UKIP’s success in Essex shows the scale of our challenge

Last Thursday was a dark day for progressives in South Essex.

It was supposed to be a day in which the Labour Party toppled the Tories in Basildon and came within a few seats of taking back control of the Council for the first time since 2002.

Instead, we lost two of our safest seats to UKIP and we are now the third largest party in the borough with just ten councillors.

Listening to Nigel Farage on (yes, you guessed it) the BBC on Sunday, it is clear where he and his troops are about to invest their millions; South Essex. 

So this is now the scenario; if Labour does not organise to tackle the UKIP threat, convince voters that we are the right choice in a General Election and expose the horror of five more years of Cameron and Clegg, then in 344 days time, the Labour Party in Essex will be on the brink of electoral extinction.

As a party nationally, we have to demonstrate our commitment to the East of England region and show our opponents that we are serious about winning seats here in twelve months time.

Because running General Election campaigns out of the boots of our candidates cars won’t do. Relying on candidates to act as their own campaign managers, agents, organisers and press officers, won’t do. Relying on the same group of four or five activists to cover the whole constituency week in and week out, won’t beat what is coming around the corner from the two right wing parties.

There must be a recognition that South Essex is under threat by the far-right. If the Trade Unions want to protect the rights of workers than we cannot allow UKIP MPs to win in 2015. Make no mistake; they are well and truly on course to do just that in towns like Basildon.

So we have to get after them now.

At a time of such a huge political upheaval, we can get lost in apologising for what we got wrong in Government but in this part of the world, those apologies fall on deaf ears in the majority of cases and for anyone that is actually listening, the apology only acts a further stick to beat us with.

We can also adopt the ‘lets listen, learn and reflect’ approach but before we know it the results of the General Election will have been called and Labour will have been wiped out in this part of the country.

People want to see action. They want to buy into a new message from Labour. They want their fears alleviated.

To beat UKIP and the Tories, we need to do more to demonstrate how immigration is NOT affecting the day-to-day lives of people in Essex.

In Basildon we have a council house waiting list of more than 5,500 people. Right now British-born Basildonians waiting for a council house, genuinely believe that the other 5,499 on the waiting list are all immigrants. Further, they believe that the immigrants on the list have priority over British families. We need to ensure this myth is debunked.

We have a chronic shortage of school places in Basildon and a Tory-led County Council which is seeking to close rather than open new schools. The pressures on Basildon’s schools is more to do with the fact we have more children living in Basildon today than we did in the sixties and seventies so the need to increase the physical number of schools in the borough is of paramount importance.

The idea that a single mum in Laindon cannot get her child into the local school because we have swathes of immigrant children taking over our classrooms is plainly wrong, yet it’s what I was repeatedly told was happening by frustrated voters who gave their support to UKIP last Thursday.

We have more women unemployed today than at the time of the last General Election in Basildon and Billericay. Across the town there are more NEETs than anywhere else in Essex, rising rail fares which cost, on average £4,000 per year for employees travelling to the Capital, a hospital that remains in special measures and GP surgeries, which are at bursting point.

In every one of these cases, I have heard over the course of this Local Election campaign, voters explaining to me that if we point blank stopped immigration, these problems would fix themselves.

I do not doubt the sincerity of these individuals’ fears. When you look them in the eye on the doorstep, it is what they truly believe.

They have been told that this is what is happening by the copious front-page headlines of the Daily Express and Daily Mail and the never-ending coverage of Nigel Farage on the BBC.

It is also clear that in an overwhelming white British county such as Essex, the fears that residents have are deeply entrenched and that it may well take more than this General Election campaign to reverse them. But we have to try.

The real enemy has been lost. For more than two decades in Essex, Conservatives have controlled our local councils and have starved our public services of the proper investment. When our council house waiting list is so long, that is because the Tories won’t build social houses. When parents can’t get their kids into local schools, that is because the Tories won’t build schools locally but instead, as in the recent case in our neighbouring Castlepoint, they have sought to shut schools.

For more than two years in Basildon, the local Labour Party has warned that the UKIP rise was imminent. We knew they were taking Labour votes and that sooner or later a result such as last weeks was coming.

The media have enjoyed depicting ‘Essex Man’ as ‘UKIP Man’ in recent days, but unless Labour gets to work now, with a new message on immigration, a commitment to debunking the myths and advocating positive policies that will ensure greater protections for British workers against being undercut from migrant workers, then ‘UKIP Man’ is a depiction that sadly, is here to stay.

Gavin Callaghan is Labour’s Parliamentary Candidate for Basildon & Billericay