Nuttall could help Ukip take string of seats from Jeremy Corbyn’s party in the north of England, says senior Labour MP

The new Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, is a “game changer” for Labour and could realistically oust a string of MPs in the north of England, Frank Field, the Labour former minister, has said.

Field, the MP for Birkenhead and chair of the House of Commons work and pensions committee, said Labour needed an urgent strategy to deal with Nuttall’s succession to the Ukip leadership, as he will appear to many voters as a man who is “on the right page at the right time”.

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Nuttall, a former history lecturer from Bootle, Merseyside, has rightwing views on crime and immigration without predecessor Nigel Farage’s background as a privately educated London commodities broker.

“Farage picked up a million Labour votes by accident but with this guy it is all he’s going after,” Field said. “It is about culture, identity and family and so on. The party centrally hasn’t got a clue. There are one or two people taking about it but whether they seriously realise what is coming is another matter.”

To those in Labour who say Nuttall poses a similar threat to Farage, Field said they “couldn’t be more wrong – it is game changing to Labour”.

“Ukip under Paul will become the English party,” he said. “I don’t think it will be a wipeout on the scale of the SNP but I do think they will be taking Labour people out in our northern heartlands.

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“Last time, Ukip gave seats to the Tories. This time they will take

some themselves. If we say it will be the same as [Ukip under] Farage, we have lost the plot.”

It is understood Labour plans to fight Ukip under Nuttall by attacking his record on wanting to privatise the NHS. Labour leadership sources said the strategy would be to relentlessly highlight Nuttall’s past praise for privatisation, which he has now disavowed.

Immediately after Nuttall’s election, dozens of Labour MPs tweeted a video showing Nuttall criticising the “monolithic” NHS and suggesting it could not survive in its current form.

However, Field, who has long held that Ukip is a threat to Labour and campaigned for the UK to leave the EU, said the NHS strategy would be “water off a duck’s back”.

“Labour voters aren’t interested in this kind of old politics. They will want someone speaking centrally about themselves,” he said. “We might try to pin this on him but he’s denounced it himself.”

The Labour leadership is understood to be treating the threat of Ukip under Nuttall seriously but does not consider it to be an escalation of risk compared with the party under Farage.

While Labour will want to keep the attention on health, Ukip and the Conservatives are likely to try to move the conversation on to immigration, attacking the party for not wanting to have extra controls.

But Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, has been clear that Labour must “hold the line” by defending immigration and not allowing the party to become “Ukip-lite”.

Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday that the threat of Ukip “must always be treated seriously” as he argued the party had made a mistake in allowing “nationalist and populist voices” to dictate the immigration debate.