Current standing
Last
week, Roger Helmer of UKIP was trounced by the Conservative candidate at
Newark. It seemed to go against everything the media has told us about the UKIP
threat. Many had claimed the gains UKIP made in May would be transformed into a
fourth party presence within Parliament. This was not a claim of the right-wing
press, or at least not just the right-wing press, even the BBC and the liberal
broadsheets succumbed to this message. In late May The Guardian reported a poll finding that 86% of those who voted
for UKIP in the European elections said they would do so again in the 2015
General Election.[1]
The
leap from 13 UKIP MEPs to 24 UKIP MEPs since 2009 set off the British media to
announce their well-cooked conclusion: it’s a political earthquake. The results
are interesting. Labour came in second at 25.4% to UKIP came out with 27.5% of
the vote, translating to about 9.3% of the electorate. The Conservatives fell
by 4%, Liberal Democrats by over 6% and the BNP by 7%. UKIP increased its vote
by more than 10%. The Green Party lost a little under 1% and gained three seats
beating the Lib Dems with nearly 8% of the vote. Voter turnout was around 33.8%
for the European elections. It goes without saying that the fringe right-wing
parties do better out of low turnout. It was predictable that the ruling
parties would face a drop in support.
At
the local elections, UKIP's vote fell from 22% to 17% and picked up 160 seats
(but no councils) which was less than the Lib Dems who have been relegated
politically toxic.[2]
UKIP may have eaten into the votes of Conservative candidates enough for them
to lose overall control of several councils, but not enough to gain control of
any councils itself. The media has claimed the results are ‘disastrous’ for
Labour even though the Party gained 330 council seats and a net gain of five
councils.[3]
The threat of UKIP is to establishment parties in its potential to divide the
vote on sore issues like immigration. This matters as we’re about to go into an
election. The Conservative Party have never fully recovered from the defeat
inflicted on John Major, the worst since 1832, while Labour has still not
filled the void leftover by Blairism.
Newark
was not to be the first victory of the Farage Party. It should have been
obvious from the beginning that the first seat in Parliament would not be
offered to Roger Helmer with all of his obvious weak-spots. Helmer himself said
that the absence of Farage hurt his chances in the by-election.[4] It
may have been a shrewd move by Farage to let Helmer take the fall on this
occasion. He made it clear he had no interest in putting himself forward.
Perhaps he had already gauged UKIP had little chance. Better to focus on the European
and local elections, so let someone else test the waters for the UK Parliament.
But that’s not where it ends.
The contours of white
appeal
At
the end of May there was a revealing and small controversy over the tweets of
UKIP Harrow chairman Jeremy Zeid. London was notably invulnerable to UKIP and
Zeid was one of the candidates to be defeated. In his tweets Zeid bemoaned the
‘absence’ of white faces in Ilford and went on to claim that London is being
“ethnically cleansed” of white people.[5] He
put the blame on the Labour Party. Perhaps Zeid imagines that New Labour’s
immigration policy as a social engineering programme to flood the country with
a new electorate to back whatever Labour wants. These are longstanding tropes
of right-wing fantasy. Race-mixing with the aim of building socialism in one
country. Alas, the Blairites had no such radical imagination.
During
the debate held between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage the veteran broadcaster
David Dimbleby asked “Do you consider the social impact of unlimited EU
immigration to be positive or has it caused a damaging element of cultural
segregation?” Nigel Farage charged immigration with ‘increasing segregation’
and ‘fundamentally’ changing Britain's towns and cities. He went on to say “Worst
of all, what it's done socially, it has left I'm afraid the white
working-class, yes, I know educationally, many have not done as well as we
would like, but it has left the white working-class effectively as an
under-class. And that I think is a disaster for our society.” Here Farage
targets those who identify as ‘white’ and ‘working-class’ in the audience.
‘White’
being the lowest common denominator there is. The appeal to white racial
consciousness is to those who have nothing else to cling onto. In the vast
swathes of the country reduced to wastelands by Thatcherism there are plenty of
working-class people who feel marginalised. To advance a race-consciousness where
class-consciousness is necessary holds obvious value for any reactionary party.
The white race exists, if at all, definitely not in biological terms, it exists
objectively as a formation of social control. Its shape is a multi-class
formation. The problem is those external to its advantages, not the system in
which we are all chained. In the words of Theodore W Allen, “The white race is
the historically most general form of ‘class collaboration’.”[6]
In
using such words Farage attempted to bind the ‘white working-class’ to his
party as a party of ‘white’ men standing up for themselves. Anyone who defends
immigration can then be conceived of as a traitor. Nick Clegg was the perfect
candidate with the long list of broken promises behind him. It was clear who
was going to win the debate from the outset. Clegg could not rely on the
strength of liberal ideas to triumph over the nationalist reaction. He had
already conceded too much ground to the opposition. He trapped in the
liberal-nationalist dichotomy permitted by the media and reinforced by the BBC
and apparatchiks like Dimbleby. The only kind of opposition which can be
levelled against UKIP properly would have to be levelled against the
Establishment as well. And that is why the liberals are so complacent.
Farage as an Ultra-Rightist
The
lexicon of the Left has always had a plethora of useful phrases. Lenin coined
‘ultra-leftism’ to designate those leftists who reach beyond the Left and,
ultimately, undermine left-wing aims. It follows that there is such a thing as
ultra-rightism. In many ways the Westboro Baptist Church in the US embodied
ultra-rightism. Many LGBT activists believed that the notorious placard ‘GOD
HATES FAGS’ was more of a help to the cause than a hindrance. There was no pretence
of civility with the Westboro bunch, which the rest of the Christian Right has
tried hard to maintain. It's not hard to see how the zealotry of Fred Phelps
and his flock has caused a lot of problems for American conservatives. Waving
around placards, like ‘GOD LOVES DEAD SOLDIERS’, is hardly inspirational to the
so-called ‘red states’.
Nigel
Farage seems to occupy a similar space in UK politics. Certainly, the
Conservative leadership understands the threat of UKIP in this framework. It
threatens to undermine its electoral basis. As Paul Mason has highlighted, the
Conservative Party is a social alliance between socially and economically liberal
metropolitans and the socially conservative, anti-immigrant and anti-EU voters
of the rural middle-classes.[7]
Likewise, the Labour Party is rooted in an alliance between a liberal salariat
in the cities and a working-class base.[8] In
its nationalist appeal, UKIP challenges Labour where there remains, what Mason
calls, “a residual white working-class culture”; all the while Farage threatens
to convert socio-moral and hard Right conservatives from the Conservative
Party.[9]
The
UK Independence Party itself is a coalition of nationalists, libertarians, and
paleoconservatives. It's not a straight fascist party like the BNP. UKIP has
managed to gain greater respectability and coverage in mainstream affairs.
Farage has been asked onto Question Time more often than any other politician
in the last few years. The Party has drawn support from the reactionary press,
explicitly in the case The Daily Express,
from whence Farage plucked Patrick O'Flynn to stand as an MEP and UKIP’s
Director of Communications. Ultra-right columnists such as Peter Hitchens and
Simon Heffer have recommended UKIP to their readers as the necessary means to
undermine the Conservative Party. In general the discourse surrounding certain
issues has helped to maintain and spread a fervent base for a particular kind
of anti-political populism.
The Flame of Thatcherism
As
George Eaton has recorded in his blogging at the New Statesman, there have been signs since at least April 2014
that, UKIP are moving further leftwards on economic matters to seize the ground
long abandoned by the Labour Party.[10] Even
in the run-up to the European elections Farage had been critical of zero-hour
contracts. George Eaton refers us to an article Farage penned in the Express and corporations who “refuse to
accept any social obligation towards loyal employees”.[11][12]
On
The Andrew Marr Show, Farage was
asked about his convictions as an avowed Thatcherite and he distanced himself “Thatcherism
was of its time, 40 years ago, to deal with a specific set of problems. For
half the country it benefited them, for the other half it didn't.”[13]
Farage confirmed that the flat tax of 31%, claiming that the policy had been
‘badly explained’, as people “thought we were going to put tax up for the
low-paid”. The UKIP leader went as far as to assert a commitment to low-taxes,
as an incentive, for minimum wage-earners: “What I can tell you for certain is
that our biggest tax objective in the next manifesto will be no tax on the
minimum wage. You've got to incentivise people to get off benefits and get back
to work. That will obviously cost money.”[14]
The
framework of these positions remains largely within the confines of
conservative thought: ‘loyal’ employees, work not welfare, low taxes etc. The
commitment to the 40% tax rate on high-incomes should not be mistaken as
‘progressive’, for it is a status quo commitment, it would still be a cut of 5%,
and it is still a rate lower than it was in the Thatcher years. In the past Farage has affirmed that the NHS
should not be ring-fenced and, by implication, open to market forces and
private companies.[15]
He told Norman Smith not long ago that he wants to see Britain “getting better
value for money” from the NHS. Farage has withdrawn from this position in his
interview with Marr.
It
is likely that the UKIP machine-men have taken notice of the criticisms against
their laissez-faire tastes – for health-care privatisation, abolishing
maternity leave and sick pay – in the traditional Labour press. The Daily Mirror ran pieces on UKIP’s
stances in the run up to the European and local elections. It is a vulnerable
point for the Party in its bid to expand into serious influence. The small
amount of coverage that these positions gained in the press (compared with
their stances on immigration and plentiful scandals) may have helped to harden
Labour support in the local elections.
Despite
the media claims of a UKIP ‘earthquake’ the Party leadership will be quietly
aware of the need to chip away at the Labour base. There is widespread support
for the nationalisation of energy companies, the renationalisation of the
railways, and a ban on zero-hours contract. It wouldn’t be surprising if the
bulk of this support was concentrated in the North and the Midlands. In the
same quarters, there is strong nationalist opposition to immigration and
European integration, as well as a popular disdain for political-correctness,
benefits scrounging, and multiculturalism. The UKIP leadership may be looking
to siphon off support for Labour where the Conservatives have had little chance
of gaining any ground whatsoever.
The
real question is whether UKIP will be able to capitalise on the modest gains it
has made and hold itself together with these electoral manoeuvres. This is at the
same time that the Party will be up against the Conservatives and Labour. The
threat is there and it has yet to be really seen what this means for future
British politics. It is evident that the need for a radical opposition in the
UK and the absence of such an opposition is at a dire point. The only force
which could take the wind out of UKIP would have to challenge the Conservatives
on the cuts and oppose the European austerity regime.
