Saturday 1 November 2014

"Rotherham! Rotherham! Blah! Blah! Blah!"

Labour topped the poll with over half of the first preference vote in Rotherham, as in all three of the other local authority areas in South Yorkshire.

There is no point in screeching "postal votes!", either. Anyone may apply for such a thing, and on a turnout this low they would all have been drowned out by people's going to the polls, as they chose not to do. Clearly, no one had convinced them that it was worth their while to do so.

UKIP's candidate had managed not to notice anything amiss during his 30 years on the South Yorkshire force. Not Orgreave. Not Hillsborough. And not Rotherham, either.

The persistence of the bedrock Conservative vote, which can no more be expected or enticed to vote UKIP than to vote Labour or anything else, is as noteworthy as ever.

Beyond re-electing incumbents against whom it had in any case never previously fielded candidates, UKIP does not exist anywhere outside the comment threads of certain websites.

Especially of Breitbart London, on which James Delingpole has had a kind of nervous breakdown over this entirely predictable, and outside Ukipworld universally predicted, result.

UKIP ran a campaign effectively written by those comment threads, and the voters in the real world have given their answer.

Now the rather more serious figure of Alan Billings can get down to addressing the true story of Rotherham, as also of Orgreave and of Hillsborough.

That is not a story of race, but a story of class.

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