23.06.2004

UKIP: England - the lion awakes?

Patrick Presland looks at the recent electoral successes of the UK Independence Party.

Let the issue be put. Let the battle be joined." Tony Blair's words just a few weeks ago, when he announced a referendum on the European Union constitution. As confident - or rather as arrogant - as ever, he threw down the gauntlet and dared the Tories and the forces of Euroscepticism across the country to fight him. June 10 must have come as quite a shock. Perhaps, as in the case of Iraq (but that was and is a real war with real victims - tens of thousands of them), Blair was once again given the wrong intelligence by his experts? Certainly he is not to blame for Labour's humiliation at the polls. He is never to blame for anything.

By any standard, the gains made by the United Kingdom Independence Party in the European, London and local elections were astonishing. Remember that in the general election of 2001 UKIP already had sufficient financial backing to field 434 candidates, the great majority of whom nevertheless lost their deposits. Nationally, they polled around 1.5% - the same sort of figure achieved last week by Respect. In other words, negligible, barely a blip on the electoral radar screen.

This time, albeit not in the context of Westminster, the picture is very different. Some 2.7 million people (around 9% of the poll) voted for UKIP in the Euro elections. It now has 12 seats in Brussels. For the first time, on the strength of 156,780 votes (8.2%) in the GLA elections, it is represented in the Greater London Assembly with two seats. Even its mayoral candidate, the boxing promoter Frank Maloney, polled 115,665 votes (6%), leaving Respect's Lindsey German well behind.

So what is happening? How did UKIP arrive at a position where it was essentially the real winner in all three of the 'super Thursday' elections? Listen to the spin doctors and the soothsayers from the mainstream parties and you will be told that it was all just a one-off protest vote by people tired of Blair's government and tired of Europe. When the 'real' elections come along, UKIP will revert to its completely marginal status as the natural home for far-right Tory cranks and suburban saloon-bar racists.

In a leading article and a piece by Tim Hames, The Times counsels Michael Howard to keep mum: "He not only needs to do nothing about the UKIP surge, but should say nothing about it. His colleagues need to be similarly Trappist." And from Hames: "What the Tories should do about UKIP is absolutely nothing" (June 14).

In its defensiveness, this reaction is interesting and founded on the belief that Howard made a fundamental mistake by arguing with UKIP in the pre-election period, thus giving it unnecessary prominence and publicity. Clearly the Conservative Party had most to lose from a surge in support for honestly and openly expressed anti-European 'withdrawalist' politics and it duly suffered. But the punishment meted out to it can hardly be blamed on Howard alone.

As we all know, ever since Maastricht, Europe has been a seismic fault line threatening to split the Conservatives from top to bottom - the issue that has most obviously prevented them from portraying themselves as a united party fit for government. In their different ways, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith found themselves obliged to placate the visceral anti-Europeanism of the right wing in Westminster and the grassroots majority in the shires. They became leaders of the party not because of what they were, but because of what they were not: to have anointed Heseltine or Clarke would have meant inevitable schism. Remember Hague's risible 'save the pound' debacle? Nobody, sadly, remembers anything at all about Duncan Smith, except that he was the strong and silent type, Chingford's answer to Clint Eastwood. And Howard's line on Europe is no better: basic renegotiation of the treaties (simply a non-starter, as he well knows); failing that, (perhaps) wresting back control over fishing. Pathetic.

In order to keep their show on the road, the Tories have had to fudge and fudge again. UKIP, by contrast, is burdened by no such constraints. Indeed its very raison d'être is to be the organ of that xenophobic hatred which, in the Conservative Party at Westminster, still dare not speak its name. Is UKIP Eurosceptic? Hardly. Scepticism betokens doubts, misgivings, a questioning spirit. UKIP has none of these. It hates everything about Europe and it detests foreigners who do not know their place, that is those foreigners who have had the temerity to land on the shores of our sceptred isle.

Does this make them what Ken Livingstone has dubbed "the BNP in suits"? Not quite, though we know what he means. Ken maybe has not noticed, but these days the British National Party leaders also wear suits. The hideously camp, fake brownshirt uniforms and jackboots are a thing of the distant past (at least in public). But yes, beneath the BNP pinstripes there are still fascist thugs so ignorant, so odiously perverse, so abhorrently sick as to find in Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party their role model and their political philosophy. Does UKIP's membership and support come from the same stable? I venture to suggest not. It exerted a quite significant squeeze on the BNP vote precisely because it is more 'respectable': ie, people feel that they can vote for it with a good conscience. Xenophobes and racists they may be, but their ideological origins lie firmly on this side of the channel: not with the Nazis or the Waffen SS, but with Dad's Army and with seductive, nostalgic dreams of England's imperial greatness.

Tentatively, we can also distinguish a certain difference between the bases from which the two organisations currently operate, though sufficient data are lacking. The BNP seems particularly strong among some sections of the white working class in certain specific areas - typically, the run-down, impoverished council estates in cities and towns with a large non-white population, particularly where unemployment and social deprivation are commonplace and where non-white areas are perceived to enjoy an advantage in relation to local funding and amenities. The BNP has learned the value of building up trust by engaging with concrete local issues on the doorstep, while poisoning people's minds in an overtly racist way.

UKIP's current constituency - again one can only be tentative - appears to centre around a different milieu. Rather the suburbs and the countryside than the built-up areas; generally older and more prosperous; readers of the Mail or the Express rather than the Sun or the Star; people who through a combination of hard work, thrift and good fortune have attained a certain level of material comfort which they see to be threatened by a tidal wave of illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers bent on milking the benefits system; essentially, therefore, the petty bourgeoisie, small businessmen and the like. But this remains at best a broad-brush approach.

So again we must ask, why did UKIP do so well? Paul Donovan in the Morning Star tells us that "the media fell under the spell" (June 22). Hardly an adequate explanation, but there is some truth in it. Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's political analyst and media guru, was hired by UKIP to give advice. For good measure it called on the services of Max Clifford, publicist of choice for all manner of 'celebrities', whether famous or notorious. Their advice was that UKIP had a natural constituency out in the country, so all it needed to do was maximise publicity by roping in the 'names', putting up lots of posters and using internet polls to generate that precious momentum. Get enough people talking about the coming tidal surge and it will happen.

And it did. Though we have to wonder just what contribution Joan Collins (71) made to UKIP's success. As someone who has never voted and spends most of her time out of the country, Ms Collins does not strike you as a particularly persuasive advocate of UKIP's case, though her hatred of the euro (it makes living in St Tropez so expensive) may have struck a chord, and as the dominatrix who presided over Dynasty she may have quickened some elderly male pulses.
That certainly cannot be said of Geoffrey Boycott, another 'celebrity' deemed to be a UKIP asset. Nothing can be said of him. But what about Robert Kilroy-Silk? Our Scouse comrades will remember him well, though they did not see much of him when he was a Liverpool Labour MP. Thanks to Militant, he was eventually given the red card (certainly not red for socialism in his case). But Mr Kilroy-Silk, the permanently tanned and exquisitely coiffured chat show host, was apparently adored by the nation's housewives - until he got the sack for making offensive remarks about islam and Arabs. He is also litigious, so let me make it clear that I totally disagree with anyone who suggests he is an arrogant, self-obsessed and brainless stuffed tailors' dummy with a penchant for punching anybody who disagrees with him. Absolutely not.

Was it Kilroy-Silk (now MEP), Joan Collins or Geoff Boycott who were responsible for UKIP's victories at the polls? Perhaps to some limited extent, for there is no such thing as bad publicity. But we need to look deeper. Readers of this paper are probably not regular readers of the Mail or the Express, which function par excellence as the press organs of the Conservative Party among the middle classes and small bourgeoisie. Day after day after day, these papers have run stories about illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers, gypsies, economic migrants and the rest - all clearly designed to stoke up xenophobia. The accession of 10 predominantly east European, formerly Sovbloc countries to the EU brought forth a deluge of dire prophecies that Britain was about to be swamped by millions of feckless, work-shy foreigners who would ruin the country. It was all the EU's fault and there was nothing we could do - except vote UKIP, though the papers did not quite go that far. They left it to the reader to draw the obvious conclusion. This daily pollution of consciousness with the bile of ethnic hatred, which still goes on, played, in this writer's view, a key role in UKIP's breakthrough.

More speculatively perhaps, I would suggest that in UKIP we see the embryonic form of a genuine English nationalist party - a party that, under the flag of St George, says that enough is enough, and astutely taps into Anglo-Saxon discontent, giving expression to the anger and resentment which many English people apparently feel not just towards foreigners but towards the Scots and even the poor Welsh. Scots particularly, a small minority, but thanks to devolution they have their own parliament and budget - a budget funded, at least in popular perception, by English taxpayers' money, provided for them by a Labour government, in which there are far more Scots than English. That cannot go on, they say. One suspects that they would not be sorry to see Scotland go its own, independent way and then come back, begging bowl in hand, to a very different union.

The UK in UKIP is real, but it is secondary. The ideological homeland of UKIP is the south of England, its consciousness fundamentally permeated by English rather than British values. UKIP's task now, of course, is to transform itself from a single-issue party into something resembling a coherent force capable of attracting wider strata of support. In other words, it is a question of programme, something UKIP obviously lacks. As David Lott, UKIP's chairman, put it, "Broadening our manifesto is the next step and it will move along the lines of small government in every walk of life." Quite a bit more flesh needed on those bones. Forthcoming by-elections in Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill will show to what extent the 'UKIP effect' continues. Kilroy-Silk will contest Leicester and could find himself in the Westminster parliament. Momentum.

It may well be the case that UKIP's successes will be in the nature of a transitory protest vote. But perhaps not. If it can produce a cogent programme based on more than merely getting out of Europe and hating foreigners; if it can widen its appeal to embrace some of the millions who are evidently disgusted and disillusioned with Blair, including many of those sickened by the Iraq war who did not find themselves voting for the Lib Dems or Respect, then UKIP could influence British politics in a way few of us can have foreseen.

In the period since the 1997 general election, British politics have moved inexorably to the right. New Labour has squeezed the Tories out of their familiar territory (can anyone think of a more rightwing, authoritarian and plain nasty home secretary than Blunkett?); in turn the Tories have been squeezed by the BNP but much more significantly, as it now appears, by UKIP.
What about the left? We know the answer to that question, with all due Respect.