Is Labour losing its traditional voters?

by Brian Bamford

A POST ELECTION REPORT   from  Steve Gillan (POA), the TUC-JCC General   Secretary, POA, claimed 'Brexit was a key issue' and Labour lost 37% of leave voters who voted Labour in 2017, and 21% of remain voters who voted Labour in 2017.

A recent comment in Heywood and Middleton from a Labour canvasser, campaigning on the doorstep, told me people were closing their front doors when they realised it was Labour on the knocker.  

It was said that this dislike seemed to be down to two things: an intense dislike of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour's stance on Brexit.

Heywood, near Rochdale, has long been a solid Labour constituency but at the General Election in December the local Labour candidate was defeated by the Conservative.  

Steve Gillan in his report also claimed 'we should be building on, increasing and challenging the growth of the far right, anti-semitism and Islamophobia.'

 Yet,  as the Secretary of Tameside TUC, I wrote twice to Jeremy Corbyn asking him where he stood as regards the case of the persecuted Pakistani Catholic Asia Bibi, who had been sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan.  She had drank water from a cup used by Muslim fruit pickers to quench her thirst and had spent eight years on death row.  The family sought asylum for Asia in the UK but nobody from Theresa May's government was prepared to meet her husband and daughter when they came to London.  May refused asylum to the family because she said it could lead to racial unrest in the UK and put the lives of British diplomats at risk in Pakistan. 

Meanwhile, Corbyn never gave us a reply and I'm not aware of him speaking publicly about her case. We concluded that he was frightened of alienating the Muslim Labour vote.  I asked a Labour Party friend to speak to Angela Rayner about Asia Bibi. Rayner told him that Labour was supportive but the problem was the family hadn't applied for asylum in the UK, which was untrue.  Corbyn, did however, speak out publicly in support of the Isis bride, Shamima Begum, demanding that her British citizenship be restored. Asia Bibi and her family were eventually given asylum in Canada where she campaigns on behalf of other persecuted Christian's in Pakistan.

The Heywood and Middleton constituency in Lancashire has a strong Roman Catholic presence, having received immigrants following the Irish potato famine in the 19th Century.   Among today's fashionable addicts they they are now yesterday's people and the recent failure of Rochdale's Labour councillors to condemn an axe attack on four tree surgeons working in the Newbold area of Rochdale in October 2017 by an Asian gang shouting 'white bastards' at them, seems to be a symptom of post-modernity.  This might sound like blatant 'Orientalism', but the thing is Irish Catholics are no longer the flavour of the month in politics, and the local Labour Party is more inclined to wag-its-tail and fly the flag of Kashmir or Pakistan outside Rochdale Town Hall these days. This may go some way to explaining why Heywood and Middleton, which is one of the two Rochdale constituencies, now has a conservative MP.  Labour is so frightened of offending the Asian clans that it appears to be losing the white working class.

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