How Ukip and the BNP differ
As a by-election victory for the United Kingdom Independence party on Doncaster council this summer showed, the rise of Ukip is a challenge for Labour as well as the Tories. In many safe Labour seats, Ukip is emerging as the main opposition party. The Tories should be losing support to Labour at this stage in the election cycle, but, as Matthew Goodwin has outlined elsewhere, Ukip has siphoned off this protest, damaging Labour’s prospects.
I believe that white British concern over ethnic change, rather than economic woes or a generalised distrust of politicians, underlies Ukip success. Research undertaken by Gareth Harris and myself, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in partnership with Demos, suggests Ukip voters are almost exclusively white British. In addition, whites who consider their national identity to be English are much more likely to vote Ukip than whites who identify as British. This holds even when we account for age, region, class and other factors. In local elections, wards in England where a larger share of white British identify as English manifest higher Ukip support.
Ukip voters are also outstandingly old. The elderly recall a time when Britain was more homogeneous and they have fewer minority friends and contacts than younger Britons. They thus find it more difficult to accept the changing face of the nation and hence turn more often to Ukip. But age is only one aspect of the politics of immigration: British National party voters, for instance, are as young as Ukip’s are old.
This is reflected in Ukip’s electoral geography, which differs from the BNP because Nigel Farage’s supporters experience ethnic change differently. The BNP thrives in hotspots of ethnic succession such as Barking, while Ukip mainly draws on voters in the 80 per cent of England that is 95 per cent white. With a few exceptions, such as Boston in Lincolnshire, most Ukip-friendly wards experience diversity second hand: through the media, via friends, or fleetingly through a car window. They are roused by distant, not local, change.
People tell pollsters like Ipsos MORI’s Bobby Duffy that immigration is a national problem, but not a local one. They grossly overestimate the share of minorities in the country and refuse to believe the numbers even when presented with census figures. This suggests ‘mythbusting’ is unlikely to address popular alienation.
What can? Labour, like the Tories, claims economic palliatives can address popular grievances over immigration. But our research points to unease over ethnic change as more important than economic insecurity. The parties must therefore engage with thorny questions which underlie majority disquiet: What does it mean to be white British in an increasingly diverse society? Is there a place for those who feel British through their ancestry and memories? It is not enough to address minority integration and British institutions: our modelling finds that even when most minorities are British-born, native English-speaking and British-identifying this has no effect on majority perceptions. By contrast, assimilation – identifying with common ancestors and traditions – into the majority does. No government should compel assimilation, but politicians addressing largely white audiences could highlight the impressive scale of voluntary assimilation. The children of European immigrants often identify as white British while the mixed-race population is expanding faster than that of minorities. This suggests that, even at current immigration levels, the ethnic majority – those invested in English ancestry and collective memories – may have less to fear than they imagine. Therein may lie one key to calming majority concerns.
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Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London
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Photo: RPM