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2013-05-04 Britain
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Ukip is a very British revolution
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| Perhaps England isn't lost after all. |
[Telegraph] The results aren't all in yet, but it's obvious what's happening: Ukip are the moral victors in yesterday's local elections. A party that was just two men on a golf cart ten years ago has placed second in South Shields and won county seats across the country. A few early observations:
1. The Lib Dems are at risk of becoming politically irrelevant. In South Shields they came seventh, a pathetic result for a governing party.
2. Ukip have helped to smash the BNP. By providing a non-racist Right-wing alternative, they reduced the BNP's result in the Spalding East and Moulton ward in Lincolnshire from 20.5 per cent in 2009 to just 3.9 per cent today.
3. Labour did well but its gains were only modest. It held South Shields (the kind of seat that a donkey in a red rosette could win) but on a lower majority. Miliband is not popular in southern England and that will prove a problem in 2015.
4. Dan Hannan's dream of a Ukip/Conservative coalition might actually happen in Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire -- a fascinating laboratory for any future pact.
But the big story is the rise and rise of a tiny party once derided by its critics as full of fruitcakes and closet racists. It probably won't gain any parliamentary seats in 2015: the electoral system is stacked against it and while Ukip's support is broad, it isn't deep enough in individual constituencies to win anything. This doesn't seem to trouble Nigel Farage who says that he sees his party as playing the same role that the SDP played in the 1980s -- driving the political agenda in his preferred direction. That statement could cause some controversy within Ukip because the party is split over whether it's a pressure group or a serious candidate for government. Farage is correct that its best shot at relevance comes from posing as the former, but the taste of victory in this round of elections could delude many activists that they stand a chance of becoming the latter. Success breeds success, but also hyperbole and vanity.
Either way, there's no escaping that Ukip has exploited the anger of a great many people. They're angry at the slow pace of reform coming from the Coalition, its prioritising of social liberalism over social justice, its failure to cut taxes for the middle class, its ring-fenced foreign aid budget and its poor economic record. The perpetually furious could have turned to Labour, but memories are long of how they spent all the money in the Noughties, and contempt is deep for Mr Miliband's student union style of politics. Many voters have reached the conclusion that the philosophical division between the parties is so narrow, that incompetence is so ubiquitous, that the personalities are so uniformly unreal that there really is no difference between the three main parties. Under those circumstances, why not vote for the anarchist fringe? Put a bit of stick about, as Francis Urquhart would say.
And then there's the personality factor. Cameron, Clegg and Miliband are all of a type: middle class, white, male, middle aged, middle-of-the-road, posh, suited and largely lacking in real world experience. By contrast, all the scandals surrounding Ukip this week only confirmed its accidental authenticity -- its refusal or inability to be anything other than crude, rude and painfully honest. It is also fun. Humour is very important in Anglosphere politics. For the English, wit is the way that we communicate fury, intelligence and love. There's something funny, and thus irresistible, about Farage with a cigarette in hand, hat on head, charming the voters with his market banter.
Yesterday, people voted Ukip partly out of anger and partly for a laugh. It's a very British revolution.
| Update: Anthony Watts of wattsupwiththat.com has a nice little roundup of reports that Ukip is decidedly not in the Green (Britain-watermelon) camp. A nice bonus that will no doubt save the British taxpayer billions of pounds (or euros, or both). |
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