THE narrow win for Kim Leadbeater in the Batley and Spen by-election is down — in part — to an impressive Get Out The Vote operation.

It seems that a still-intelligent element in Labour’s apparatus has learnt from the Momentum surge tactics and perhaps, from Stalin’s famous aphorism that once the political line has been determined, organisation decides all.

The party machinery pulled out all the stops — something it will not be able to achieve in every constituency during a general election — and in doing so demonstrated how much more effective Labour’s ground operation could be if the apparatus worked in unity with the membership rather than witch-hunted activists on the left.

In this by-election, Labour’s pitch was substantially apolitical in the sense that the large hole where Labour’s policies might exist remained unfilled — or at least unexpressed.

Meanwhile the campaign relied on doorstep organisation, a shameless evocation of sympathy for the Labour candidate’s relationship with her sister murdered by a local fascist and her transparently human qualities.

A good part of the impetus to Labour’s organisational effort lay in the awareness that a defeat would threaten Starmer’s leadership, allied to the plain fact that George Galloway made this his clear goal. This led to an unusual and extraordinarily antagonistic campaign which has continued after the result was declared and will undoubtedly end up in the courts.

The campaign proved that a likeable local candidate — trading on her local roots and family connection — can partially compensate for Labour’s policy vacuum, while the toxicity of Keir Starmer in the eyes of many erstwhile Labour voters is best countered by keeping him invisible right up to the poll result when he reappeared like a magician at a children’s party.

But this was a very narrow win that provides only aspirin-lite relief for Labour’s mortifying problems.

Leadbeater is far from the identikit picture of a Blairite functionary on the make. Her forgivable and sometimes shaky grasp of policy and her obvious failure to fit the mould of a professional politician may have helped her appeal.

The Labour campaign targeted Tory and Lib Dem voters in the more middle-class areas with material which stressed the candidate’s local roots and downplayed the Labour label.

This, the complete irrelevance of the Lib Dems and the quietly engineered absence of a Green Party candidate may have compensated somewhat for the loss of working-class and Labour votes to Galloway and abstention — but will more likely store up future problems than tackle Labour’s credibility crisis among working-class voters.

It is a contemporary and temporarily expedient version of the Blairite strategy of targeting swing voters in swing constituencies while neglecting the concerns and class interests of its working-class base.

Labour, or elements in it, ran an extensive dirty tricks campaign directed principally against Galloway and mobilised the suggestion that local disappointment to Labour was down to anti-semitism.

The issues over Palestine, and to a lesser extent Kashmir, had salience in this election not because Galloway made them so but because Starmer beat him to it.

Aside from his complete commitment to the ruling-class consensus on Israel and his avowed zionism, the Labour leader seems to have a tin ear to the broader concerns of British Muslims including the disputed status of Kashmir.

His earlier refusal to attend a post-Ramadan Iftar feast because one of its participants had backed a BDS campaign against the Israeli dispossession of Palestinians gave legs to this deeply damaging narrative.

When a so-far-anonymous Starmer aide briefed that Muslims were abandoning Labour because of Starmer’s line on “anti-semitism” the damage to Labour’s local Muslim support was beyond repair.

This dog-whistle echo of the zionist trope that criticism of Israeli state policies is ipso facto anti-semitic is the logical expression of Starmer’s campaign against the Labour left and indeed, the settled views of most Labour Party members. It is now both a party management problem and an electoral disaster.

Starmer’s people tried to deflect criticism of the leadership’s repudiation of Labour’s conference policy on Kashmir by playing on the inevitable differences between Muslims and the smaller but not insignificant Hindu community.

As a consequence, where broad, cross-community support for Labour was possible on the basis of domestic and British issues, it is now fractured.

In two crudely opportunistic moves the unreflexively racist cabal at the heart of the Starmer machine managed to alienate two key elements in Labour’s local electoral coalition and inflict reputational damage to Labour nationally.

By-elections are an imprecise guide to the result in a general election when the governance of the state is the key issue but some things can be taken from the result.

The fringe fascists who fielded a whole array of noxious individuals — and made a barely subliminal play on the murder of Leadbeater’s sister Jo Cox — scored derisory votes and their aggregate lost deposits helped Kirklees Council pay for the election.

The Tories largely stayed out of the scrapping, concentrating their efforts in the more middle-class settlements up the Spen Valley and canvassing support on the barely coded promise of investment and jobs that might follow a Tory win.

What produced a win in Hartlepool didn’t here — and given the narrowness of the vote the Tories must be regretting the low-key character of their campaign.

A 300 margin of victory is not enough to inspire confidence that the seat would be safe from the Tories in a general election even if the overall result here and in Amersham and Chesham shows that the Tory appeal is clearly more limited than the national polls allow.

The headline story is a Labour win and a something of a setback for the Tories and that may be enough to save Starmer’s skin for a while.

However, Labour faces deeper problems. In 2017 — with the Corbyn effect — Labour in Batley and Spen won 29, 844 votes. This was 55.5 per cent of the total and the highest Labour vote for years.

In this 2021 by election Labour won just 35.5 per cent with 13,296 votes. These missing 16,298 votes are the real danger signal.

Part of the post-election spin by the Labour leadership — and its reliable cheerleaders in the liberal commentariat — is that there was a small swing to Labour.

This imaginative reading of an election in which more than half the voters stayed at home and the Labour vote slumped by more than a half fails to take account of the very substantial percentage — of those who did vote — that Galloway won running on his Workers Party of Britain (WPB) ticket.

The liberal commentator Paul Mason put this down to “a mixture of the youthful radicalism that put tens of thousands of young Muslims on the streets during the latest Gaza atrocities and the homophobia and anti-feminism of their parents.”

In mobilising these racist stereotypes Mason ignores, or is indifferent to, all the polling evidence which suggests that Muslims hold positions on sexual politics and women’s liberation in broadly similar proportions to the rest of the population.

The significant thing about British Muslims is the fact that they are … rather British. But what do logic or facts matter when a factional point is to be scored?

In their range of attitudes to the big moral and political questions Muslims are much like the rest of us save they are traditionally more inclined to vote Labour — and disinclined to vote Tory — than other groups. This is a reflection of the fact that most Muslims were brought to Britain to meet labour force needs and that it is in the present-day working class that they are to be found.

Galloway is a formidable campaigner. The right-wing SDP schismatic Roy Jerkins found out in 1987 when the then Scottish Labour Party chair won Glasgow Hillhead against liberal media expectations. And as a leading anti-war campaigner Galloway has taken the scalps of two Labour MPs in by election triumphs.

Expelled from Labour by Blair for his anti-war stance Galloway owes the present Labour leadership nothing but contempt. In a constituency which registered a 60 per cent vote for Brexit his ceaseless criticism of Starmer’s politics was allied to the sympathetic hearing he has deservedly won from British Muslims.

These he used in characteristic manner and may have fashioned a template for future contests where Labour is vulnerable to an assaults on the weak spots that the party’s retreat from political principle and popular working-class politics has created.

Charisma and brio may not be enough to give his latest vehicle any more staying power than the Respect Party won after the invasion of Iraq — or that his latest creation Unity for All managed in Scotland.

However, the significance of his challenge to Labour lies not in the fragile and vestigial structures of the WPB — whose practical operations are dependent on the youthful and recently recruited enthusiasts of the CPGB-ML, a semi-Maoist sect notable for serial political promiscuity — but in the fracturing of Labour’s electoral coalition.

This accompanies a catastrophic collapse in confidence.

Just 17 per cent of voters think Starmer could beat Johnson and 57 per cent are convinced he can’t. Labour voters split three equal ways — for, against and don’t know — when asked whether Starmer should step down as Labour leader — and in this they are broadly in tune with the public.

The only group who appear to have a mildly positive view of Starmer are the 50 per cent of Liberal Democrat voters.

Interestingly, the same poll shows the media campaign to big up Andy Burnham has some traction, while the rather widely touted ambitions of Angela Rayner to replace Starmer has little public support.

The inevitable consequence of Labour’s right-wing turn is a fast gathering disintegration of the coalition that formed the basis of Labour’s 2017 increase in votes.

The unifying theme of the 2017 and 2019 manifestoes was the appeal to the common interests of the British people as a whole on the basis of policies which had an appeal beyond a working class which had the greatest interests in seeing them implemented.

In contemporary class politics this is the practical expression of the Marxist idea that the working class is the only class that has no interest in exploiting another.

In abandoning these policies and in his relentless assault on the left, Starmer has succeeded in dramatically reducing the size of the party — and in doing so has created a financial crisis.

Here we see the logical conclusion of the Mandelson approach which having dispersed much of Labour’s activist base and mass membership is now carrying through the destruction of Labour’s electoral coalition and thus its credibility as an alternative party of government.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.