UKIP – Don’t Screw It Up
It’s a rare thing to have a proper headshot at the establishment, but after 20 years, various splits and schisms within the party, slurs of racism from the main parties, and a mainstream media that went from ignoring them completely to often open hostility, UKIP are finally in a position to not only threaten the main parties at Westminster but to play a decisive role in the next general election, and perhaps even in forming the next government.
Having come first in the Euro elections in the summer, and recently won one by election in Clacton, Nigel Farage’s party are now clear favourites for a second win in Rochester & Strood next week. Meanwhile arguably a bigger coup still was the Heywood by election where just over 600 votes kept UKIP from winning a Labour safe seat. Farage has managed the seemingly impossible and made a libertarian-conservative party appealing to disaffected voters from all the main parties and strong enough in certain areas to actually win seats under the first past the post system.
As a supporter of UKIP and a believer in most of what they stand for this is great news, but not a time to get complacent. There are still plenty of pitfalls which the media and political establishment would love to see UKIP fall into.
The biggest danger I foresee is the temptation to sell out in the wrong way.
Short of actually winning a general election, UKIP will have to do a deal at some point, and most likely with the Conservative party. If they do this too cheaply, then they will burn out, as we are now witnessing the Lib Dems doing now. If they refuse to do it at all then they will never move beyond a protest party.
With a new Tory leader, a sniff of power to reward Farage’s twenty years’ of hard work, the temptation to sell out too cheaply is all too obvious. A coalition with the Tories in exchange for the promised referendum represents the biggest present danger to UKIP. We have seen the modus operandi in Scotland and any such EU referendum would be heavily rigged in favour of the UK staying in, with juicy sounding but hollow concessions set against an ill-formed “Out” alternative. The SNP can survive this sort of defeat with their strong local powerbase north of the border. UKIP cannot. Losing a fudged referendum would lose their raison-d’être for a generation, and without a firm and established base in Westminster the party would be cast into the wilderness. The hopes of a democratic UK would go with it.
Conversely, staying out of government forever will not serve any useful purpose. After 2015 we will have a wealth of information on where UKIP’s support lies and how to win it, and their enviable resonance with the voting public will be lost. In a best-case scenario this will lead the Tories, realising they have lost a general election because of UKIP, to offering a proper alternative outside the European Union, but history and logic suggest a rigged referendum is more likely. Again this will take away UKIP’s reason for being, without them ever achieving the goal of taking the country out of the European Union.
Only time will tell how this pays out, but anyone thinking the hard work is done is setting humself up for a massive disappointment: and anyone thinking the battle is already won is gravely mistaken. UKIP have now got enough rope to hang someone and it could yet be themselves. However they now have the momentum, they can’t be ignored or tarnished as fringe group racists anymore, and it’s entirely up to them to make their voices heard, and to make sure their voice is saying something coherent and compelling.
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I speak as an outside observer.
UKIP should concentrate, like a laser beam, on the European Union – on restoring the independence of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union.
UKIP must not allow itself to be distracted into anything the establishment could portray as “racist” or whatever “ist”.
UKIP must keep its “eyes on the prize”, the objective, of independence of the E.U. – and allow neither the establishment media (such as the BBC) or infiltrators (with an agenda of racialism or whatever) to distract it.
As for the next General Election.
Under a “First Past The Post” electoral system a pact with the Conservative Party is vital for UKIP – for Alex “rant well” to describe this as “selling out” is an error. We do not have “PR” in this country – so it is an agreement with the Conservative Party or UKIP and the Conservatives just cut each others throats (and the left laugh).
The Labour party and the Lib Dems are totally committed to the E.U. – whereas most Conservative Party MEMBERS AND SUPPORTERS are opposed to the E.U.
“Ah but the national leadership of the Conservative party Paul – the national leadership…..”
The national leadership, Mr Cameron and so on, do indeed seem to be the problem – they seem to put loyalty to the E.U. above winning the next General Election.
After the defeat in Rochester the leadership of the Conservative Party will have their last chance to change policy, to fundamentally change policy – to move to a pro British (i.e. anti E.U.) position.
No more giving in to the E.U. – with extra money, E.U. Arrest Warrants and everything else, indeed restoration of the independence of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland from the European Union, must be the policy.
The thing is the EU is a bit abstract. People do care about it, and many are hostile to it, but then election time comes around and the economy, the NHS and a host of other things come up and understandably dominate the election debate. UKIP can win all the debates on the EU, but without speaking on other issues they cannot win elections.
Immigration has given them a hot issue where they can take on the established parties and where the established parties can’t move into while still supporting EU membership.
“Selling out” wasn’t really meant in a negative sense. As you note they have to do a deal. The likely “price” of this is UKIP not opposing certain Tory MPs, so they must get something substantial in return.
Leaving the EU is the big issue. I’m sick of being told its ‘immigration’, ultimately we know that without leaving the dying and withering, corrupt, Communistic state that the EU is becoming no reasonable result can be obtained in regard to immigration. Ukip is not a protest vote, controlled immigration will be achieved when we leave the greedy, grasping EU. God save the Queen and our sovereign CHRISTIAN country. That’s pretty British John Major.
‘UKIP must not allow itself to be distracted into anything the establishment could portray as “racist”’
I am not an UKIP member, though I have voted for the party in the past and will almost certainly do so again at the General Election.
As something of a fellow traveller, my observation is that for decades, UKIP was a libertarian, anti-Federalist party that polled risible votes except at elections to a Parliament which it thought should not exist, under a voting system of which it did not approve!
Then one day someone decided to play the anti-immigration card, and it proved to be the ace of trumps, not least because the BNP was not by and large acceptable to middle class opinion, but an anti-immigration party that presented as middle class and respectable was very acceptable indeed.
If UKIP goes back to being a PC single issue anti-EU party, it will lose much of its present electoral support, and gain nothing, since it has the anti-EU vote already.
The UKIP are a bunch of collectivist bullshit artists like the rest of them. A pox on all their houses.
I feel the “gaffe-hunting” media need to be used for UKIP’s purposes – as the media are in their own right quite extreme on issues such as racism/immigration, and they wrongly interpret innocuous comments to be the next best thing to neo-fascism. Take the UKIP Calypso song – nothing extreme there – and it probably added to UKIP votes when the media kicked up a synthetic storm about nothing. The “Romanians next door are totally different to Germans next door” was another similar example. Police figures show that the levels of arrests of Romanians is off the scale – and so Farage’s comments were just the truth. My impression is that the storm the media created over that won the Euro elections for UKIP. In the run-up to the election more of these fake gaffes – actually telling the truth in an unvarnished, but not extreme, way – need to be generated, in order to trap the media into unwittingly propagandising for UKIP.
The left-liberals chickens are coming home to roost on immigration, the Euro, EU, foreign wars, PC nonsense, even the licence fee and the NHS. The language the hard left is using to try to demonise their opponents is helping this along. Look at the feminist reaction to that guys shirt. They cannot help themselves. John Majors words on Ukip yesterday approached absurdity and I believe the public can sense it.