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Democratic decisions
May. 1st, 2013 12:19 pmListening to the Today programme this morning, they had William Hague on putting the boot into UKIP. His principal point of attack was that UKIPs manifesto was full of uncosted pledges and the size of the financial black hole they would create if implemented. As I listened, I mused over my cornflakes just how hard it is to sound credible criticising the other fellow for the size of his economic black hole when you're borrowing a hundred and twenty billion smackers a year and printing tens of billions more every year just to fill yours.
"So", said the she-David. "Do you think that UKIP candidate is dodgy?"
"Which one? The nazi one, or one of the others?"
"The nazi one."
"Almost certainly", I said. "Probably lots of the others, too."
If you've been following the press lately you'll have noticed that there have been a lot of attacks on UKIP from all sides of the political spectrum. Social media has been trawled and anything which can be used as a weapon - ranging from innocuous mickey-taking to downright, brain-numbing imbecility and lunacy - has been wheeled out. It's been interesting to watch, and there's several thoughts I've had off the back of it.
Firstly is that all three main parties have seen the incredibly fast rise of UKIP, and it's got them rattled. Understandably so, as well. Comres report this morning that they're polling 22% for tomorrow's local elections, which given they polled 3.1% in the General Election three years ago is a stunning increase, unparalleled in modern politics.
As a result of this rise, recruitment to the party has been ad-hoc to say the least. From 22 candidates last time round to 1,700, the party has been recruiting with remarkable rapidity and the way they've been doing this is, as Farage has gone round the country on his speaking tour, if anyone has asked him a good or interesting question at one of his talks he's asked if they'd stand as a candidate. Without any sort of vetting process, that sounds like a recipe for letting the whackoes in if I've ever heard one.
But despite this a fair - and growing - chunk of the electorate appear not to care. In fact, it's worth pointing out that Ken Clarke attacking UKIP has probably done more for their profile and to get them support than any amount of speaking Farage has done. Possibly a part of this is the electorate sniffs a certain amount of hypocrisy in the attacks; if the main parties particularly cared about bonkers points of view, then Diane Abbott would have been out on her ear years ago, Maureen Stowe wouldn't have got near a seat, and of course let us not forget the Green party candidate who once memorably observed that children should be taken from their parents and raised by the state.
Protest parties always do well mid-term, and so the 22% polling shouldn't be taken overly seriously. The LibDems, who have positioned themselves as the protest-vote-party since time out of mind, have lost that role as a result of Nick Clegg looking sad every time he's asked a difficult question about running the country. Obviously nobody wants to vote for the Conservative incumbents, and nobody really wants to vote Labour ever since that time they took the economy into the changing rooms and did that thing which makes it cry every time it remembers.
What's perhaps more interesting is that the Green party, who were so a-quiver with the possibility that they might take up the protest vote slack, completely failed to do so and their efforts to position themselves as a mainstream political party after Caroline Lucas' winning of a parliamentary seat last time round seems to have completely failed*. Instead, the protest support has shifted to UKIP. You know, the racist party. Now either
a) Getting on for a quarter of the population of the UK are prepared to vote for an overtly racist party because they dunt liek tehm furriners, or
b) There's actually something else going on.
I'm actually prepared to lay hard cash on the answer being B, and I think there's multiple reasons. Top of the list is that there's clearly a gap in the market for a bit of populist protest and UKIP are it. Farage has said that he reckons that politicians are universally despised and it's just his good fortune to be less despised than any of the other others at the moment, and that's definitely true. However, there's more. Top of the list - consistently - of polls about people's concerns is the economy. I've said lots about economics before and I'm not going to get into it here, but what it comes down to is that the coalition strategy of lots of tax increases, borrowing and printing and a few cosmetic cuts here and there isn't all that popular and people are worried about it. Given that Labours' economic policy is pretty much to do exactly the same but with even more borrowing and a very sad expression, anyone who feels this isn't exactly ideal is limited in their electoral choices between the three main parties.
Secondly, you have the European Union, which is the elephant in the room of UK politics. Mainstream political consensus is that the EU is essentially benign but could do with a few tweaks to optimise performance and for a long time it was possible to maintain this position and seem credible. Unfortunately, ever since it became absolutely crystal clear that the institution values the survival of the Euro over the lives of it's citizenry, support for the UK as an integral part of the system has dwindled over here.
So you've got two major political issues where there's a consensus of the big three which is increasingly out of whack with a large proportion of the electorate.
Back in the 1930s it was predicted that a combination of generous welfare, a minimum wage and open migration would lead to a rise of nationalist politics as the consequences of that combination played out. UKIP can also be seen as the fulfilment of that prediction. Organisations like the BNP might have been the reflection of the inchoate rage of the disenfranchised a few years ago but they could never become mainstream because, well, they were a bunch of shaven headed overweight oafs who in terms of policy were pretty much old hard-left labour policies with added death camps, neither of which the British have really ever gone in for. UKIP have filled the niche instead. They've managed to attract people who think the economy isn't being managed very well, people who worry about the EU, and a lot of disenchanted large-C Conservatives and small-c conservative old Labour supporters who Blair lost. It's impressive, being all things to all men. And they've done it because they've never been in power.
What tends to happen with protest votes is that people vote for the protest party, see them in action when they've got a bit of power, and then shudder and return to the tried and tested political parties. The reason this happens is that competent people gravitate to where actual power is and it takes a heck of a shift in momentum to change that. So the question isn't will UKIP do well in the local elections (yes they will) or the European elections next year (yes they will), but whether once they done well can they maintain a veneer of competence sufficient to carry them through to the general election in 2015?
Personally, I doubt it. Recruiting electoral candidates on the basis of who sounds interesting in a crowded hall isn't a system designed to install quality, and it's a error. A forced error, yes, driven by the explosive growth in the party but it is an error nevertheless.
However, I may be wrong. And if I am, then it gets interesting. UKIP won't do that well in the 2015 general election. But if they hold onto even half their current support going into that election then it would put them into the position of being kingmakers - and with their EU and economic policies, that could prove very interesting indeed.
*Narrow escape there, eh, readers?
"So", said the she-David. "Do you think that UKIP candidate is dodgy?"
"Which one? The nazi one, or one of the others?"
"The nazi one."
"Almost certainly", I said. "Probably lots of the others, too."
If you've been following the press lately you'll have noticed that there have been a lot of attacks on UKIP from all sides of the political spectrum. Social media has been trawled and anything which can be used as a weapon - ranging from innocuous mickey-taking to downright, brain-numbing imbecility and lunacy - has been wheeled out. It's been interesting to watch, and there's several thoughts I've had off the back of it.
Firstly is that all three main parties have seen the incredibly fast rise of UKIP, and it's got them rattled. Understandably so, as well. Comres report this morning that they're polling 22% for tomorrow's local elections, which given they polled 3.1% in the General Election three years ago is a stunning increase, unparalleled in modern politics.
As a result of this rise, recruitment to the party has been ad-hoc to say the least. From 22 candidates last time round to 1,700, the party has been recruiting with remarkable rapidity and the way they've been doing this is, as Farage has gone round the country on his speaking tour, if anyone has asked him a good or interesting question at one of his talks he's asked if they'd stand as a candidate. Without any sort of vetting process, that sounds like a recipe for letting the whackoes in if I've ever heard one.
But despite this a fair - and growing - chunk of the electorate appear not to care. In fact, it's worth pointing out that Ken Clarke attacking UKIP has probably done more for their profile and to get them support than any amount of speaking Farage has done. Possibly a part of this is the electorate sniffs a certain amount of hypocrisy in the attacks; if the main parties particularly cared about bonkers points of view, then Diane Abbott would have been out on her ear years ago, Maureen Stowe wouldn't have got near a seat, and of course let us not forget the Green party candidate who once memorably observed that children should be taken from their parents and raised by the state.
Protest parties always do well mid-term, and so the 22% polling shouldn't be taken overly seriously. The LibDems, who have positioned themselves as the protest-vote-party since time out of mind, have lost that role as a result of Nick Clegg looking sad every time he's asked a difficult question about running the country. Obviously nobody wants to vote for the Conservative incumbents, and nobody really wants to vote Labour ever since that time they took the economy into the changing rooms and did that thing which makes it cry every time it remembers.
What's perhaps more interesting is that the Green party, who were so a-quiver with the possibility that they might take up the protest vote slack, completely failed to do so and their efforts to position themselves as a mainstream political party after Caroline Lucas' winning of a parliamentary seat last time round seems to have completely failed*. Instead, the protest support has shifted to UKIP. You know, the racist party. Now either
a) Getting on for a quarter of the population of the UK are prepared to vote for an overtly racist party because they dunt liek tehm furriners, or
b) There's actually something else going on.
I'm actually prepared to lay hard cash on the answer being B, and I think there's multiple reasons. Top of the list is that there's clearly a gap in the market for a bit of populist protest and UKIP are it. Farage has said that he reckons that politicians are universally despised and it's just his good fortune to be less despised than any of the other others at the moment, and that's definitely true. However, there's more. Top of the list - consistently - of polls about people's concerns is the economy. I've said lots about economics before and I'm not going to get into it here, but what it comes down to is that the coalition strategy of lots of tax increases, borrowing and printing and a few cosmetic cuts here and there isn't all that popular and people are worried about it. Given that Labours' economic policy is pretty much to do exactly the same but with even more borrowing and a very sad expression, anyone who feels this isn't exactly ideal is limited in their electoral choices between the three main parties.
Secondly, you have the European Union, which is the elephant in the room of UK politics. Mainstream political consensus is that the EU is essentially benign but could do with a few tweaks to optimise performance and for a long time it was possible to maintain this position and seem credible. Unfortunately, ever since it became absolutely crystal clear that the institution values the survival of the Euro over the lives of it's citizenry, support for the UK as an integral part of the system has dwindled over here.
So you've got two major political issues where there's a consensus of the big three which is increasingly out of whack with a large proportion of the electorate.
Back in the 1930s it was predicted that a combination of generous welfare, a minimum wage and open migration would lead to a rise of nationalist politics as the consequences of that combination played out. UKIP can also be seen as the fulfilment of that prediction. Organisations like the BNP might have been the reflection of the inchoate rage of the disenfranchised a few years ago but they could never become mainstream because, well, they were a bunch of shaven headed overweight oafs who in terms of policy were pretty much old hard-left labour policies with added death camps, neither of which the British have really ever gone in for. UKIP have filled the niche instead. They've managed to attract people who think the economy isn't being managed very well, people who worry about the EU, and a lot of disenchanted large-C Conservatives and small-c conservative old Labour supporters who Blair lost. It's impressive, being all things to all men. And they've done it because they've never been in power.
What tends to happen with protest votes is that people vote for the protest party, see them in action when they've got a bit of power, and then shudder and return to the tried and tested political parties. The reason this happens is that competent people gravitate to where actual power is and it takes a heck of a shift in momentum to change that. So the question isn't will UKIP do well in the local elections (yes they will) or the European elections next year (yes they will), but whether once they done well can they maintain a veneer of competence sufficient to carry them through to the general election in 2015?
Personally, I doubt it. Recruiting electoral candidates on the basis of who sounds interesting in a crowded hall isn't a system designed to install quality, and it's a error. A forced error, yes, driven by the explosive growth in the party but it is an error nevertheless.
However, I may be wrong. And if I am, then it gets interesting. UKIP won't do that well in the 2015 general election. But if they hold onto even half their current support going into that election then it would put them into the position of being kingmakers - and with their EU and economic policies, that could prove very interesting indeed.
*Narrow escape there, eh, readers?
