BOTH Billy Hayes and the Communication Workers Union that he leads have long-standing well-deserved reputations for opposing racism.

However, he is wrong to bracket Ukip with the British National Party in identifying Nigel Farage’s outfit as a racist party.

As Communist Party general secretary Rob Griffiths points out, Ukip rhetoric on immigration means that it attracts a number of racist votes.

However, unlike the BNP which always had racism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, stiff-armed salutes and a nostalgia for genocide in its DNA, Ukip plays the democracy game by the rules and has proved adept at casting itself as an anti-Establishment protest movement.

It also differs from the BNP in having black members in leading positions and in not opposing all immigration, backing a points-based system similar to that of Australia.

To treat the BNP and Ukip as racist parties scarcely distinguishable from each other would require a similar “no platform” policy towards Ukip as labour movement anti-racists deployed against the BNP, which would be an absurdity.

The main reason for Ukip’s rapid rise is the sense of betrayal and alienation that many voters feel about the entire Westminster political caste.

The Tories are losing many votes to Ukip, largely over the European Union, but Labour too is under pressure because, as many ex-Labour voters say, the party no longer gives a toss for the working class.

Outgoing Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont’s farewell comments spoke volumes about the refusal of the party in London to recognise that things are changing and that people will no longer accept edicts from the Westminster ivory tower.

The centralist grip that Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and the rest of the new Labour clique imposed on the party has not been broken.

Westminster in-crowd hangers-on continue to be parachuted into safe seats, knowing nothing of local history, problems or hopes.

Farage and his crew have successfully mobilised the people left behind by the shiny suits, persuading them that Ukip will represent them.

It won’t, because the Ukip leader is as much an Establishment figure as David Cameron — privately educated, rich and a City slicker — but such is the political alienation felt by many voters that they are desperate to believe.

Farage has always insisted that he is an unashamed Thatcherite, so his priorities are a slimmed-down state, tax cuts for the rich, reduced spending on public services and hostility to “red tape” such as health and safety legislation.

The more widely that these policies are publicised the more likely that working-class votes can be mobilised against them — but only if there is a real alternative posed to Ukip’s free-market fanaticism.

Unfortunately, when Labour frontbenchers admit to having failed to listen to their working-class voters, they only seem to have immigration in mind.

Talking tougher on immigration is not only wrong but self-defeating, as Norwich South Labour parliamentary candidate Clive Lewis makes clear.

The Tories and Ukip will always be trusted more by voters whose main motivation is clamping down on Romanians and Bulgarians coming to Britain.

Labour’s uncritical acceptance of EU directives and European Court of Justice rulings in the Viking, Ruffert, Laval and Luxembourg cases, which undermine workplace rights, would also offer Ukip an open goal.

If Labour makes a pro-EU line its campaigning priority and insults voters attracted to Ukip by tarring them with a racist brush, it will lose next May and will deserve to do so.