It’s not accidental that newly elected Ukip MP Douglas Carswell conducted television interviews yesterday in an open-necked shirt. 

He looked nothing like the stuff-shirted Tory and Labour politicians who think that a suit, collar and tie is sartorially essential as proof of their seriousness and sincerity.

  Ukip intends to milk the public mood of hostility towards “establishment” political parties and their careerist politicians for all it’s worth. The latter have only themselves to blame, particularly Labour and its MPs who rely on working-class electors for millions of votes.

  Thursday’s by-elections were notable not only for the swing to Ukip, both in once-Tory Clacton and the once-safe Labour seat of Heywood and Middleton. 

  The same anti-establishment mood also produced spectacularly low turnouts, even though the Scottish referendum demonstrated that people will vote in huge numbers when they suspect it could make a substantial difference to their lives.

  In Heywood and Middleton, only 15 per cent of the electors turned out to put Labour’s Liz McInnes into the House of Commons. 

Almost two electors in three didn’t bother to vote for anyone at all. While many more Labour supporters will turn out for next May’s general election, the party leadership’s failure to inspire people is palpable. 

  Even in Clacton, the full glare of media publicity barely attracted half of the electorate to the polling station.

  The two results also confirmed the collapse in support almost everywhere for the Liberal Democrats. They deserve to pay a heavy price for their cynical dishonesty in the last general election, when they attacked the Tories for wanting to cut Britain’s public spending deficit too deep and too fast, before propping them up in a coalition to do just that — and with a vengeance aimed at the poor, unemployed and disabled.

  As for Ukip, its own hypocrisy is breathtaking in its bold shamelessness. Its leader, “man of the people” Nigel Farage, is a privately educated millionaire who made his fortune trading in metals and financial commodities in the City of London. 

  He makes no secret that the City’s freedom to gamble without let or hindrance is central to his hostility to the European Union, which merely proposes the mildest regulation to create a level playing field for all of Europe’s spivs and speculators. In 2010, the Ukip manifesto advocated widespread privatisation of NHS services, much though party spokespeople deny it today. 

 But Ukip anti-EU and anti-immigration rhetoric strikes a chord with many people who have genuine concerns about democracy, self-government, pay and the lack of decent jobs and houses.

  Branding Ukip and by implication its misled new followers as racists or fascists dissuades nobody. 

  Instead, the labour movement and the left have to find ways to reconnect to many alienated working-class people. This means not only explaining how migrant workers are not the cause of unemployment, scarce or expensive housing, unemployment, low pay and longer NHS waiting lists.

  It also means exposing and confronting the anti-democratic, pro-big business character of the EU, rather than yielding the whole issue to the right and far right.

  And it must mean proposing real solutions to people’s problems, including taxing the rich and corporate profits to fund the NHS and other public services, directing capital into productive industry, taking the utilities and public transport back into public ownership, raising pay and social benefits and extending employment and trade union rights for the equal benefit of all.