Election in Britain’s ‘Brexit Capital’ Poses Test for Labour Party
Speaking in Labour’s campaign office in Stoke, Mr. Dromey said
that voters here have legitimate discontents — a lack of secure jobs, low pay and squeezed education and health care provision — but that these were being exploited "by a grotesque populism" that Labour has a chance to thwart in the elections.
Independence Party, known as UKIP, and he thinks that the Labour Party, for which he used to vote, "has lost touch with the working man." On Thursday, such feelings
of alienation will be tested in elections for two parliamentary seats in struggling areas of middle and north England, Stoke-on-Trent and Copeland.
His mea culpa out of the way, Mr. Snell acknowledged
that times have changed and that in Stoke he can no longer "rely on the fact that generations of grandparents and parents have continued to vote Labour." "The Labour Party," he said, "doesn’t deserve loyalty.
In Copeland, the contest has been more low-key than in Stoke, where Mr. Nuttall has made headlines as he seeks to craft a new identity for UKIP, after the Brexit referendum, one
that is less about Europe and more about representing the left-behind voters in depressed urban areas.
The vote seemed to be driven primarily by people like Mr. Lancett, who also have been displeased with the leftward turn of the current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn,
and attracted to the nationalist, anti-immigrant message of UKIP.
"It’s also clearly an indication of the party’s failure to recover from the shock both of the general election in 2015 and from the trauma created by the outcome of the referendum last year," he added, referring to the Brexit vote and a national election in which Labour lost all
but one of its seats in Scotland, a traditional stronghold.
A lifelong critic of the European Union, Mr. Corbyn campaigned only tepidly to remain
and has since ordered his legislators to vote with Mrs. May to trigger withdrawal talks — prompting further internal discord.