim Wigmore is a contributing writer to the New Statesman and the author of Second XI: Cricket In Its Outposts.

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Using anti-Semitism as a political football is damaging for both Labour and the Jewish community

Stop politicising anti-Semitism, or it will become even more embedded in the left of British politics than it was before.

I watched the Labour party leadership hustings on Thursday night and was depressed to hear loud booing of Owen Smith when he told Jeremy Corbyn that anti-Semitism has been worse in the Labour Party in the last nine months than at any time he can remember.

I asked myself, how have the last six months, in which Labour was supposed to be getting a grip on anti-Semitism, brought us to this point?

Six months, in which two inquiries have been published – one official, one leaked – and one still to come, and we are no closer to ridding political discourse on the left of anti-Semitism. In fact, all that has happened over the last six months is that anti-Semitism has become a political football, used to divide people as being loyal to the Leader or disloyal.

What has happened to the cross-party consensus against racism? Why has a political party founded on equality and tolerance become the focus for division and bullying?

On Wednesday morning, the full version of the Royall Report into allegations of anti-Semitism among Labour-supporting students at Oxford University was leaked to Jewish press. Having read the full report, there are no huge revelations or scandals. So the Jewish community is left to scratch its head and wonder, why did the Labour NEC try for so long to conceal the full version from the Jewish community or the students who were the alleged victims of the abuse?

It was a bizarre move that left the Jewish student movement, especially at Oxford, feeling isolated. Any real gain from the report – and there would have been some – has been overshadowed by the pantomime of whether it would be released.

Then on Thursday came the confirmation that Shami Chakrabarti was to be the only Labour peer in the new list. After Jeremy Corbyn’s commitment to never make a peer, the fact he recommended the supposedly politically independent leader of an inquiry into anti-Semitism has undermined much of the process in the eyes of the community. Social media is frothing with anger.

Chakrabarti is a public servant who possibly would have deserved an honour for her work at Liberty. However, the timing and circumstance of her elevation have undermined the integrity of the investigation and report in the eyes of the Jewish community.

Organisations such as my own engaged in good faith with the inquiry on the basis of assurances that it would be fearless, robust and independent. It has turned out to be none of those things. It now confirms our fears that, from the outset, the inquiry was a device to push damaging allegations off the frontpage.

Chakrabarti and Seamus Milne now have questions to answer on when the peerage was offered and whether there was any link to the commissioning or content of the report, or its aftermath.

The booing of Smith tells us that one’s view on anti-Semitism now determines where you stand on the leadership of the Labour party. If you raise the issue of anti-Semitism in the party, you risk being shouted down as disloyal or part of a witch-hunt. If you are loyal to the Leader, you condemn the raising of any such concerns as an act of disloyalty or part of a plot by embittered Blairites.

I still don’t understand why anti-Semitism is not clamped down on in the same way that has been effective for other forms of racism?  As Corbyn said, just a few weeks ago, Jews and Poale Zion (a Jewish Labour Movement) helped found the Labour party alongside the trade unions over 100 years ago. There are many within our community who not only associate themselves with Labour; they are actively part of the movement and embrace all sides of it.

The Labour party has always taken the lead on equality, tolerance and discrimination. But for some reason, ancient stereotypes such as the conspiratorial power of the minority continue and this becomes more intense when the discourse moves on to the subject of Israel.

The left cannot see that its constant and disproportionate criticism of Israeli government policies could ever stray across into anti-Semitism. At least the Chakrabarti report gave some clear examples of where it does. It’s a good thing it did, because it is beginning to look as though the Labour party’s problem is less with anti-Semitism than with the denial of anti-Semitism.

It is also regrettable that neither report came to grips with the vexed issue of anti-Zionism and how the denial of the right of Jewish people to self-determination in a Jewish State could well be anti-Semitic as well.

Many within the Jewish community would agree that nothing has been achieved in the last six months. If anything, anti-Semitism has become more embedded in the left of British politics than it was before.

The Jewish community does not want to become a football in party politics. We would all be happy if there was a zero-tolerance, strict liability approach to anti-Semitism in society, politics and in all political parties.

We did not need three inquiries to tell us that!

Simon Johnson is the chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council.