Southward View

Whatever the result at Eastleigh, very little can be gleaned from a by-election in a constituency so, literally, eccentric that it has elected a Lib Dem MP five times in a row. Such a place exists altogether outside the electoral mainstream. That makes it interesting in its own way. But only in its own way.

The treatment of UKIP as a major party by the media is something of which it ought to be thoroughly wary. The Greens, with an MP and with far more Councillors, including control of a Council, are not treated like that. UKIP is being co-opted. And Farage is allowing it to be. The rest of his party needs to ask why. It will. If it has any existence apart from his personality.

If Danny Stupple does finish top of the rest, then there will be the man whom Labour ought to have approached. The National Executive Committee can have anyone it likes to contest a by-election. Although I expect (I could be wrong) that he has previously identified as a Tory, his campaign website marks him as vaguely left-of-Blair economically.

Alas, his Evangelical Anglican church, which I am told is quite normal for that neck of the woods as I am told that it also would be in Kent, seems fully signed up to the late and aberrant theory of Christian Zionism. It probably does not know that Arab nationalism and the modern concept of Filastin both arose among Christian students at American Protestant missionary universities well before the denominations in question adopted the liberal theology that could not have produced them.

Nor that the Anglican community which makes up a significant proportion of Christians in today's Jerusalem is of a rather Conservative Evangelical persuasion, having arisen with a view to Reforming the existing Catholics and Orthodox. That latter lack of awareness is particularly odd and disappointing in view of the recent Jerusalem Declaration. If you need to, then give it a Google.

But such things can be contained, especially these days. Stupple's main objection is to the same-sex "marriage" that Labour never sought to introduce and on which it granted a free vote when the present lot tried to do it, as that lot has still yet to see through to conclusion.

Among the Labour abstainers were two Shadow Ministers, both of whom remain in post and will be Ministers after 2015, who are active Evangelical Protestants, who would certainly vote against Third Reading in the extremely unlikely event that this Bill ever made it that far, and one of whom is the only Pentecostal pastor in Parliament. Labour and Respect are known to be fighting it out to recruit the pastors of the black churches as candidates in many urban areas.

If the combined vote for Labour and for Danny Stupple is greater than that for the next candidate up, then it will be perfectly clear what ought to have been done, and what ought to be done next time, in order to capture this admittedly unusual seat.

Update 10:18pm: Danny Stupple has just retweeted this. Whoever runs Labour in the Deep South, take note.