Ukip is set to dominate the European elections. Nick Lowles sifts the evidence on why people vote for it
The local elections and European parliamentary elections this May are going to be difficult for progressives and anti-racists. They will be contested against a backdrop of increasingly hostile anti-migrant and anti-multicultural rhetoric in the media and the election agenda will be dominated by immigration and anti-Europeanism.
The story of the European poll will be the seemingly relentless march of the United Kingdom Independence party, which is campaigning on an anti-European Union and anti-immigrant ticket. Backed up by incessantly negative and hostile anti-immigrant headlines in the newspapers, Ukip could come first.
Ukip is not a fascist party, nor is it a racist party like the British National party, but it is a xenophobic and increasingly anti-immigrant party. It combines the English nationalism of Enoch Powell with the populist anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic tone mirrored in many other countries across Europe, such as the Finns party (formerly the True Finns) and Geert Wilders’ Freedom party (see box).
For the hardcore of BNP members (and 31 per cent of their voters in the 2009 European elections), their racism stemmed from a belief that non-whites were genetically inferior to white Britons, according to polling research. While 17 per cent of Ukip voters had this view, 58 per cent did not. Similarly, while 44 per cent of people who voted BNP in the 2009 European elections disagreed with the notion that ‘non-white British citizens who were born in this country are just as “British” as white citizens born in this country’, only 18 per cent of Ukip voters felt the same, compared to 64 per cent who agreed.
While Ukip is best known for its opposition to membership of the EU, it is now increasingly focusing on immigration and the failure of multiculturalism. Much of its material has focused on potential arrivals of Bulgarians and Romanians into the UK in January 2014, with some of its leaflets claiming that 29 million people could come here. Other Ukip leaflets have focused more generally on these issues. One even carried a picture of a Native American Indian, with the words: ‘He used to ignore immigration … now he lives on a reservation.’
Ukip’s anti-immigrant message is probably now surpassing its anti-EU message in its prominence. Indeed, immigration is considered the most important political issue by Ukip voters, ahead of Europe by some margin. Eighty-seven per cent of Ukip voters in the 2009 elections believed that ‘all further immigration to the UK should be halted.’ A YouGov poll of 1,505 Ukip supporters conducted in 2010 found that 51 per cent do not believe that Britain has benefitted from immigration (compared to 25 per cent who do); 35 per cent think immigrants should be sent back to their ‘home’ country; and 51 per cent believe that immigrants are the main source of crime (21 per cent disagree).
It is also clear that the majority of Ukip voters are not just uneasy about current or future immigration as a consequence of Britain’s membership of the EU but with immigration per se. The majority also view past immigration as harmful to the UK and are hostile to the very concept of multiculturalism.
In many ways Ukip is tapping into the vein once mined so successfully by Powell. It contains an English nationalist outlook, is against non-white immigration, is hostile to the EU, and has a deep distrust and dislike of the political establishment. It is unsurprising, then, that in a poll commissioned by Conservative pollster Michael Ashcroft in April 2013, 90 per cent of Ukip voters had heard of Powell and what he was known for. This was almost twice the national average.
In addition to the threat posed by Ukip in the European elections, we should also be mindful of the local elections. Ukip plans to stand thousands of local election candidates and it hopes that its European election profile will enable it to win hundreds of council seats, which will then give it a local base to grow in much the same way as the Liberal Democrats did. Of particular concern should be the all-out London elections, with Barking and Dagenham and Havering being particularly vulnerable to Ukip.
Nigel Farage’s party is also zeroing in on a handful of key constituencies which it hopes to prioritise in the general election next year and a lot of national resource and professional campaigning will go into these seats.
Research has also revealed that support for Ukip is less driven by policy than a ‘mood’ – a sense of unease about the state of the country and where it is going, and a disdain for the political establishment. This allows Ukip to be all things to all people and present a different image in the more affluent south to the working-class north.
It also means that simply offering policy alternatives on areas like immigration and welfare is unlikely to win back many Ukip voters. Indeed, while the main political parties need to address immigration they should not simply ape Ukip as this simply will not work and risks alienating other voters who will be key in 2015.
The political parties must take on Ukip if they want to beat it. They cannot imitate it or offer voters Ukip-lite. They need to expose Ukip’s populist ‘all-things-to-all-people’ message while really showing voters that they have an alternative, more positive, vision that offers a better tomorrow.
Hope not Hate does not oppose Ukip in the way it does the BNP. However, we do oppose their anti-migrant scaremongering and their general anti-immigrant tone. We will be mobilising our supporters to defend and promote the ‘Our Britain’ campaign. We aim to address anti-migrant concerns and, by organising in key marginals, show the main parties that they do not need to run to the right to win votes.
———————————————————
Nick Lowles is founder of Hope not Hate
——————————————————————————————————————
Strange bedfellows: Ukip’s European allies
In existence for a decade, Geert Wilders’ Freedom party 
(the ‘PVV’) is one of Europe’s most successful parties of the nationalist right. It currently has 15 seats in the 150-seat lower house of the Dutch parliament and 10 in the 75-seat senate having seen its vote fall from 15.5 per cent in the 2010 general election to 10.1 per cent in 2012. Between 2010 and 2012 it helped keep in power a minority centre-right government, but withdrew its support, precipitating the administration’s fall in 2012. The price for the PVV’s support was a clampdown on immigration and asylum. The PVV’s model was that of the Danish people’s party which supported, but did not enter government with, a succession of centre-right administrations in Denmark between 2001 and 2011. Its price, too, was tighter immigration laws. Anti-Islamic – Wilders called Islam a ‘totalitarian religion’ and the Qu’ran a ‘fascist book’ – the party portrays itself as the defender of Dutch liberalism, supporting same-sex marriage and opposing ‘gender apartheid’. Economically liberal and opposed to green taxes, the PVV supports a return to the gilder, opposes migration from new European Union and Islamic countries, and backs a repeal of the ban on smoking in public places.
In contrast to the PVV, the Finns party has a somewhat different political orientation. Described by one researcher as the ‘most 
leftwing of the non-socialist parties’, it combines support for the welfare state with anti-Europeanism and social conservatism. Having polled 19 per cent of the vote, the Finns party won 38 of the 200 seats in the Finnish parliament in the 2011 general election, although its support fell back to nine per cent in the presidential election the following year. Under its leader Timo Soini, the Finns party backs higher taxes, including the reintroduction of a wealth tax, and more state intervention in industry. Opposed to the EU and Nato, the Finns party supports a cut in foreign aid, opposes same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption, and supports tight curbs on immigration and tougher sentences for violent criminals.
——————————————————————————————————————
Photo (main): Euro Realist Newsletter
Photo (first inset): Sebastiaan ter Burg
Photo (second inset): Jaako Sivonen