Labour has said the party is facing an “incredibly tight” battle in both of this month’s byelections, with serious challenges from Ukip and the Conservatives.
The two constituencies, Stoke-on-Trent Central and Copeland, each recorded a high leave vote in the EU referendum. Labour’s campaign team in Stoke-on-Trent believes success against the Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, will depend on how well the party can paint him as an outsider using the city as a stepping stone for a platform in Westminster.
The campaign is expected to focus hard on the Conservative-Ukip council, the NHS crisis and on Nuttall’s personal record, including his historic comments on NHS privatisation.
In Copeland, the key to victory is thought to be the state of the NHS in Cumbria, including proposals to have the maternity ward, A&E and children’s ward downgraded or removed at West Cumberland hospital in Whitehaven.
The Conservatives, who came within 2,000 votes of winning the seat in 2015, have been focusing their attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s previous criticism of the nuclear industry. The Sellafield nuclear plant is one of the region’s biggest employers.
A Labour spokesman, speaking after MPs met in parliament on Monday evening, said: “We accept in both it is incredibly tight and it is a battle in both but there is no defeatist talk. In Copeland, we think we are winning the battle in terms of making it about the NHS. That is cutting through. In terms of Stoke, there is a feeling that we are beginning to get traction as well.”
The spokesman said campaigners knew they “have got a fight on our hands”, especially in Stoke. “Ukip have got their leader standing in the seat [Stoke] and he is a high-profile figure. But we are campaigning hard and there is a sense that it’s beginning to come back.”
Labour’s candidate in Stoke, Gareth Snell, wrote in LabourList this week that Nuttall could not count on support in the Midlands seat, just because he was from the north-west. “When Paul Nuttall was asked what he knew about Stoke-on-Trent, he suggested he understood our city because he’s stood before in Bootle, three times, and these places are all the same,” he said.
“I don’t expect Nuttall to understand what makes Stoke-on-Trent special. To him, the people of our city are just another pay cheque.”
Nuttall has come under fire after it was revealed his nomination paper declared he was living in a house in Stoke which he had not yet moved into at the time it was filed, against the Electoral Commission’s guidance for candidates.
One Labour source who has worked on the ground campaign in Stoke said the party sensed fears about Nuttall were rising. “People are very nervous about Nuttall as an individual,” the source said.
The shadow business secretary, Clive Lewis, told Labour activists in his Norwich South constituency over the weekend that the threat of Ukip in Stoke had been one of the reasons he had chosen not to defy a three-line whip on voting to trigger article 50 last week.
Lewis said he “was told – if you break with the whip in any stage in this process, you are helping to elect Paul Nuttall in Stoke … There are swaths of this country, like in Stoke, where we are hanging on by the fingernails to keep Ukip at bay.
“I do not want the politics of Trump in Westminster. And once they have one voice, they will have a base, and it will be a domino effect.”
Lewis, whose constituency voted strongly to remain, had suggested he could consider resigning over the issue and has said he may still do so if no Labour amendments to the government bill are accepted this week in its committee stage.
He told constituents: “If at the end of that process the bill before us is still an overwhelmingly Tory, hard, cliff-edge Trumpian Brexit then I am prepared to break the whip and I am prepared to walk from the shadow cabinet.”
Others in Labour believe the result is finely balanced on how well Ukip is able to mobilise ground support. The seat had the lowest turnout in the country in the 2015 general election, and the source said Labour believed it could make it over the line by mobilising its base better than Nuttall’s party.
“Ukip believe their own hype, that the people’s army will rise up, but in every byelection it comes down to the same thing – have you got enough people to get leaflets through the door and persuade people to actually go out and vote?” the source said. “Ukip do very well with people who also say they don’t vote.”
It has been revealed that both byelections on 23 February will clash with a summit hosted by Corbyn with leftwing European leaders, announced last autumn. The event with Labour’s sister parties is expected to include a dinner with shadow cabinet ministers and a Brexit-themed conference with speakers from businesses, NGOs and trade unions.
