Who is to blame?

The media have helped to build up UKIP into a 'fourth political party'. Even though the Party still doesn't even control any councils in the entire country and have no representation in the House of Commons. The Green Party has representation in Parliament. Yet it is UKIP who are the 'fourth party' championed by the press, whether explicitly or in frantic fear-mongering. The facts that the Party has within its ranks types who want to do away with universal suffrage and universal health-care barely comes up. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party is a non-presence in the media, yet Farage is asked onto BBC Question Time more than any other politician.

Now the press are looking for a scapegoat. The blame has fallen on Ed Miliband in some quarters. Actually the truth about the UKIP 'revolution' and the reasons for it are less simplistic. My friend Chris Horner took this from The Guardian:

Ukip's share of the vote went down this week, not up. Yes, it scored impressively well, in the high teens of vote share according to BBC projections, but it did not come close to dislodging Labour and the Conservatives as the two frontrunner parties, while the Liberal Democrats remained far behind in the low teens. The 2014 elections, in short, look less like the eruption of a new political order than the partial solidification of the one that erupted a year ago. The earthquake was last year, not this.

This point was echoed by Dan Hodges and by others elsewhere. The media wants this to be a threat and they want it to hurt Labour more than the Conservatives. The entire establishment are to blame for their inability to deal with the nuisance of Farage. The reason why Nick Clegg couldn't win the debate with the UKIP leader was because he has already conceded the major issues. The same can be said of Ed Miliband and David Cameron. All of them accept Thatcherism as their starting-point. Only an outsider can tackle Farage and only an outsider can tackle Lib-Lab-Con.