What voters want is a renationalisation of the railways, policies that hit the rich harder, a mansion tax and definitely not an abolition of inheritance tax. This isn’t a belated write-up of one of the further left fringes of the Labour conference in Manchester: it’s the ideas of a group of Ukippers who gathered this lunchtime in Doncaster to discuss how to attract Labour voters.
Led by Ian Dexter, a party member who has no formal role in writing the manifesto but who was given the official ‘How to win the crucial Labour Vote’ lunchtime slot, the fringe sounded at times more like a Socialist Workers’ Party meeting than an apparently libertarian party trying to entice Labour voters over. This included spending more on healthcare, housing , manufacturing, and higher wages, he argued. On wages, the living wage proposed by Labour was not nearly enough. And Dexter agreed with an audience member that it was a mistake to abolish death duties, which Patrick O’Flynn had announced just minutes before in his speech to the hall.It included
‘We should acknowledge that our population is now so huge and still growing and our resources of space and money so limit, we really do have no alternative to a measure of state intervention on some things, on many things, I would suggest, to prevent total distortion and total chaos.’
Asked why the party wasn’t adopting his ideas, Dexter said:
‘They will tell you, whatever the merits of these arguments, this is about, politics is the art of the possible, you have to do what you can, try and bring people along with you. they’re not into revolutionary ideas, that’s the problem.’
I asked Farage whether this revolt on the left of the right was going to make it into his manifesto. He replied that the manifesto would be written by the party’s NEC, and that those ideas wouldn’t be going into it. But watch out for those voices urging the party to lurch to the left to attract former Labour voters.
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