The Dog That Never Barks

I wish Jim McMahon well, and I have every expectation that he will hold Oldham West and Royton.

UKIP came a distant second in May, Michael Meacher took more than 50 per cent of the vote, UKIP is forlornly putting up one of its perennial candidates, and some wards deliver Labour votes of 90 per cent.

Purely hypothetically, if McMahon did lose, then the "electable" Establishment Right of the Labour Party would have lost a seat that Meacher had won 11 times, including only seven months previously.

In any case, with all the boundaries changing, the Left will have blood somewhere, to atone for having been deprived of Meacher's seat. But even so.

But of course Labour is going to win. On what issue might UKIP beat it? Immigration? Immigration is not an electoral issue. A policy one, yes. But not an electoral one. It simply isn't.

If it were, then there would be 200 UKIP MPs, or 100, or 50, or 20, or five, or two. But there are not. There are not even two UKIP MPs. Nor will there be so on 4th December.

UKIP is not even allowed in the campaign for withdrawal from the EU should the referendum ever materialise. That has been up and running for months, led by a Labour MP, funded by a Labour donor, and with Nigel Farage, in particular, well and truly banned from it.