The turnout was higher than expected – 27,795, or just over 40% of those eligible to vote. Our party’s membership has now doubled since the general election, much of it down to Corbyn’s reinvigoration of the grassroots and inspiring new people.
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UKIP were a distant second – but their leader’s come out fighting today.
“As a veteran of over thirty by-elections I have never seen such a perverse result”.
Mr Corbyn said: “The British people need the Labour Party’s united action in support of social justice more than ever”. His deputy, Paul Nuttall, called postal voting an “affront to democracy” and asked provocatively: “Is this Britain or is this Harare?”
His comments will heighten fears among moderate Labour MPs that they could be targeted for de-selection by Mr Corbyn’s supporters, despite the leader’s insistence that he does not want to see MPs ousted.
But a defiant Labour source told Daily Star Online: “We totally reject that claim”.
The angry MEP added: “We’ve had problems in Tower Halmets with this, we’ve had problems in Birmingham”.
Ukip’s candidate in Oldham West, John Bickley, almost overturned an 11,000 Labour majority at the Heywood and Middleton by-election last October, losing by just 600 votes.
He said Oldham West and Royton was a “different type of constituency with different demographics” in what he said was a “very strong Labour heartland”. “That would make polling day actually mean something”.
And he said: “The sooner we kick the Tories out and get a Labour government back in the better for all of us”.
“The other candidates weren’t from Oldham, and I think in by-elections these local factors weigh rather more heavily than they would in a general election”. “The hard work starts now”.
“It shows just how strong, how deep-rooted and how broad our party, the Labour Party, is for the whole of Britain”.
“It shows the way we’ve driven the Tories back on tax credits, on police cuts, on their whole austerity agenda and narrative”.
Now the voters of Oldham would be able to echo the disgust felt by Cameron and prove that Labour must turn once again to the “sensible” right-wing pro-war cabal of 66 MPs who voted with the Tories, possibly replacing Corbyn with Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn.
Tory candidate James Daly was third with 2,596 votes, while the Lib Dems lost their deposit after Jane Brophy only managed to secure 1,024 votes. McMahon, the local son of a truck driver, was the ideal counter to Ukip’s anti-Corbyn attacks. Mr Coyle has not accused Momentum of responsibility for the incidents, but said the group now had “pop-up organisations…across London who are making threats to councils about de-selection and things and pretending to do this in Jeremy’s name”. I never thought we would get the majority we got.
The result discredited Corbyn’s internal critics, who had hoped a weak showing would help spark a leadership coup.
And Oldham Council said there had been a “high level of daily scrutiny” of the by-election, the first to be run under the new system of individual electoral registration – where people have to sign up to vote themselves rather than being registered as a member of a household.
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Time for a confession: I don’t know many Corbyn people.
