Ukip, hunting blue-collar votes, takes the fight to Labour

While Ed Miliband unites with David Cameron in launching Gulf War Three against IS in Iraq, Ukip leader Nigel Farage has started his own war - launching a bunker-buster aimed at Labour.

On the day Ukip’s annual conference opens at Doncaster Racecourse - next door to Miliband's Doncaster North constituency - Farage announced on Radio 4’s Today programme that his party’s election manifesto will include a pledge to remove the income tax burden from anyone earning minimum wage.

Miliband’s vow to increase the minimum wage - to £8 an hour – was one of the central planks of Labour’s election promises, laid out earlier this week in Manchester in a bid to attract core working-class supporters. But Miliband said nothing about removing tax.

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Farage’s plan would cost £12 billion - easily paid for by slashing the foreign aid budget by 80 per cent and cutting payments to the EU. All of that adds up to a pledge which could prove highly popular with blue-collar workers disenchanted with Miliband's leadership of the London-centric Labour party.

Just to rub in the difference Ukip would make, Farage told the Today programme he was prepared to side with populist Labour rebel Diane Abbott, who announced on the same programme that she will be voting against air strikes against IS in today’s Commons vote.

It will have made Abbott feel decidedly uncomfortable – no Labour MP wants to have anything in common with the Ukip brand - but Farage said that if he had a seat in the Commons, he would be in the same division lobby voting "no" with Abbott tonight.

“Our [Britain’s] track record on this is bad,” said Farage. “This time last year Cameron wanted us to arm the people who became Isis [IS]. Just launching bombing missions will not work.”

• Crispin Black: Bombing IS in Iraq is not the answer

The Ukip insurgency is being taken so seriously by Labour that it has launched a pre-emptive strike on social media, getting the Labour leader of the Lords, Janet Royall (Baroness Royall of Blaisdon), to tweet their line that Ukip are "more Tory than the Tories".

Dan Hodges, the former union spin doctor turned Daily Telegraph blogger, says this shows Labour is "rattled" by Farage and Ukip.

Robin Brant, who is covering the Ukip conference for the BBC, said the Doncaster meeting of 2,000 party members was aimed directly at Labour - and with good reason. He reckons they have a serious chance of challenging Labour in the Manchester Heywood and Middleton by-election on 9 October, where Labour are defending a majority of nearly 6,000 left by Jim Dobbin, whose death triggered the poll.

Ukip are also putting boots on the ground in the rotten Labour borough of Rotherham with a serious bid to win the election for a new police commissioner after Labour's Shaun Wright was forced to resign along with other officials in the wake of the child sex scandal involving largely Asian men in the town.

Matthew Goodwin, an academic political commentator, told the Today programme: “What we may be seeing is Ukip not just beginning to tease off Labour support but becoming the main opposition to Labour in areas that have not really been competitive for generations.”

Ukip’s target zone includes Doncaster, Middlesborough, Hartlepool and Rotherham where there has been serious economic stagnation, and where a strong working-class vote has big concerns about immigration in particular.

Ukip is not forgetting its other battle - against the Tories. In the other 9 October by-election – Clacton - Douglas Carswell, who defected from the Conservatives to Ukip to force the election, looks certain to retain the seat and become Ukip’s first MP in this parliament.

And Ukip’s party secretary, Matthew Richardson, has been putting it about that two more Tory “turncoats” are “in the bag”, suggesting their defection could be announced at Doncaster. Of course, this could be conference bluster designed to get the party excited, but as Political Betting reports, the bookies are offering evens on the first defector being the recalcitrant Peter Bone. We shall see.

Meanwhile, Farage has been carrying out a classic pincer movement in Clacton, supping pints with the former Labour stalwarts in Jaywick, the Labour end of the Essex resort, while Carswell chats up the retired disgruntled Tory voters at the posh end of the constituency at Frinton.

At this rate, it will take a new “coalition of the willing” to wipe out the Ukip threat.