UK opposition Labour Party wins by-election

The by-election followed the death of former Labour minister Michael Meacher, who won in the general election with a majority of more than 14,000.

A large swing to UKIP failed to materialise, however, as candidate John Bigley took 6,487 votes to McMahon’s 17,209.

As well as overcoming the apparent threat from UKIP, the party also managed to increase its share of the vote by seven points.

Turnout was higher than expected at just over 40pc, and Labour’s success appears to have been partly secured by an effective postal vote operation.

The UKIP leader suggested “big ethnic changes in the way people are voting” could have “perverted” the result of the election. I don’t refer to the public-school educated Maoists, leeching off their parents, who people the various leftist pressure groups that are trying to take over the Labour Party and re-form it in their image: I mean normal, civilised people with families and mortgages who found Labour attractive in the days of Tony Blair, but who would require lobotomies before they voted for it now.

Mr Farage said: “As a veteran of over thirty by-elections I have never seen such a perverse result”.

“We need the office of the leader of the Labour Party to say Momentum is nothing to do with us, it’s nothing to do with the Labour Party”, he told Channel 4 News.

The angry MEP added: “We’ve had problems in Tower Halmets with this, we’ve had problems in Birmingham”.

“Clearly the Labour party has fought a very local campaign, a campaign in which Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t in the picture very much and the Labour candidate was”, he said.

Since his election as Labour leader in September, Mr Corbyn, 66, has struggled to revive a party that suffered a severe drubbing in this year’s general election. Mr Farage doesn’t seem to have any evidence to support his claim.

Tom Watson, Labour’s Deputy Leader, said the result was very positive news for Corbyn and called on MPs to get behind their leader after what he called “a hard week” for the party.

Mr Farage has made a series of visits to Oldham, while Mr Corbyn has only campaigned there once – and was forced to cancel an appearance last week as he dealt with internal divisions over air strikes on Islamic State in Syria.

Canvassers in Oldham said that Corbyn disagreeing with a shoot-to-kill policy had “cut through” to people.

In an email to Labour members on Thursday, Mr Corbyn and Mr Watson called for debate over the party’s direction to be carried out in a ” more civil and more respectful” way.

Moreover, Mr McMahon, a successful and pragmatic leader of Oldham’s council, is a centrist who is nearly as far removed from the Corbynistas as anyone could be.

POLLSTERS and politicians were left with egg on their faces yesterday after Labour stormed to victory in its first electoral test under Jeremy Corbyn.

Ann Coffey, MP for Stockport, who voted in favour of airstrikes, said she received messages calling her a “warmonger” and a “red Tory” and warning that she would have “blood on her hands”, which she believes is from an email account previously associated with Momentum.

Pharmacy manager Nasser Khan said: “I think 30%-40% would vote for somebody who they know because that’s what you trust”. What’s happened since Jeremy became leader and I became deputy leader is we have focused on issues that affect the working people of Britain.

“Unfortunately, some of the people who pretend they act in his name and some of those who have surrounded him are doing things that he finds fundamentally unacceptable and they should respect his views as well as those of ordinary people in Britain who just don’t think that this kind of behaviour is acceptable”.

“We are back in the game because we’ll either win it and it’s a game changer or we’ll get a brilliant second place”, he told me.