We must tackle Ukip’s emotional appeal

The result in Heywood and Middleton may have shocked some people, but not all. Some warned this could happen after UKIP took or seriously challenged safe council seats in the north, topped the national vote at the Euros, and polled strongly in Labour areas. Their highest average share of the vote in the 2014 elections came in Labour areas like Rotherham, Mansfield and Hartlepool.

We’re told if we campaign on the “issues” people will come back to Labour. This fails to address why many people feel detached from us, disillusioned about politics and uncertain about Labour.

UKIP’s appeal to former Labour voters is not about policy. It’s emotional. How else can we explain people voting for NHS privatisation, tax cuts for the wealthy and attacks on working people.

Talking to UKIP voters on the doorstep these are not the issues up for debate. Too many of our former voters feel we don’t understand or care about their problems. We’re just part of the “Westminster elite”. Nigel Farage, a privately-educated, City broker who’s taken £2 million pounds in Brussels expenses – he speaks their language!

So, how did this happen, and what can we do? First, we need to accept that we have neglected many of our voters. We’ve concentrated as an organisation on swing voters in marginal seats. Understandable in the past, but not now. Some “safe” Labour seats have been ignored. In some areas, our voter contact rates are far too low and we’re not spending enough time talking to and, more importantly, listening to our voters.

In Scotland or Clacton or Labour seats in the north, the anti-Westminster feeling is a wave new parties can ride. We won’t stop it without realising top-down “line of the day” politics just won’t cut it any more. We have to be out there, engaging with people, in marginal and “safe” seats. All of us, councillors, MPs, our front bench, need to be involved with voters wherever they live; especially in areas where they feel neglected.

Next, we have to understand the emotional gap that’s opened between politicians and voters. Listen to us on the TV or radio. Listen the way most people do, whilst making the tea or getting ready for work. What do you hear? The same voices, the same passion-less “gaffe-free” Westminster jargon.

We should not be afraid of showing passion, anger, our own sense of frustration and our desire to make this country a better place. We have people who have known unemployment, low pay, dead-end jobs. Let’s start using these voices to re-engage.

Then we need to understand people’s real fears. An elderly lady tells me “the old shops have gone” in her area. There are Turkish shops and a Polish grocer. She doesn’t need a lecture on economics. She does need me to understand her fear of living in a rapidly changing world.

I see women doing two or three jobs to make ends meet, people searching for work. A fear of migrant workers taking their jobs, whole shifts recruited from abroad, abounds. Yes, we have the policies to stop this, but, to be believed we need to first show we understand these feelings of not being given a fair deal in your own country, the worry about paying the bills. We can’t dismiss them as insufficiently cosmopolitan or enlightened. A steady job and a regular wage is wonderfully enlightening.

Lastly, we must stop making London – or, to be accurate, a part of London – the focus of a political career. It’s too easy to become part of the “bubble”, remote from the people we represent and their day-to-day concerns.

To beat UKIP, to keep them away from our seats, our voters, our people we have to change the way we campaign. We won’t beat them with the “line” of the day, ignoring huge differences between constituencies. We will beat them by old-fashioned campaigning, by listening to people’s fears and showing them a way out. As in Scotland, so in England, people want a real debate about how to tackle their problems. We have to be the Party which values that debate, which looks and sounds inclusive. The old, centrally-directed politics is dead. It’s time we woke up and noticed.

Helen Jones is the MP for Warrington North