THE United Kingdom Independence Party is on the up, according to a succession of opinion polls taken in the last couple of months. One of the latest suggests Ukip has the support of 34 per cent of Britain’s voters.

But while the popular view is that the Conservatives in both the South and ‘Middle England’ are the main losers. Nothing further could be from the truth.

Last year Ukip came a respectable second place in the South Shields Parliamentary by-election, gaining a quarter of the popular vote, in what’s regarded as a traditional working-class industrial seat. In South Tyneside Council, Ukip are now the official opposition.

During the same year, Ukip scored 27 per cent of the vote in Walkergate, Newcastle, at a council by-election despite little local campaigning. In this year’s local elections, Ukip came second in Byker, Benwell, Newburn, Lemington and Walker, traditional working-class neighbourhoods. Most of its electoral support came from ‘core’ Labour voters. They made little impact in the leafy suburbs of Gosforth and Parklands, despite fighting a vigorous street campaign. In West Gosforth Ukip came a derisory fourth with a meagre 376 votes.

Although Labour held their core seats, their majorities were much smaller in a much reduced vot. So what’s going on in Labour, Newcastle?

Contrary to popular belief, Ukip is not drawing its main electoral strength from disaffected middle-class right-wing Conservatives or eurosceptics, but from what has been perceived as a ‘neglected workingclass’.

In a new book, Ukip: Revolt on the Right, experts Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, argue convincingly that Britain’s fourth largest political party is getting its biggest support from low-income, cashstrapped and insecure working-class men, who feel alienated from ‘metropolitan liberal elites’ who dominate all three main political parties, including Labour, a party originally founded to represent the interests of working people in urban areas. According to Ford and Goodwin, Ukip voters look like ‘old Labour’, and the surge in support has come from unskilled/low-skilled manual workers – whose support Labour has lost since 2009.

Women, the under-35s and university graduates don’t touch them with a barge poll.

In the groups where Labour has lost most ground – working class men, the unqualified and jobless as well as low income pensioners – Ukip has gained a staggering nine per cent lead.

AS a local sociologist, I’ve spent the last year visiting bars on Gosforth High Street, in the big market, and the inner-city west and east end of the city, observing and chatting to ordinary working men and women, as well as informally interviewing young people doing A-levels and taxi drivers.

Many who I spoke to felt left out from the political process, and believed wrongly or rightly that the big parties simply didn’t represent their interests anymore. And more worryingly, they perceive that they are not listened to, let alone respected as a potential electoral force. In addition, I was staggered by the number of educated young people who were intending to vote Ukip and even Conservative next year and in the big 2015 General Election.

True, there exists at present an ‘anti-politics culture’, with turnout in both general and local elections having slumped but, as Ford and Goodwin stress, it’s more than this, “Ukip articulates a more specific idea: the resentment and anger of the old Labour working-class base”. To many of these people, New Labour cares more about the welfare of migrants than its core vote.

Although migration has brought many benefits to our region including filling skill shortages, greater diversity in culture, lifestyles and food, those who feel threatened by it, are not the comfortable professional middle-class, but disaffected, financially insecure blue-collar workers and the unemployed in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Labour must re-establish itself in its urban heartlands by re-connecting with its core vote, listening to their concerns and focusing on local doorstep issues such as low-level crime, local issues, anti-social behaviour and housing shortages. If Labour is to win big in the 2015 General Election and see off Ukip, Ed Miliband’s major challenge, is to win back the hearts and minds of the region’s and country’s male blue-collar workers.

  • Stephen Lambert is a Newcastle City Councillor and freelance writer and has taught politics and sociology for 20 years.