Labour’s sweeping byelection victory in Oldham West and Royton has buoyed the party after a week of bitter infighting and insulated Jeremy Corbyn against an early leadership challenge.
But it has not changed the underlying dynamic of conflict between Corbyn and most of the party membership on one side, and the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs on the other.
Labour expected to hold the seat outside Manchester, where the party was defending a majority of more than 15,000 after the death in October of Michael Meacher. But the party was braced for a massively reduced majority, perhaps as low as 1,000, and big gains for Ukip.
Instead, local council leader Jim McMahon held the seat with a majority of almost 11,000, on a turnout of 40 per cent, lower than in the general election. Labour’s share of the vote actually increased by 7.5 per cent to 62.3 per cent.
Corbyn, who had stayed away from Oldham for most of the campaign, was there on Friday to celebrate the victory which many pundits had characterised in advance as the first electoral test of his leadership.
“This campaign shows just how strong our party is, not just here in Oldham, but all over the country. We’ve driven the Tories back on tax credits, on police cuts, on their whole austerity agenda and narrative. It shows just how strong, how deep-rooted and how broad our party, the Labour party is, for the whole of Britain,” he said.
Labour had an unusually strong candidate in McMahon (35) who focused almost entirely on local issues during the campaign, and sidestepped questions about his party leader. But even if Corbyn may not have been the key figure in persuading Oldham to vote Labour, his perceived toxicity among white, working-class voters was not strong enough to drive them into the arms of Ukip.
Indeed, Ukip was so rattled by its failure to make a dent in Labour’s majority that its leader Nigel Farage toured the TV and radio studios to claim that there was widespread electoral fraud on behalf of what he called an “ethnic vote”.
Loyalty
It was a bad election too for the Conservatives, whose very own brand of toxicity saw their vote share fall by 10 per cent since May’s general election. This failure came despite George Osborne’s trumpeted Northern Powerhouse, as well as the relentless attacks on Corbyn’s alleged extremism and lack of patriotism.
At the end of a week that has seen Labour MPs seek police protection from mobs expressing loyalty to Corbyn, the atmosphere within the party remains sulphurous. The Labour leader has condemned online bullying of MPs who backed the government over Syria and rejected calls for such MPs to be deselected.
Such words will offer little comfort to MPs who know that, with the number of parliamentary seats due to be cut from 650 to 600 before the next election, constituency boundary changes are inevitable, leading to candidate selection battles. Some of Corbyn’s critics within the Parliamentary Labour Party were quietly hoping that a poor result in Oldham would accelerate a process of disillusionment with the leader among party members.
They will now have to wait until May’s elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, in some local authorities and for London’s mayor. Labour has a strong candidate in London in Sadiq Khan; its main rivals in Wales are the Conservatives; and any sign that the corpse of Scottish Labour is still twitching will be interpreted as a triumph.
If May fails to bring their wished for electoral disaster, Labour MPs may have to get used to the idea of Corbyn leading them into the next general election.