Like mother, like daughter?

PEOPLE don't always respond well to bust-ups. Brown has fallen out with the electorate, but Labour's Crewe & Nantwich by-election campaign shows that Labour wants to win back voters' love with some hateful tactics.

The tone of Tamsin Dunwoody's local leaflets show that Labour understands it has to return to grass roots for votes but will grub around in the muck rather than look for healthy growth.

Panicked by the way that Brown's business-loving, hug-an-executive approach left Labour voters cold, the party has decided to use bigotry as a short cut into working people's hearts.

Labour clearly understands that it needs to enthuse both party campaigners and the "core vote."

Dunwoody's publicity emphasises that she "grew up with Labour politics in her blood" and tells us that both her grandmothers were "suffragettes." Her opponent, Conservative candidate Edward Timpson, is attacked as a "Tory Boy" living in a "BIG mansion house."

This campaign is a long way from Brown's "government of all the talents" with jobs for top Tories and genuflection before those who can afford not one but many "BIG mansion houses."

However, the Beano-style attacks, as if the Bash Street Kids were running in an election against Lord Snooty and his chums, suggest that the campaign is driven by people who don't have old Labour's organic connection to working class voters. It looks like new Labour androids playing at old Labour politics.

They are not playing nice. One of Dunwoody's four slogans is that she "will listen and respond to people's concerns about immigration." Her attack on "Tory boy" Timpson suggests that a sign of his general out of touch richness is that he "opposes making foreign nationals carry an ID card."

Dunwoody says that Labour is the party that listens to "worries over immigration," not the Tories.

Her campaign is reminiscent of Home Office Minister Liam Byrne, who got into Parliament in 2004 in a by-election where he accused the Lib Dems of wanting to "keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum-seekers."

Like Byrne, Dunwoody also puts some law and order noises into her campaign literature, announcing that the Tories are "soft on yobs."

It seems that Labour feels unable to attract working class voters with fair taxes and better pay and conditions, so it has decided that prejudice will be a shortcut into the C2s of Crewe.

Dunwoody says that she "will fight to get well-paid, skilled jobs for local people," but she adds that "people's concerns on immigration" are key to the job problem. It's British jobs for British workers time again.

This is a dangerous and double-edged strategy. Appealing to backward sentiments might win a few votes, but it will also make the Tories bolder.

Stoking up fears over immigration won't help in the long term - the Tories can simultaneously rely on long-term perceptions that they are better immigrant bashers to pick up a few votes in this area, while, at the same time, posing as more liberal than Labour.

This will disorient some Labour voters and keep them home, while reassuring more genteel Tories that they can safely vote for the no longer nasty party.

The greatest danger, of course, goes beyond elections. The strategy will legitimise anti-immigrant sentiments long after the election is over and wear away what is left of Labour's principles.

Labour's main emphasis and main hope for winning the election is in the name. Not "Labour," but "Dunwoody."

By selecting the daughter of the deceased MP, they hope to capitalise on Gwyneth Dunwoody's popularity, avoiding Labour's unpopularity nationally. Labour's main slogan in the election is "Dunwoody Action," not "Labour Action."

Tamsin has two main election claims. First, the apparently tautologous "Tamsin Dunwoody ... She's a Dunwoody!" emphasises her family links. Second, the claim that she is "fiercely independent" also makes her sound closer to her mother than Labour HQ.

It is a shame that she is running such an obviously centrally directed campaign sprinkled with prejudice, because her mother sounded very different.

One of Gwyneth's last parliamentary speeches was a contribution to a debate on "foreign workers" last November.

She said: "There are two ways of dealing with the problem of immigration. One is to welcome the economically active and very intelligent workers whom we have taken into my constituency, largely from Poland.

"The other is deliberately to foment trouble by attacking such workers in the local paper and having pictures taken outside Polish shops, as though they were not only a wave of invaders who are damaging the economy but totally unacceptable."

Dunwoody senior called on MPs to "condemn those who, for narrow political purposes, seek to foment trouble" about immigration.

She took an even stronger line on migrant workers the month before. In October 2007, the Crewe MP forced a Commons debate on the rights of these workers. Make no mistake, she was taking the side of the migrants, not listening to euphemistic "concerns."

Filipino care workers who were losing their work permits and being "thrown out of the country" because of Immigration Minister Byrne's "points system" had approached Gwyneth.

Byrne had decided that, because the workers earned less than £7.02 an hour, they should go, even though, as Dunwoody senior said, they had been "working for periods of between four and six years in this country, almost all of them with children in local schools, mortgages and stable home."

She forced MPs to hear their case and challenged Byrne: "What is he going to do about it?"

Byrne had one good point. He said that their employer Southern Cross should pay the women more. As it happens, he could have taken this up with one of Southern Cross's stingy directors, Labour peer and former Blair aide Sally Morgan.

But, as Dunwoody's fellow MP Chris Rune said, "we should tackle the employers that treat their employees shoddily, not the employees themselves."

Meanwhile, the party's claim that Tory candidate Timpson "opposes making foreign nationals carry an ID card" is actually based on his opposition to the ID card as a whole. Timpson did not specifically raise the "foreign nationals" issue. That is Labour's interpretation.

Who else opposed ID cards? One Gwyneth Dunwoody, who voted against the scheme's introduction.

I suspect and hope that Labour will just about win the by-election, that Brown's raising of tax thresholds will bring some votes back.

But, if this happens, Labour's strategists will believe that their nasty "immigrant" noises take them to core voters erogenous zones. Labour could win Crewe, but lose its soul.