For those of us who fought seats in place the United Kingdom Independence party parked its tanks, this book holds some points of interest, along with a reminder that no one in the Labour movement should count Ukip out just yet.
It is tempting now that all the booming rhetoric of Ukip’s general election campaign has died down to think that they had their chance, blew it and are off licking their wounds never to return. In north-east Lincolnshire the local party’s deep divisions (political and social) have surfaced in the wake of a disappointing campaign which saw them finish third, having been predicted to win the seat. Councillors have resigned and defected amid bitter recriminations. Interestingly, those who have resigned have either gone independent or to the Conservatives, which does not say much for the efforts of Ukip to be a genuine voice for disaffected Labour voters.
This ‘revert to type’ behaviour is exactly what I relied on as an attack message during my campaign – that Ukip are made up of Tories with an axe to grind over Europe. That line resonated, as my Ukip opponent had actually been the Tory candidate in 2010. I would even go so far as to say she characterised one of the problems Ukip faced. Not only were a number of their candidates either untried and inexperienced, or unvetted and embarrassing, but they were out of control.
At a car-crash hustings my opponent set herself on an unrecoverable course, seeing her question of ‘what happens when it runs out?’ in reference to renewable energy go viral and get picked up by the nationals (clue’s in the name, no?). In the end, Grimsby rejected Ukip’s message of blaming Europe for all the town’s problems and harking back to the past. Instead, we won with a positive focus on how the town could revive itself, with a forward-looking vision to securing the jobs of the future.
Moving on from the happy memories … The closeness of the authors to Ukip’s campaign really does allow for a blow-by-blow account of the trials and tribulations of the party’s breakthrough year.
The faults are plain – they spread themselves too thin rather than focusing their efforts and funding on a handful of winnable seats. It was an emotional, pride filled and wholly over ambitious strategy which ultimately failed them. The lack of depth in candidates and of experience in campaigning councillors remains a weakness. Building the campaign around one person must in hindsight seem to many Kippers as a great folly.
But it would be an error to think they are a spent force. As the Scottish National party benefitted from the Scottish independence referendum, Ukip could well do the same with the forthcoming European Union referendum. And the issues Ukip successfully identified as being of widespread concern have not gone away – Europe and immigration (the two are now entwined in people’s minds); an out-of-touch establishment in Westminster; post-industrial and seaside towns left behind. And, if anything, under this government the difficulties facing people in those towns are greater than ever. If Labour does not get its message right in these areas, they could be ripe for the Ukip picking.
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Melanie Onn is member of parliament for Great Grimsby. She tweets @OnnMel
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Ukip: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics
Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo
Oxford University Press | 464pp | £18.99
I agree with this completely. UKIP have problems caused by a domination of ex-Tories and a lack of broader experience and they made some terrible mistakes in their campaigns (as did we). Now they’ve established a base vote they’ll learn those lessons quickly and bounce back. We need to be ready for it.
At the moment UKIP do not seem to be generating much impression, yet it would be wrong to characterise them as spent Tories or least if they are they, they appeal to a very sizeable proportion of former Labour voters. Indeed I am sure this will be huge if Labour does not mount a sizeable alternative ‘Leave’ campaign with the final result perhaps composing a 40% ‘Leave’ vote. Labour’s avoidance of the blame of European people by putting the emphasis on the absence of European institutions to offer even one solution could possibly finish off much working class support in Eastern England for a decade.
The position that UKIP occupies in British politics has generally been accommodated within the Conservative Party plus a few further to the Right in the BNP and its predecessors. The working class connection is nothing new. Alf Garnett believed Enoch was right and earlier Mosley had plenty of support in East London. Our electoral system keeps these politics on the margin (as it also once did with the Communist Party). It works against extremism, maybe a price we have to pay is to accept FPTP flawed democracy. The appeal of Fascism and its slightly less extreme successor ideology is to the gut, to prejudice, to bigotry with a jingoistic sprinkling of patriotism thrown in. Today it’s danger is not that the Kippers will get power. It’s that their success in securing 4m votes combined with their preposterous and offensive cadre of second rate MEPs will influence the major parties in their policy positioning. UKIP is not an authentic political party, it is a protest movement. History tells us they will fade as their predecessors did. We must help that happen.
UKIP made gained ground becasue we failed to resonate with our core voters–We are yet to learn that lesson. I don`t have the answers on hand but we need to be listening more actovely to voters and taking there concerns seriously as oppose to asking them for their votes.