There now appear to be three parties in Britain’s coalition government. So, to paraphrase the late Princess of Wales, it is starting to look a bit crowded. Alongside the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, a sizeable number of Tory backbenchers seem to be marching to the tune of the United Kingdom Independence party.
Having thought that he had appeased the Tory right with his pledge in January to hold an in-out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union by 2017, David Cameron is discovering just how difficult it is to sate the voracious appetite of this particular beast. With their demands that the government bring forward legislation now to hold that referendum and attempts to derail equal marriage, large numbers of Conservative MPs are giving all the appearances of being more keen to win the approval of Nigel Farage than their own prime minister.
It is hard to feel much sympathy for Cameron: he is merely reaping what he has sown. Not only did the prime minister open the referendum Pandora’s box, his victory in the Conservative party leadership contest in 2005 was built, in part, on playing to the Tory Europhobe gallery with his pledge to pull the party out of the mainstream centre-right grouping in the European parliament. Once delivered, this brought the Conservatives into alliance with parties that contain a fair share of the ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ which Cameron claimed to find so repellent in UKIP.
Serious commentators speculate that it is ‘no longer impossible to imagine’ the Tory party formally splitting over Europe. It is no accident that the Conservatives, once the most electorally successful party in the western world, have not won a parliamentary majority in 21 years. Their appeal used to rest on their pragmatism and adaptability. But that was fundamentally altered by Margaret Thatcher, who bequeathed the party an ideology – Euroscepticism – which it previously lacked. In place of pragmatism and a will to win, the Tories developed an overriding obsession with Europe: one which destroyed John Major’s premiership; caused the party to habitually ‘bang on’ about Europe, as Cameron once put it, to the exclusion of issues of greater concern to the voters; and led the Tories to reject the popular Ken Clarke as their leader in place of the disastrous William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith. Obscured by Cameron’s partial modernisation of the party, this obsession appears to once again be gripping the Conservatives.
This presents both dangers and opportunities for Labour. First, it is easy to draw parallels between UKIP and the split in the centre-left vote which helped Thatcher to her election victories in 1983 and 1987. With the Liberal Democrats seemingly discredited as a receptacle for progressive votes, could a united centre-left overcome a divided rightwing vote in 2015?
Comforting as this analogy is, it should be treated with caution. As YouGov polling for Progress released last month showed, when voters are forced to make a choice between a Labour government and a Tory one, they divide 41-40 per cent in favour of the former. UKIP is now a part of the British political firmament, but many – if not all – of the disgruntled Conservative voters who cast a protest vote for UKIP at the beginning of last month may well back Cameron in 2015 if they feel not doing so might allow the election of a Labour government. This could make for a much tighter race than the current opinion polls suggest.
Second, the establishment of the coalition presented Cameron with a historic chance to reshape politics and establish his dominance of the centre-ground. His fear of UKIP has led him to abandon that endeavour, offering a golden opportunity to Ed Miliband. Populated with a compelling policy agenda, ‘One Nation’ is the right message and strategy to seize this opportunity. But the Tories’ disarray will present Labour with open goals for tactical mischief-making. It should beware of these turning into own goals. To present itself as an alternative government, not simply a good opposition, Labour must show that it puts the national interest above political point-scoring. Miliband’s principled stance on Europe suggests the Labour leader understands this risk.
Finally, Labour should not fall into the trap of believing that UKIP is a danger solely to the Tories. Analysis by former Conservative deputy chair Michael Ashcroft of 2010 UKIP voters suggested as many of them identified with Labour as the Tories, while, of those currently considering voting for Farage’s party, one in five are Labour supporters. Indeed, an analysis of local election data by the polling company Survation suggested that, where it won more than 16 per cent of the vote, the majority of UKIP’s new converts were formerly Labour voters.
Perhaps most important of all is the deleterious long-term effect that UKIP could have on progressive politics. In Australia in the 1990s Pauline Hanson’s populist One Nation party initially boosted the Labor party’s electoral fortunes by splitting the right-of-centre vote. Over time, however, the shift in the political debate to the right on issues such as immigration and asylum which Hanson initiated was successfully exploited by John Howard’s Liberals to secure a series of general election wins. The Tories’ elections guru, Lynton Crosby, is well placed to advise on such tactics: he was Howard’s campaign director at the time.
Whatever these long-term dangers, a rather more immediate challenge also now exists. Having descended to what the former Conservative deputy prime minister, Geoffrey Howe, described as a ‘new, almost farcical, low’, it is not difficult to imagine the Tory right so destabilising the government as to cause the coalition to collapse. Labour needs to be prepared for the very new political landscape which may then arise.
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vote ukip
Just keep on saying that Nigel Farage is a rightwing Tory. Farage believes in a flat tax (more tax cuts for millionaires), deeper spending cuts on public services and he is a self-confessed Thatcherite (with the picture of his Margaret Thatcher mug). Keep drumming that message whenever Ukip is mentioned, that way you encourage rightwing Tory voters to vote Ukip and you prevent that 1 in 5 Labour supporters from switching.
Labour dismiss UKIP at their peril as much as the Tories do.
I certainly know that when I stood in the County Council elections in May in Aldershot West, we came across a large number of UKIP voters on the doorstep. Yes they decimated the Tory lead to the point of almost halving the Tory vote. Aldershot West have been rock solid Tory. However we also came across a number of traditional Labour voters who had made the switch.
From what I discern there are a number of reasons why people vote UKIP and surprisingly the EU is not up there in the top three. This also explains why Cameron’s switch to a farcical anti Europe line has not actually done him any favours.
With this government doing so badly Labour ought to be showing opinion poll leads of 20% to 30% not a few points up to 10%. With so many affected by the savage cuts of this government we should also see increasing turnouts in the local election not a shrinking electorate. With so much under threat the Labour Party should be the focal point of opposition, although sometimes I think that groups like thirty eight degrees pack more punch.
Truth hurts and I am absolutely sure that many of the reasons for UKIP doing well are too unpalatable for Labour Party elite to stomach.
But one that I will say on these pages is that Ed M needs to issue an alternative to the austerity narrative and set out a direction as to what he would do as the next PM and the front bench as the next government in waiting. If there really is a destruction of the Coalition then Labour is woefully unprepared to step up breech.
The other point that I will mention is that we have allowed the Tory lie that Labour cannot be trusted with the economy to take a real hold. After the last election we allowed Cameron to talk of Labour’s recession and Labour’s banking crisis and elements within the party were so keen to “move on from New Labour” that they were only too happy to say that “mistakes were made” and not to state anything about a whole list of achievements which the last Labour government brought about. Nor were the Labour Party keen to show how Gordon Brown responded to the banking crisis and turn a potential depression into a recession and then end his time in office with a modest economic upturn, with low unemployment and all that that means for recovery.
If Labour had handled this better and hadn’t allowed this “factoid” to take hold, if it was setting out some policy ideas then we would shoot ahead like we did in the mid 1990’s. Ultimately if the economy was up and running UKIP would be nowhere. It is the politics of discontent.