Labour won't win Clacton, but it still needs to throw the kitchen sink at it

This week’s news that the Tory MP for Clacton, Douglas Carswell, was defecting to UKIP and resigning to fight a by-election shocked Westminster, having been kept well under-wraps right up until Carswell and Nigel Farage announced it on Thursday. His resignation was confirmed on Friday when the Chancellor ceremonially appointed Carswell to be the Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead (the delightfully arcane procedure by which parliament enables MPs to quit). And despite UKIP’s remarkable failure to inform their previously-selected Clacton PPC Roger Lord of the plot - and Lord’s subsequent defiant threats to “rip [Carswell’s] throat out” - UKIP’s National Executive Committee has now ruled that Carswell will indeed be UKIP’s by-election candidate. Since the resigning MP’s party (the Conservatives, in this case) have the right to move the writ for a by-election, all is left is for the Tories to choose a date – the Mail reports they may choose the day after Cameron’s conference speech in September, hoping this will give them a boost.

In the May 2010 election, Carswell was re-elected as a Conservative with 53% of the vote, with Labour in second on 25%, the Lib Dems on 13% and four minor candidates (BNP, local group Tendring First, a Green and an Independent) taking a combined 9%. There was no UKIP candidate at all in 2010, perhaps because Carswell was one of a handful of anti-EU Thatcherite backbench Tories UKIP was willing to stand down against.

Last night, Survation released the first poll of Clacton for the Mail on Sunday, and it made for staggering reading - 64% now plan to vote for UKIP/Carswell in the by-election. The Tories are mired on 20%, giving UKIP a 44% head-start. Labour are now in third place on 13%. The Lib Dems are set to lose their deposit for the 10^th time since 2010, with just 2%.

Clacton Pier, Clacton-on-Sea (attribution: Lauren S. on Flickr)

 What will the Tories do?

There was an immediate call on the Tory side for Boris Johnson to stand as their candidate and save the seat for them, but that hope has been scotched – Survation found that Johnson would barely move the needle (60% would still vote UKIP, 27% Tory, 10% Labour) and in any case, Johnson himself has now ruled out a bid. This week, Johnson also committed himself to stand in the safe west London seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, an announcement that came only two days before Carswell revealed his switch (timing which makes me half-wonder whether Carswell and Farage had been holding off in order to ensure Boris was already engaged elsewhere, or would at least have to make an embarrassing u-turn to stand in Clacton).

Burnt ex-Tory UKIP man Roger Lord has half-jokingly suggested he could re-join his old party and try to become their Clacton candidate, a twist which would certainly make this saga all the bizarre if it came to fruition. It would also mirror the Tories’ existing strategy in South Thanet, where Farage himself is standing and the Conservatives deliberately chose a Eurosceptic former UKIP deputy leader, Craig Mackinlay, to be the Tory candidate. However, as George Eaton argued in the Statesman, the Tories might be better-served to remember what happened in the Newark by-election. There, bland Tory candidate Robert “Generic” Jenrick fought off odious right-wing UKIPer Roger Helmer by gaining reluctant tactical votes from progressive-minded Labour voters and ex-Lib Dems.

That said, Carswell is an incumbent and immeasurably better liked than Helmer was. Further, research by Revolt on the Right writers Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford found Clacton to be the most UKIP-friendly electorate in the country in terms of raw demographics (their data also correctly predicted that Newark was not necessarily an optimal target for UKIP). There’s probably little the Tories can do to win, so instead they will try their best and manage expectations.

Labour’s prospects

The same is ultimately true of Labour as well. Labour will not win Clacton. Labour did hold the predecessor seat of Harwich from 1997 to 2005, but Clacton has different boundaries and former Harwich Labour MP Ivan Henderson was beaten soundly when he sought a rematch with Carswell in 2010. It’s also a general rule of thumb that given the current close fight between Labour and the Conservatives nationally, re-taking the seats like Corby that Labour only lost in the 2010 slaughter (of which there are more than enough for a good majority) is a more realistic aim than expecting to win places like Harwich/Clacton, where Blair couldn’t even hold off Michael Howard in 2005. Even in the extremely unlikely event we did win, it would be in part due to the UKIP-Tory split on the right, and so would have a side-effect of strengthening the Tories’ “vote UKIP, get Labour” pitch to their own wavering base.

Nonetheless, Labour should still throw the kitchen sink at Clacton. In Newark, Labour was understandably squeezed out due to the seat being a Tory-UKIP fight, freeing many usual Labour supporters to either vote tactically against UKIP or protest vote directly for them (the same happened in the three-way LD-UKIP-Tory fight in Eastleigh last year). But however reasonable the explanation, the image of the official opposition coming third in Newark was still damaging to Labour and Ed Miliband. While Survation put the Tories 7 points ahead of Labour, the poll also made clear that the battle isn’t (yet) anything close to a UKIP-Tory fight either. Labour also has an edge over the Tories, as our local candidate is already in place. Labour’s Tim Young was born and bred in Clacton itself, attending  St Clare's Primary School and Clacton County High School. As a local councillor in the neighbouring district of Colchester, he holds a portfolio for local planning, community safety and culture and has campaigned to restore street lights and against the government’s privatisation of probation services.  He’s a member of a committee promoting museums in Essex and is a “big supporter” of Ipswich FC and Essex County Cricket Club.

Labour's Clacton candidate, Tim Young
(taken from his Twitter,
@cllr_tim_young)

What’s more, Labour needs to take the fight to UKIP more generally in order to win back the insecure working-class voters we have lost to them – Clacton is a chance for a proper road-test of our strategy. We need to tell voters in Clacton that although we firmly believe Britain should stay in the EU to safeguard British jobs and keep us secure and strong, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party has also opposed ardent integrationist Jean-Claude Juncker, voted to cut the EU’s budget (something Cameron opposed), wants a strengthened ‘red card’ veto for Britain in Brussels and has promised an In/Out referendum if there’s another treaty change. We should explain that we want to reduce and reform immigration so that it truly works for Britain, making sure that migrants speak English and policing employers so they don’t undercut British workers’ wages. We should tell them about our radical plan to devolve more powers to communities like theirs in England, to free them from distant, top-down Westminster rule (a message Carswell also hammers). We should outline how Labour will reform financial services, housing, utilities and local transport so they work on terms that are good for consumers, not just for hawkish for-profit firms. And we should certainly remind them that Labour will protect our publicly-funded NHS, their hard-won employment rights and our fair tax system, all of which Thatcherites Carswell and Farage (not to mention Cameron) are firmly committed to weakening.

Carswell & “the clique”

It’s perhaps risky, but if Labour wanted, it could even try and warn Clacton voters that as well-liked as Carswell may be and as much work he may have done for them, his claim to be a heroic, anti-establishment crusader against “the cozy little clique called Westminster” is self-serving and hypocritical. He was born in the City of Westminster. In common with 34% of Carswell's fellow MPs, Nigel Farage and much of the UKIP high command, Carswell was privately educated (only 7% of the public are). After working abroad for several years, he moved to Durham to stand against Tony Blair in Sedgefield in 2001, earning Carswell attention in Tory circles. He then briefly worked in CCHQ's Policy Unit ahead of the 2005 election, reporting to the man who was writing the Tory manifesto in 2005 – David Cameron. Only after that did Carswell then parachute into Harwich for the 2005 election, winning in a national tide that had moved against Labour.

Moreover, as Dan Hodges and other have pointed out already, even the manner of his selection for UKIP this week goes against Carswell’s own principles. He was recruited after UKIP's treasurer, ex-Tory donor Stuart Wheeler, invited him to Wheeler's private castle in Kent for a secretive meeting. Carswell has also long advocated open primaries for candidate selections - something he even criticised “the clique” for failing to do in his own resignation letter - but was happy to barge aside locally-picked man Roger Lord without a contest, a classic Westminster stitch-up. Carswell has had nine years to embed himself as a beloved local MP, and there’s no doubting he’s done a fantastic job of that, but a fair reading of his CV shows he is little different from the “clique” he purports to attack.

So yes, Labour needs to go all in for Clacton. We won’t win, so a bit of expectations-management is still in order. But we need to show we can get past the Tories there, and take back the traditional Labour voters we have lost to UKIP, returning to the status quo of UKIP being just the Tories in exile.