At Last, An Interesting Brexit By Election

I quite like Tristram Hunt, even though it is easy to see why a lot of people don't.  He really really looks and sounds a Tory.  So when he got on the telly you had automatic cognitive dissonance before he even opened his mouth.  And parachuting media friendly posh boys into working class seats was really the worst side of New Labour.  Likeable enough guy, but unfortunately symbolic of stuff at lot of us really don't like.


And now he has set up the perfect symbolic by election.  Stoke Central is one of those seats that gives the Labour Party such a headache.  It is a pretty safe Labour seat on paper, even with Labour's terrible national polling.  But it voted strongly to leave the EU.  I imagine that at least some of that anti-EU vote was the deep rooted skepticism about Europe that has always been present amongst Labour voting working class people.  Contrary to what you'd think from the media, these people are pretty solidly Labour and unlikely to vote any other way most of the time.  Or are they?  With the EU in the news, could they jump ship to UKIP?

I doubt it personally.  The idea that traditional Labour supporters are also social conservatives is one of those tropes that rarely gets challenged.  But I am from that kind of background myself, and it frankly doesn't ring true.  Sure you see plenty of union jacks and pictures of the queen.  But there are also plenty of gender bending Rocky Horror show fans.  There are people whose private lives and loves would be so complicated you could get seasons of soap opera plots out of them.  The so called white working class is also a lot less white than it used to be.  Last Christmas my extended family gathered around the dinner table included a jew and a couple of North African muslims alongside the anglo saxons.

Basically they are people, and a pretty diverse set of people with a wide range of opinions.  The main common theme is that they are all a bit hard up and reliant on social support from the state and really need a progressive taxation system to pay for it.  So the basic Labour message is in their interests, and most of them know it only too well.

So I think that UKIP's plan to take over from Labour in working class areas in the north is not going to be anywhere near the plain sailing it might look from a newspaper office in London.   But maybe I am wrong.  Maybe the anti-immigrant hints and flag waving might win over more people than I imagine.  There is no better seat to test this out than Stoke Central.  If UKIP can do well here, maybe they have a future.  If they can't then it really is goodbye.