Our near defeat last week was the wake-up call Labour needed

Last week was a potential turning point in the history of the Labour Party and British politics.

Labour came within 617 votes of losing the safe seat of Heywood & Middleton to UKIP.

That is not a comfortable margin of victory, particularly as mid-election polls had put us 19% ahead, and increasing our vote by under 1% compared to our 2010 defeat is not heartening. But as Michael Dugher MP said “ In football terms, Heywood and Middleton wasn’t pretty but we did take all three points. And teams that win the league sometimes have to scrap for a win.”

That Labour pulled off this tightest of wins is down to the tenacity of our excellent grassroots operation – both volunteers and organisers. The good shape the party’s field operations are in owes much to the heavy investment in new organisers by General Secretary Iain McNicol.

Had we lost, and UKIP therefore gained seats from both the Tories and Labour on one day, the current media frenzy about UKIP would have become a perfect storm and Labour might well have degenerated into the orgy of recrimination and infighting we are sadly culturally prone to.

Monday’s opinion polls showing Labour steady but the Tories losing vote share to UKIP since the Clacton defeat would undoubtedly have shown us dropping as well if we had lost Heywood & Middleton.

As it is, we live to fight another day.

And by pushing us hard in a by-election UKIP have given us advance warning of how seriously we need to take them in the General Election and of strategic and tactical changes we now need to make. Voices in the party had been warning about this for some time but it is usual and just human nature for any large organisation to want to avoid coming to terms with external threats that require major changes to strategy and operations and that take you out of your comfort zone.

We now know that UKIP can resource and fight multiple elections on the same day against both the Tories and us – we need to assume their targeting strategy in the General Election will be ambitious and include a significant thrust versus Labour seats, not conservative and limited to a small number of Tory targets.

We now know that they can successfully corral a large percentage of the anti-Labour vote in our northern “safe” seats into one pen where it had previously been splintered. This means any seat where Labour polled under 50% in 2010 cannot afford to be complacent and needs to monitor and react to local UKIP activity.

We should also conclude that they are taking votes direct from our 2010 support base, which we had assumed was a core that we could build on rather than needing consolidating. I have seen people argue that as Labour’s vote in Heywood & Middleton went up by 1% we must have retained all of it (in proportion to a reduced turnout). But I don’t think it is feasible to suggest that despite the Lib Dem shift to Labour nationally only 1% shifted from Lib Dem to Labour. A far more likely scenario is that Labour gained some votes from the Lib Dems and these compensated (plus 1%) for 2010 Labour voters who went to UKIP.

We have learned the limitations of trying to fight an election as a single issue referendum on the threat to the NHS. Party strategists are right to identify the NHS as our strongest policy card, a good motivational message for our core vote, and part of how we fight UKIP given their extremist Thatcherite stance towards it and the disproportionately older and hence more likely be thinking about health care nature of UKIP supporters.

But it clearly isn’t enough – ICM today suggested our relentless focus on the NHS (and the very real problems it is facing) have pushed it up to the most resonant issue but there are other issues – namely immigration and jobs, prices and wages (the cost of living issue we had previously been highlighting) – that are almost as resonant with voters according to the polling. We mustn’t stop pushing on cost of living, and we need answers on immigration. Maybe not the answers UKIP supporters want to hear, if these are inconsistent with our social democratic values, but at least we need to demonstrate we are engaging in the same conversation that they are. Personally I am persuadable that either we need a radical policy switch from free movement of labour to fair movement (I don’t think it is problematic in terms of social democratic values to control economic migration, surely a social democratic EU would be trying to create jobs in every member state and region so people were not forced to migrate for work) or we just need to lay into the xenophobia that sits behind UKIP ideology. But we need to do either, or both, firmly, not try to dodge the issue.

Ed Miliband showed a good start to addressing the policy questions that are driving the rise in UKIP in his Observer article and it sounds like he made a barnstorming speech to the PLP. But these are both internal audiences. Next he needs to be making barnstorming speeches in UKIP’s Kent and Essex heartlands and putting across his arguments in tabloid language in tabloid newspapers read further from NW1 than the Observer is.

One place he should choose to make a barnstorming speech is Rochester & Strood. As I have now argued twice we have nothing to lose there, any reasonable vote share will help show there are no “No Go” areas for Labour in the South East and help dent UKIP’s momentum. Everyone who has already campaigned there is reporting that the local Party is very active and has great levels of data (including nearly 800 contacts made in one day with help from Labour3Seats on Saturday), candidate Naushabah Khan is a real star, and there is a solid Labour vote in the seat.

Ed doesn’t need to claim we will win – he just needs to show we are not giving up on this kind of seat or these kind of voters.

I think that Michael Dugher showed he gets this when he said “But we now need to have the confidence to go out there and take the fight to Ukip wherever they pose a threat.”

The party seems to have woken up to the potential to a fightback there, with frontbenchers Jonathan Ashworth and Gloria De Piero leading a Rochester Express trip with Labour Students this Wednesday – you can sign-up here.

There’s also no need for it to suck resources away from Key Seats – I believe a specific appeal to help stop UKIP there would easily bring in enough donations to cover the cost of the campaign, and the idea of derailing UKIP’s by-election bandwagon – particularly with a BAME candidate – will mean many people, including non-party members from anti-racist campaigns, will be willing to volunteer their time.

Generally I hope Ed takes the opportunity to shake up the team and bring to the front rank of the campaign robust people with the stomach for the fight of our lives and an ability to connect with the kind of voters who might be choosing between Labour and UKIP. That means seeing more of Michael Dugher – I like politicians who say “my arse” and “bullshit” when that’s what they are thinking. Jim Murphy’s soapbox should come south of the border. Tom Watson needs to be cajoled into his third comeback. Gloria’s “why do people hate us” listening exercise has meant the campaign tours she does with Jonathan are based on a real understanding of how voters view politicians.

We need a rethink of targeting too. This is probably the last point in the campaign when we can usefully reallocate serious resources like organisers. The 106 seats we initially targeted look like an analogue list in a digital age thanks to the explosion of UKIP onto the scene. We need to add the Labour seats most under threat from UKIP (I was shocked to hear young members were asked not to go to one of the most publicly heralded of these on the grounds it was “not marginal”), those Lab/Con marginals where the local impact of UKIP is against us, and those seats that looked safe Tory but have been turned into Con/UKIP/Lab three way marginals. Existing key seats that are not looking promising need to be downgraded. If it doesn’t already exist then the 1997 category of “stand alone seats” for seats that were not top priority marginals but weren’t expected to decamp to a key seat needs to be reinvented. As suggested above, for Rochester there will be donors who will specifically want to fund organisers in seats where UKIP is the problem.

UKIP remains a bigger problem for the Tories than Labour. But in the last week we have woken up to the threat –and in some places opportunity – it presents to us. We are not quite there yet but I feel the shock of near defeat in Heywood & Middleton has been exactly the wake-up call Labour needed, at a point when there is still time to plot a new course to victory.