Labour hold Oldham West & Royton

Despite the best efforts of John Bickley and his UKIP team, Labour managed to hold on to Oldham West & Royton in yesterday's by-election.

Despite the bookies getting twitchy, the election had already been won before election day thanks to Labour's postal voting machine which generated a massive 25% postal turnout.

UKIP's vote share was up 2.8%, Labour's was up 7.3%, the Lib Dems lost their deposit and the Tories dropped 9.6% of the vote since May. Overall turnout was down 19.3% from the general election.

Candidate	Party	Votes	%	+/-
Jim McMahon	Labour	17,209	62.1%	+7.3%
John Bickley	UKIP	6,487	23.4%	+2.8%
James Daly	Conservatives	2,596	9.4%	-9.6%
Jane Brophy	Lib Dem	1,024	3.7%	0.0%
Simeon Hart	Green	249	0.9%	-1.0%
Sir Oink A-Lot	Monster Raving Loony	141	0.5%	N/A

Well done to John Bickley and his team for an excellent election campaign.

Oldham deserves better than Labour, vote John Bickley

Voters go to the polls in Oldham West & Royton today to choose a replacement for the late Michael Meacher who sadly passed away in late October.

Oldham has been described as a "one party state" due to Labour's dominance in the city as the former party of the working class. But the city that once elected Sir Winston Churchill - thought by many to be the greatest and most principled leader we've ever had - deserves better than four more years of Labour, Jeremy Corbyn and the IRA supporting communist tax dodger, Jim McMahon.

UKIP is the only party that can end Labour's rule in Oldham and give people in the north and MP that works for real people, not corporate interests or unaccountable quangos and organisations. John Bickley is a successful businessman from a working class family, not a career politician.

Bookies for Bickley

With less than a week until voters go to the polls in Oldham West & Royton, the bookies are shortening odds for a UKIP win.

All but two of the online bookies tracked by the Odds Checker website are shortening odds on a UKIP victory and lengthening odds on a Labour win. Most bookies have UKIP around the 2/1 mark whilst Labour are still odds on at around 1/3.

There is no question that John Bickley can win Oldham West & Royton for UKIP. This once safe Labour seat is rapidly turning purple and while the bookies are pretty sure Labour will keep the seat, they're uncertain enough to keep UKIP's odds short in case they find themselves having to pay out.

Hypocritical Labour complain about UKIP's mock leaflet in Oldham

Labour have launched a hypocritical attack on UKIP for distributing a mock Labour leaflet pointing out Jeremy Corbyn's policies.

In this year's general election Labour distributed leaflets all over the country claiming UKIP wants to privatise the NHS, even distributing them to students at a Keele University election event and in Northumberland they distributed a letter claiming that UKIP was calling for mothers to lose state benefits. In the 2013 local elections the Conservatives distributed a fake UKIP leaflet in Lancashire and Labour were doing it in the South Shields by-election.

Trade union sockpuppets, Hope not Hate, have put a considerable amount of effort into publishing fake social media content and defamatory and inflammatory material about UKIP candidates to try and prop up the Labour Party.

The Labour MP for Denton & Reddish, Andrew Gwynne, has accused UKIP of "trying to take Oldham backwards to the days of division" and says that the leaflet would only heighten fears of racial tension. Oldham saw a series of race riots in 2001 after white communities retaliated to a growing number of racist attacks from asian gangs and the violence escalated. Gwynne is claiming that highlighting Jeremy Corbyn's policies of uncontrolled immigration, abolishing the armed forces, abolishing the monarchy and ceding the Falklands to Argentina - all of which are his policies - will result in a return of race riots and suggests the timing is inappropriate because of the terrorist attacks in Paris last week.

Its hard to decide what's most pathetic - the breathtaking hypocrisy, the suggestion that exposing the Labour leader's policies will lead to race riots or using the Paris terrorist attacks for political point scoring.

With three weeks until voters in Oldham West & Royton go to the polls, Labour are 1/6 favourites to win with UKIP a fairly close second with odds of 7/2 and the vote splitting Conservatives a distant third place with odds of 100/1. Opinion polls in the run-up to the by-election in the neighbouring Heywood & Middleton constituency last October predicted an almost 6,000 vote majority for Labour when in reality UKIP's John Bickley fell just 617 votes short of taking what was once a Labour safe seat.

The polling companies will have revisited their weighting after that result and the party's massive 3.9m votes in the general election this year but they're not going to lose their bias toward the status quo. The result is going to be a lot closer than any of the polling companies predict and John Bickley stands a very good chance of winning Oldham West & Royton for UKIP.

John Bickley for Oldham West & Royton

So John Bickley is UKIP's man for Oldham West & Royton as expected and he's the perfect candidate.

Bickley is the son of a trade unionist and a self-made businessman who has created jobs and investment in the north of England. He came within a whisker of unseating Labour in the by-election for the neighbouring constituency of Middleton & Heywood last year and there's a very good chance he can win Oldham West & Royton for UKIP this year.

UKIP - The Great Realignment Of British Politics Finally Begins

It is difficult to know what to celebrate the most - Douglas Carswell's fantastic victory in Clacton or John Bickly's very close second in Heywood and Middleton.

What is now absolutely clear is that the great realignment of British politics, so long prophesised, is finally underway. 

Some quick points:

• UKIP is rapidly becoming the party of the indigenous working class, displacing working class Toryism in the south of England and challenging Labour supremacy in the north.
• Both Conservative and Labour are retreating deeper and deeper into their regional heartlands and can no longer really be called national parties. Labour's vote evaporated in Clacton, as did the Tories in Heywood and Middleton. 
• UKIP is now surely the only serious challenger to Labour in it's post-industrial heartlands.
• The Labour vote is now realigning in tune with the modern party's middle class leadership and Metropolitan obsessions. Labour has sucked up a very large proportion of the previous LibDem voting middle classes at the same time as losing large amounts of working class supporters to UKIP.
• Despite our advances deep into Labour territory, thanks to the huge public sector vested interests and the dependency culture deliberately created by Gordon Brown, the Labour vote remains very strong in their core areas and will be difficult to break down. After all, after the Rotherham revelations a party with Labour's track record should quite properly cease to exist, and yet it is still winning by-elections in the kind of places similar to those badly affected by such terrible scandals.
• The LibDems are destroyed as a national party, doomed to total humiliation except where they have strong local incumbency factors in their favour. They will lose hundreds of deposits at the next general election. However they may well still hold the balance of power afterwards because of their still strong localised concentrations in support.
• Judging by the idiotic comments and spin from the LibLabCon parties after tonight's debacle, of which the victory address by Labour's Liz McInnes was the most ridiculous, the political class (a) continues to treat the voters with contempt by insulting their intelligence and (b) still doesn't know what has hit it!

Douglas Carswell is UKIP's first elected MP

Douglas Carswell has won the Clacton by-election for UKIP by a huge margin, increasing his majority and becoming UKIP's first elected MP.

John Bickley came unbelievably close to unseating Labour in the Heywood & Middleton by-election, falling short by just over 600 votes after a bundle check.

Carswell's victory for UKIP in Clacton represents a 44% swing from Conservative to UKIP and is the largest winning vote increase for any party in history whilst Bickley's close second in Heywood & Middleton will mortify Labour who almost lost the safe northern seat that they have held since it was created 21 years ago.

When I joined UKIP six years ago the party was very much the underdog, barely registering on opinion polls and tanking in elections. How things have changed. UKIP has replaced the Lib Dems as the number three party in the UK and is challenging both the Conservatives and Labour. The courage that Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless have shown in defecting from the Conservatives and resigning their seats to get a fresh mandate for UKIP is a rare display of principals that hadn't been seen since Churchill crossed the floor twice when his party failed to represent his beliefs. But we must also recognise the role of Nigel Farage who has devoted his life to turning UKIP into a serious political force for good at great personal expense. There is no doubt in my mind that UKIP's success over the last couple of years, culminating in yesterday's historic first ever Westminster by-election win would not have happened were it not for Nigel Farage's leadership of the Peoples' Army that he has created.

Clacton

Candidate	Party	Vote	%
Douglas Carswell	UKIP	21,113	59.7%
Giles Watling	Conservative	8,709	24.6%
Tim Young	Labour	3,957	11.0%
Chris Southall	Green	688	1.7%
Andrew Graham	Lib Dem	483	1.3%
Bruce Sizer	Independent	205	0.6%
Alan "Howling Laud" Hope	Loony	127	0.4%
Charlotte Rose	Independent	56	0.2%

Heywood & Middleton

Candidate	Party	Vote	%
Liz McInnes	Labour	11,663	40.9%
John Bickley	UKIP	11,016	38.7%
Iain Gartside	Conservative	3,496	12.3%
Anthony Smith	Lib Dem	1,457	5.1%
Abi Jackson	Green	870	3.1%

UK second in Wythenshawe & Sale East

UKIP's John Bickley came second in yesterday's by-election in the Labour stronghold of Wythenshawe & Sale East.

A hate campaign by Labour and BNP activists that saw voters and activists abused and intimidated and criminal damage at UKIP's office in Sale wasn't enough to see off UKIP's surge from fifth place in the last election in Wythenshawe & Sale East to second.

UKIP saw the biggest increase in vote share followed by Labour and the BNP whilst the Lib Dems and Tories experienced huge losses. The Lib Dems, Greens, BNP and Monster Raving Loony Party all lost their deposit.

Party	Votes	%	+/-
Labour	13,268	55.4%	+11.2%
UKIP	4,301	17.9%	+14.5%
Conservative	3,479	14.5%	-11%
Lib Dems	1,176	4.9%	-17.4%
Green	748	3.1%	N/A
BNP	708	3.0%	+0.9%
Monster Raving Loony Party	288	1.2%	N/A

Help UKIP win the Wythenshawe & Sale East by-election

Voters will go to the polls in the Wythenshawe & Sale East by-election next Thursday with a chance to make history and elect UKIP's first MP.

UKIP candidate John Bickley is a local businessman who grew up on a council estate in Wythenshawe. He has worked for EMI Records, MCA Records, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studies, Psygnosis and Sony and is now in high tech startups. Westminster needs real people who have made their own success, not millionaire lawyers and lifelong politicians and former Labour man John Bickley is just the sort of person we need.

There is still time to help out in the by-election campaign either financially or practically. If you want to help UKIP win the Wythenshawe & Sale East by-election you can find details on the UKIP website.