Fun While It Lasts

I enjoyed this article on the significance or otherwise of UKIP's showing in the local elections in England and Wales - which appeared in The Times the other day.

Now UKIP have failed miserably to make any impact in Scotland - just like the Respect Party, in fact, but UKIP as a political phenomenon is restricted in its impact to key pockets of England.

North of the border the SNP captured the floating 'protest vote' long ago and turned this into a solid base of support - around the same time that the Scottish Socialist Party blew up in spectacular fashion some years ago - despite at one stage having several MSPs in the Holyrood Parliament.

Yet unlike just about every other party I can think of - the last thing UKIP wants at the moment is  political responsibility never mind power - because then the ludicrous nature of Nigel Farage and his UKIP project would become clear - for all to see.

So for the moment it's all great fun tweaking the tail of the established parties, both in local and national government - but that's really about as far as it goes.

Unless a 'game changer' like PR (proportional representation) comes along - because this  would definitely alter the balance of power in the Westminster Parliament, as it has in the Scottish Parliament, of course.

To my mind the voters anti-politics mood is completely understandable - ridiculous claims to have abolished 'boom and bust', for example, leave a nasty taste in people mouths - and that won't be forgiven quickly or easily.

Which is why the Ed Miliband and Labour struggle so badly to command public trust - for good or ill people feel they are being conned by a cynical political elite.

All of which means that 'sending in the clowns' is as good a way as any to register a protest vote - and so for a while at least UKIP will continue to ride high.       

Panic is pointless. UKIP’s not a serious party

By Philip Collins

Nigel Farage is benefiting from a move away from two-party domination, but protest parties always fizzle out

Maureen Stowe is the lady to teach us about UKIP. In 2003 Mrs Stowe, a 65-year-old former cotton weaver and toilet attendant, was one of three people elected as a BNP councillor in Burnley. When I interviewed her at home she told me that she had once adopted a mixed-race boy and that her political hero was Nelson Mandela. It was hard not to conclude that she’d rather missed the point of the BNP.

In fact Mrs Stowe was more of an emblem of their appeal than you might suppose. She had gone into politics because “people were fed up with the council”. She wasn’t even interested in the BNP’s ideology. As soon as she got the point, Mrs Stowe became an independent. She soon worked out that, quite apart from its intrinsic nastiness, racism turns out to be a poor guide to the right opening hours for Padiham Leisure Centre.

As I write, something in the order of 2.5 million people may be out voting for UKIP, or planning to do so. No doubt the Farage barrage of hostility to Europe, immigration restrictions and a mood of the country cheerfully going to the dogs is attractive. Warmly served by the effervescent Mr Farage, this is a dish of revenge on the cosmopolitan world. Yet, for all the happy posture of UKIP, their rise is not an endorsement of a world view. At least, it’s not as simple as that.

There is one immediate cause and two long-term reasons for that. The short-term reason is that UKIP is benefiting from the usual desire of the electorate, two years to the day before a general election, to register a protest. UKIP voters are, as a group, less wealthy than Tories and more likely to be feeling the pinch of austerity. There is among their flock a sense that the political class has little to offer. To some extent, what the Green Party did in 1989, when it polled 15 per cent, UKIP is doing in 2013. Second place in the by-elections in Barnsley Central, Rotherham and Eastleigh are all, in part, the blowing of a balloon.

It is a good moment to be a party of protest. The Liberal Democrats have given up that job for the more testing occupation as a party of power. Some of the UKIP vote is just mid-term froth of the conventional kind. How else to explain the 15 per cent of UKIP’s supporters who have come over from the Liberal Democrats since 2010?

But there is more to UKIP than that. At the same time as being the latest repository for protest, UKIP is also benefiting from a chronic trend away from the two established parties. British politics has fragmented into a pattern of two-party contests in which six parties compete. Labour takes on the Lib Dems in the cities and it is Tories versus Lib Dem in the counties. Labour faces the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales. There are a few seats that pass between Labour and Tory and UKIP is the best of the rest.

On a national level this means that the era of two-party domination looks to be over. In 1951 parties other than Labour and the Conservatives won 3.2 per cent of the vote and 9 seats. In 2010 they won 32 per cent of the vote and 91 seats. Only transformative leaders such as Thatcher and Blair have avoided the trap of an electoral system that is pointing towards a victory for nobody alone. There is no such leader in situ at the moment and inconclusive results and hung Parliaments are something we shall have to get used to.

This trend has been confirmed by Nick Clegg’s decision to take his party into coalition. Two-party politics is now being conducted with three competitors for office. The folding of the Lib Dems into the battle for power is the third reason for the rise of UKIP.

When Kenneth Clarke and David Cameron dismiss UKIP candidates as clowns and fruitcakes they might, oddly enough, be alighting on a source of their appeal. There is always one party that benefits from being, in essence, none of the others. There is a significant minority of voters who, though they might not put it so bluntly, prefer protesting to power. They are so animated by an issue (the precise cause will change) that they vote as an act of defiance.

These voters deserted the BNP when they proved to be even more hopeless than the usual lot. They will desert UKIP too if Mr Farage’s merry band ever add other councils to their control of Ramsey Town Council in Huntingdonshire. The anti-politics rhetoric cannot survive too long an encounter with the problems of Stocking Fen allotments and the dispute over the Fellowes Memorial Clock. This is the set of voters who are voting for not-the-government. They are the people, many of them former Lib Dems, who are disgusted with the idea of power because it sullies their pure opposition to whatever it is they are purely opposed to.

I don’t believe that UKIP can be explained by the popularity of its ideas, even though they are popular. I agree, as it happens, with Mr Farage that pubs should have smoking rooms but when it comes to the general election, the economy might just trump that as an issue. Besides, UKIP’s formula of tax cuts plus spending promises, adding up to £90 billion of magic money that will come from pulling out of the EU (cost £6.5 billion) is the manifesto of a man wearing long shoes and a revolving dicky-bow.

That is why the popularity of UKIP is best seen in the negative. The Tory position on Europe — in but highly sceptical — would beat the UKIP position — out and good riddance — in a referendum. The popularity of UKIP is not about what it does stand for. It is about what it does not stand for. And what UKIP does not stand for is being a serious party of government. UKIP is a party of fun without responsibility, which really ought to be the new definition of the prerogative of the harlot down the ages.

It must therefore follow, if the rise of UKIP is less about UKIP than at first sight it seems, that a panic response focused on UKIP would be a political mistake. UKIP certainly has the capacity to harm the Conservatives if it can double the 3 per cent it polled in 2010. Indeed, it is a source of optimism for the Labour Party that the Tories might go haywire over UKIP, perhaps culminating in a spectacular descent into political insanity when Mr Farage wins the 2014 European elections.

The most credible response to the threat of UKIP is not to try to outbid Mr Farage on who can be most hostile to Brussels, Bulgarians and benefit scroungers. UKIP supporters already prefer a Cameron government to a Miliband government by three to one. The task for the Conservative Party is not to persuade UKIP voters to vote for the Conservative Party. The task is to persuade them to vote for the Government.