How will Labour respond to the threat from Ukip? Thanks to today’s scoop by the Telegraph’s Ben Riley-Smith, we now know. A leaked internal memo (pdf here) singles out immigration as the biggest issue to tackle and advises activists ‘moving the conversation on’ to another topic — something that has annoyed many in and outside of the party.
With Ed Miliband outlining Labour’s immigration plan for the general election today, the timing and contents of this document couldn’t be any worse for the leader. Here are four things you need to know about the paper, entitled ‘Campaigning against Ukip’:
1.) Labour realises that it can never beat Ukip on immigration
The headline news from the paper is that Labour has decided not to out-Ukip Ukip on immigration. Instead of trying to look tougher, the authors suggest campaigners ‘must instead be moving the conversation on to issues where we have clear policy which tackles the problems people are worried about’:
‘Following from this, when we embark on policy messaging around immigration, which is not an area where Labour has the strongest lead over other parties, we should ensure that this messaging is always done in conjunction with other policy areas. The purpose of this is to raise the salience of those issues in which Labour has a much clearer lead and stands to benefit more from their prominence with the electorate.’
But the report reminds Labour that it is losing people who should be Labour. Ukip has built a significant rump of its support from disaffected working class voters, who abandoned Labour precisely because it couldn’t bring itself to talk about immigration in straightforward terms.
2. Labour is finally taking Ukip seriously
Ukip has yet to take a seat from Labour, although the Heywood and Middleton by-election was a close-run thing. Following this near miss, Labour have decided that they need to ditch the ‘wait-and-see’ approach. At Labour’s last conference, candidates were complaining at fringe meetings that the party was saying nothing about Ukip and that they had no ammunition with which to fight this new enemy.
The 33-page document is choc full of polling and constituency analysis, highlighting who the Labour-Ukip switchers are and how they can be brought back in time for May 2015. One interesting example is how Labour characterises the Ukip switchers:
3. Labour plans to fight Ukip with negative campaigning
It’s a favourite past time of Labour to complain that the Tories will be running a highly professional, aggressive election campaign. But all of the evidence here suggests Labour won’t be taking a particularly friendlier approach. Their main attack point is that Ukip are ‘More Tory than the Tories’ — with example leaflets demonstrating how this might work:
4. Labour needs to stop documenting its election strategy
What kind of plonker sends out a classified strategy as a PDF? Labour activists may be pleased to find out their party’s thinking on Ukip, the strategy has now been undermined by its exposure. Both voters and Ukip now know exactly what they will be intending to do – so they’ll see the strings.
As former Labour spin doctor Damian McBride tweeted this morning, the solution for is quite simple:
I hope Labour’s media team roll up a copy of that 33-page document and beat their ‘strategic’ colleagues savagely around the head with it.
— Damian McBride (@DPMcBride) December 15, 2014
“Don’t send *whack* daft *whack* documents *whack* like this *whack* all round *whack* the country *whack* you total *whack* twats *whack*”
— Damian McBride (@DPMcBride) December 15, 2014
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