UKIP leader Nigel Farage has hit out strongly after Labour won a crushing victory in the by election for Oldham West and Royton.
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Corbyn, who won the Labour leadership election by a landslide in September, has since faced criticism from some MPs, unhappy at his conduct since becoming leader of the party.
UKIP, whose candidate John Bickley came second with 6,487 votes, were expected to perform much better than they did on the night and were accused of “sour grapes” after claims of postal vote rigging.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage: “As a veteran of over 30 by-elections I have never seen such a perverse result”.
Speaking in Birmingham, Mr Johnson says the attacks in Paris have underlined the need for Britain to stand “shoulder to shoulder” in the fight against terrorism.
He added: “We’ve had problems in Tower Halmets with this, we’ve had problems in Birmginham”. Farage even talked of “hundreds” of votes deciding the contest, and privately Ukip campaigners were confident of slashing the late Michael Meacher’s majority down to a few thousand.
Counting is under way i n the Oldham West and Royton by-election, with Jeremy Corbyn facing the first test of his Labour leadership at the ballot box.
Research by the Runnymede Trust published earlier this year shows that both Pakistani and Bangladeshi adults are less likely to be registered to vote than the white majority, and Ipsos-Mori found that black and ethnic minority voters were less likely to have turned out in the 2015 general election – as at earlier elections – than the average voter.
Mr Hague – who stepped down as an MP in May but is now a peer – led the Tories to one of their worst ever general election results in 2001, with a net gain of just one Parliamentary seat from Tony Blair’s Labour.
That echoes comments made yesterday by Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk, who told Sky News that Mr Corbyn’s “name came up not in a very good way when I was knocking on doors”.
While an opinion poll last month showed that support for Corbyn among party members remained strong, Labour lawmakers are rebelling openly over his refusal to vote for Britain to bomb Islamic State targets in Syria.
Moreover, Mr McMahon, a successful and pragmatic leader of Oldham’s council, is a centrist who is almost as far removed from the Corbynistas as anyone could be. “The hard work starts now”. But the party was braced for a massively reduced majority, perhaps as low as 1,000, and big gains for Ukip.
‘With the Tories going nowhere in Oldham, Ukip has benefited from a protest vote.
“We take our duties in administering the voting and count process very seriously and if we receive any allegations of postal voting irregularities then we would be immediately reported these to the police so they can be fully investigated”.
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“But I think really what you had was a candidate who was well-known locally and was addressing the issues that people were concerned about on the doorstep”.
