But it’s not a legal requirement for registered voters to know who Jeremy Corbyn is, as far as we know.
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Then there is the refugee crisis.
While an opinion poll last month showed that support for Corbyn among party members remained strong, Labour MPs are rebelling openly over his refusal to vote for Britain to bomb Islamic State targets in Syria.
Such features have led many to argue that Labour is about to experience a costly defeat.
Last October Mr Bickley almost overturned an 11,000 Labour majority at the Heywood and Middleton by-election, losing by just 600 votes. If that had happened it would have nearly certainly brought a premature end to Ed Miliband’s leadership.
“They came straight back to the offices in Oldham to write up and the pages were done and dusted within a couple of hours”. This is exactly the type of seat where Farage and his party have a track record.
The Labour leader hailed the result as a “vote of confidence in our party” while Ukip claimed the volume of postal votes cast in the constituency had “distorted” the outcome.
The Tory vote collapsed by 9 per cent on May’s general election, while the Lib Dems lost their deposit for the ninth time in a by-election since 2010.
But this also sheds light on a problem for the Kippers. And we all know what happened in the subsequent general election. Doubly so for one attempting to take his party in a new, uncharted direction as Jeremy Corbyn is doing.
Corbyn said the win was “a clear demonstration that Labour is the party working people trust”. “The people who might be patriotic but who are socialist leaning – they might decide to vote UKIP”, a Labour campaigner who had travelled to Oldham from London, said on condition of anonymity.
“He’s toxic, anti-British and anti-patriotic”, UKIP candidate John Bickley told the Manchester Evening News on Monday, referring to Corbyn’s cancellation of a visit to the district that Meacher had held for Labour since 1970.
Because postal votes are cast at home, vote anonymity can be compromised and there have been previous instances in Britain of people “harvesting” unused postal votes to fill in, although signature checks have been introduced to tackle this.
There are, after all, plenty of safe Labour seats where a donkey with a red rosette would win comfortably, as would a donkey with a blue rosette in the many safe Tory seats.
“Jim is either an incompetent or a hypocrite, neither is good enough for Oldham West and Royton”.
In the event Labour’s Jim McMahon easily held on to the seat.
Moreover, numerous Conservative voters in this seat are not blue-collar Essex-type Tories who warm to Ukip.
Mr Farage’s deputy Paul Nuttal branded the controversial postal voting system an “affront to democracy”.
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Now think about the numbers. “But if it is at all close, it should be ringing huge alarm bells for Labour”.
