What voters want is a renationalisation of the railways, policies that hit the rich harder, a mansion tax and definitely not an abolition of inheritance tax. This isn’t a belated write-up of one of the further left fringes of the Labour conference in Manchester: it’s the ideas of a group of Ukippers who gathered this lunchtime in Doncaster to discuss how to attract Labour voters.
Led by Ian Dexter, a party member who has no formal role in writing the manifesto but who was given the official ‘How to win the crucial Labour Vote’ lunchtime slot, the fringe sounded at times more like a Socialist Workers’ Party meeting than an apparently libertarian party trying to entice Labour voters over. This included spending more on healthcare, housing , manufacturing, and higher wages, he argued. On wages, the living wage proposed by Labour was not nearly enough. And Dexter agreed with an audience member that it was a mistake to abolish death duties, which Patrick O’Flynn had announced just minutes before in his speech to the hall.It
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