If you heard Nigel Farage on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning, you’ll have heard a masterclass in dissembling. Farage has a right to be triumphant this morning. After the results of the overnight counts, his party is winning more seats than predicted, across the UK, with more to come today. He will have a cadre of county councillors across the country, using county hall resources to build UKIP support for the European parliamentary elections this time next year. He can take succour too from the UKIP result in South Shields, as far from the ‘gin and jag’ set that Farage himself exemplifies. I always thought that when they can digitally reproduce dead actors in modern films, Farage will be played by Terry-Thomas.
His politics is anchored in anti-politics. The UKIP tellers I found myself sitting next to at polling stations yesterday in East Sussex were a mixture of angry ex-Tories, and independent-minded non-combatants, drawn in during the campaign itself. The message is obvious: all of your woes, frustrations and failures are due to someone else. Can’t find work? Blame a Pole. Can’t make a profit? Blame the EU. Can’t say what you like any more about the coloureds and homos? Blame the political class, and their PC gone mad. For a glorious moment yesterday, the UKIP and the Lib Dem teller engaged in a heart-felt discussion about the benefits of homeopathy. If you believe in magic water, you can easily believe withdrawal from the European Union is a good idea.
So why do I say Farage is dissembling? The answer is that UKIP is built on a lie, and the oldest political lie of them all: that ‘we’re not the same as the others’. Marc Antony started it all when he told the Roman mob ‘I am no orator as Brutus is’. That’s Farage’s pitch: I’m no politician, like the others. Yet in everything they do, they are the same as the others. It’s a racist-tinged, anti-foreigner, it’s-all-someone-else’s-fault, simplistic, sloganising diet of nonsense, and it’s highly effective, especially in a recession. It worked for others in the past, and it’s working for UKIP today. UKIP has also squeezed the other fringe parties. UKIP is up 14 points at 26 per cent. Meanwhile, the Greens are down three points at seven per cent and the British National party is down 11 points at four per cent.
It would be comforting to think we are witnessing a historic split in rightwing electoral politics in Britain, of the kind that kept the left out of power for most of the 20th century. Certainly, the politician with the most to worry about last night is David Cameron. UKIP cost the Tories control of Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire, and UKIP can stop him winning in 2015. Alexis McEvoy, one of the many Tory county councillors defeated by UKIP last night, wrote in the Telegraph that:
‘David Cameron says he’ll have a referendum, but no one believes a word he says. I don’t believe a word he says, and I’m a lifelong Conservative.’
She was defeated by a UKIP candidate who didn’t even live in the ward.
Yet UKIP took votes last night, not only from disgruntled Tories, but white working-class voters in hitherto Labour areas. There’s an important lesson there for Labour too. The surge in South Shields should not just worry the Tories. If white working-class voters desert Labour in the heartlands for the UKIP, it will dent Ed Miliband’s chances in 2015. It certainly should kill stone dead any notion of a ‘progressive majority’ just waiting to be led to the New Jerusalem.
Labour should take comfort, if not great joy, from last night’s results. The county elections were conducted across areas, especially in the south, where Labour has never run county councils, even at the height of the Blair triumphs in the 1990s. Eighty per cent of the people voting yesterday live in areas with a Conservative member of parliament. It was satisfying to see Labour do so well in Hastings, where Labour must win the parliamentary seat, and in places such as Dorset where Labour could regain Dorset South in 2015. In the Midlands and the north, Labour is regaining its position on councils after the truly terrible results in 2009, when the country turned its back on Gordon Brown with such unified decisiveness. These are satisfactory results for Labour. They do not represent any great strategic breakthrough, but given the kinds of seats being contested they were never going to.
Finally, our dear friends the Liberal Democrats. I, like you, laughed like a drain when their result in South Shields came in. To come seventh, and to lose your deposit, is the usual role of some eccentric campaigning for more public nudity, or against speed cameras, or to expose the secret role of freemasons in the murder of their friend. But I was reading the results in Eastbourne town hall, where the Lib Dems retained every one of their county seats, in a parliamentary constituency which they may hold in 2015. They used to be the receptacle for protest votes; Farage has cornered that market. But they are still good at using incumbency to shore up their position. There are plenty of Lib Dem MPs who may defy national political gravity in 2015, and keep their seats, making another coalition their aspiration. Miliband’s job now is to close down that option.
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Paul Richards writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics. He tweets @LabourPaul
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Methinks Paul you are being a little detached. The Labour Party have made a strategic mistake. It was Monday’s FT that bemoaned the fact that *all the main parties* had not faced upto Mr Farange -what their editorial called “blank disengagement”. Maybe all the parties believed UKIP would somehow damage someone else. But their damage has hit the core of UK politics as it seriously undermines our beliefs in progress, social democracy and of course Europe. The idea that we should somehow detach ourselves from our 27 E.U. partners and become an isolated country is growing in popularity by the day. We like the Lib Dems and Conservatives have let this propaganda run too far ahead; we have failed to convince some of our natural voters that dealing with ‘the foreigner’ is not the solution to our unemployment, inequalities or major economic problems.
I am afraid that Paul’s glossy rhetoric has run away with him. “Not only disgruntled Tories but white working class voters in hitherto Labour areas”. There has always been a big overlap between these two demographic categories – since long before there were ‘Labour areas’. (Perhaps the founding myth of Blairism is that somehow between 1868 and the early/mid C20 the forces of Labour conservatism emerged as by magic {a dragon to be slain by heroic progressive human rights lawyers and warmongers}; “hitherto Labour areas” were and are the creation of political heavy lifting during decades. Of course Blair thinks the founding of the TUC and the founding of the Labour Party were big mistakes (or one big mistake – he has displayed evidence of inability to distinguish the two events). Disgruntled white working class people, later voters, date from well before the Founding of the LIberal Party, well charted by John Vincent in his fine and neglected book of that title, and were in part responsible for the LIberal Party’s “being borne down in a torrent of gin and beer (in the 1874 general election)” in Gladstone’s summary of his defeat. Disraeli’s government released trades unions from many of the shackles imposed by Gladstone in 1868-74, as well as instituting considerable public health measures. It was in LIverpool that Salvidge created the mass Tory working-class organization (the Protestant Working Men’s Association) and showed the way to much of the rest of the country, so misunderstood in Paul’s glib narrative.
It is a relief to learn that in his current narrative Paul has set his heart against a coalition with theLIbDems. The “Progressive majority” is another founding myth of Blairism – well done Paul for retreating from that one. But equally deleterious is the comparable myth of ‘the centre ground’. Just as ‘progress’ (I find it harder and harder to pin down this woolly notion, and the more of “Progress” I read the harder it gets) is relative to particular policy issues, so too is ‘the centre ground’. There are as many ‘centre grounds’ as there are policy issues.
The British political class, the Brussels-centred political class, and the Atlantic ruling class resemble each other greatly. Their ‘narratives’ function to package-deal the electorate (and ourselves, let us admit, members of at least one of that unholy trinity) into blurring such different and disparate issues. Luckily here we have UKIP to pick up on this, rather than Chrysea Avge (Golden Dawn) to deal with….It would be nicer if we in the Labour movement could do it without prompting for ourselves…..
” On mother Kelly’s doorstep / Down paradise Row / I’d sit along Nelly / She’d sit along Joe / She’s got a little hole in her ffrock / Hole in her shoe / Hole in her stocking / Where her toe peeped through / But Nelly was the smartest down our alley / On mother Kelly’s doorstep / I’m wondering now / If li’l girl Nelly / Remembers Joe, her beau / And does she love me like she used to / On mother Kelly’s doorstep / Down Paradise Row ” ” ooh lovely ,which Nigel ? “
The thing is Paul, it is not “progressive” to support practically unlimited immigration (and we can do something about it, given that two thirds of the numbers arrving are from outside the EU). It is not prgressive to support mass migration from poorer EU states to richer ones, with bigger welfare budgets, and to support “flexible” labour markets that badly damage working class and – coming to a place near you – increasingly middle class communities
What is progressive, and what might persuade people who voted UKIP, and people who certainly aren’t yet convinced by Labour’s offer, is an admission that unlimited migration acrsoss Europe does not make us more European, and helps no-one but lazy employers who can’t be arsed to train people or to pay living wages, but are happy to take cheap, well educated labour that reduces the chances of employment for exisiting citizens.
It might be progressive to start criticising the habit of importing illiterate spouses from Pakistan and Banglasdesh too (see what Nan Cryer had to say about that…).
And it might be progressive to admit that people who don’t like seeing their relativelystable communities turned into airport arrival and departure lounges have a point. And that they are mostly neither racist nor xenophobes.
Ed M seems to be going in the right direction. Too many middle class Labour groupies are still living in la la land though.
Predictably, support for UKIP will subside to vanishing point as and when the economy recovers from the recession. The proper policy response to UKIP is not to attempt to outbid its reactionary programme but to pursue investment-led growth strategies to restore stability and confidence in the economy. Get rid of the fear that underpins, and which is exploited by, UKIP and UKIP will go away. But will George draw this conclusion or will he and Dave try to pander to the fruitcakes?
How many times in the past has a temporary phenomenon led to claims of sea changes in British politics? How many times has that aberration sunk into oblivion once the immediate crisis is past? Sensible politicians need to hold their nerve. Problem is, do we have sensible politicians, with a sense of history? Or a bunch of careerists with timescales shorter than their CVs?