The answer lies in the position UKIP occupies in our broken political system. You see supporters of mainstream politics - Tories especially - look down their noses at UKIP because it doesn't have any MPs. This allows them to pretend to themselves that the party fast bleeding their right flank doesn't actually matter. Ex-MP and Twitter celeb Louise Mensch in today's Sun (£) sums it up. While UKIP remains a racist joke party of the dud, the mad and the smugly then no mainstream outfit will want to do a deal with them (oops facts). She'd like to see Farage step aside and UKIP undergo professionalisation so it becomes a eurosceptic Tory home-from-home her party could cut a coalition deal with.
From the angry pen of Nick Cohen comes this withering take down, and it's very difficult to disagree with his argument. Farage is a phoney and yes, the media are culpable for not just creating him but fanning the flames of hard right anti-immigrant politics. Where I would quibble with Nick is his overview of the political economy of the media. Yes, he's right that 24 hour news creates a space for politics-related news which, in turn, heaps 'blanding' dynamics on party leaderships beholden to politics as brand management. Politicians who are a touch larger than life can help brighten up an otherwise dull segment and give the hacks something to report about. What Nick misses is the fascination broadcast journalists have with fringe politics. As urbane, educated and privileged professionals one of the reasons why, say, BBC journos cannot get enough of UKIP - and before 2010, the BNP - is because they cannot understand why anyone would vote for them. Their reluctance to challenge the stupidity of the far right is an incoherence brought on by being in the presence of an alien other. They cannot believe how anyone can sincerely hold ridiculous ideas. And so the constant free passes, of spiteful and hypocritical nonsense getting aired unchallenged in ways 'normal' politicians must envy.
Will holding Farage to account, as Nick urges, make much of a difference? It depends on the grounds you do so. The Mensch tactic from the right is an attempt to appeal to non-existant moderate 'kippers to think through how their populism is holding them back. The Cohen gambit is continue scrutinising and let their unhinged nastiness speak for themselves. As it happens, I don't disagree. Attacking UKIP for its racism and misogyny is right because it's right. It isn't, however, politically sufficient in and of itself. Neither Louise or Nick go far enough.
UKIP is a fundamentally different party from the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats. Even, to a degree, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. It is a protest party, a creature called to life by repeated lightning strikes of unchallenged xenophobia in the media. And what that megavoltage has reanimated are the decomposing bits of rotten Toryism. It has functioned as a challenger party to the Westminster consensus, as a party whose significance lies not in the Parliamentary representation it could possibly secure but the bloody nose it can give politics as a whole. Its core constituency of middle aged to elderly white men, which the party are trying to expand to working class non-Labour voters, are not interested in power as such but of asserting themselves against a world they don't like. They grew to maturity in a relatively benign environment and now lash out against its disappearance by pointing shaky, anxious fingers at immigrants, at the EU, at same sex marriage, at women. UKIP is a rightwing backlash at and denial of the realities of 21st century Britain and as such what is toxic for parties who aspire to govern is not for a party of protest. In fact, part of UKIP's attraction is that it will say what others won't say. By no means all UKIP voters will agree with council candidate William Henwood's attack on Lenny Henry, but at least they say what they believe. The gaffes, the racism, the poison, voters who are punting for UKIP have already factored this in.
Combating UKIP isn't a matter of adopting their policies, such as they exist, or seeing who can spend longer in the sewer. Lord Ashcroft found that former Tory UKIP supporters would return to the fold if their old party if they keep their promises and can show they have implemented policies that benefit them. In other words, it's about re-winning trust and rebuilding a sense of confidence in politics. Looking at what the Tories have to offer in 2015 - more low pay, more precarity, more debt-fuelled economic "growth" - it's not looking like Dave and Co will be taking Ashcroft's advice. Which leaves an opening to Labour. If inequality is the number one political issue - including among UKIP voters - then Labour has plenty to say and offer. It is Labour who should take on board Ashcroft's recommendations because, ultimately, unless politics tackles the deep economic insecurities that bedevil many, many millions of people, UKIP will carry on flourishing.
We should forget their racism and anti European stance, let this speak for itself. What we should do is focus on their tax policies, their labour policies and their policies for pubic services. This is where UKIP will come unstuck. But as long as the focus is on immigration or Europe then UKIP will always chime with a certain section of the population.
ReplyDeleteYou're the sociologist, right? But your analysis seems a bit blinkered by ideology in this case.
ReplyDeleteYou are right to say ukip voters grew up in a "benign" climate but what do you mean by that?
Ukip feel threatened by the nation the uk has become - in particular political correctness, multiculturalism and the eu (which is a usefulbscapegoat for concern about the other twio). Nothing to do with economics.
As Simone Weil wrote people have a need for "roots". A common trope is the uk has somehow been "lost". Ukipers are not necessarily racist but they deeply resent the homogeonisation of society and the loss, as they see it, of their identity.
Responses to this cone from brown's britisness to cameron's christianity. Maybe they are also behind scotland's independence.
But don't bother about tax and spending. What people need (the whole country needs) is something to belive in. The uk - which was always a tribal as opposed to ideological society like france or the us - needs a new sense of itself.
This seems to miss the point of UKIP entirely.
ReplyDeleteI say that as an ex core Labour voter who now votes UKIP and would NEVER return to voting Labour.
UKIP has become as researchers found the repository for English National feeling.
No other political party is able to damage UKIP because none of them offer anything to England.
It has everything to do with economics, Speedy. I suspect you cannot see it because you understand economics narrowly in terms of balance sheets, wage struggles, and so on.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are large numbers of people who are anxious about mass immigration. There are plenty who find the world in which they live profoundly changed and alienating. It's not as if I haven't written about this before.
Underlying it is a deep sense of insecurity. Where does this come from? I would contend it has quite a bit to do with the cultural consequences of fundamental shifts in the political economy of our society. Is it pure coincidence that the rise of a politics of fear coincides with the breakdown of social solidarities and institutional arrangements that underpinned the post-war social order? Should we be surprised that people are worried about immigrants taking their jobs as hire and fire, zero hour contracts, the prevalence of low waged work, etc. has come to the fore?
It's all very well taking things at face value. But you've got to look beneath the surface.
You're partly right anonymous. There is something very English about UKIP, and it speaks to all that is backward and spiteful in that identity. Though I would love to know what is specifically English about Englishness that other nationalities do not share.
ReplyDeleteI digress. UKIP have nothing to offer English people except flag waving Thatcherism on steroids. Does none of that matter to you?
Sorry, i missed this. Yes i can see that. However throughout thatcher and subsequent recessions i cant recall the kind of antagonism i witness, and this is among wc people in the south and midlands - never really unionised, not on the whole less economically insecure than before. Many better off than ever before.
ReplyDeleteI can see where you are coming from, but i think materialism - like brown's campaign against poverty by upping benefits - partly misses the point. People are of course profoundly influenced by economic factors but there are other factors which have at least equal weighting. Power should be measured in terms of the cultural, communal and even spiritual as much as financial.
Although on reflection i do see your point about economics as an underlying condition in a lot of nationalism. But the wc tends to draw its values from national and cultural sources while the mc from universal. So the kind of things ukip stands for are much more meaningful to the wc than mc. Which is why i disagree with your weighting.
ReplyDeleteI think we agree more about this than the reading of my post suggests. I've been emphasising the roots of insecurities because there are still some - too many - in the Labour Party who haven't a clue about how anxiety arising from precarity poisons politics. But yes, there is cultural uncertainty as well that can only be separated out analytically - in reality it clings together in a sticky, inseparable mess.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I have something coming up about nationalism this evening.
You don't seem to "get it". UKIP are not the racist party. They want the British to be an identifiable "race" that is not threatened by absorption into an International combine such as the EU.
ReplyDeleteThe true racists are the Internationalists (pro-EU, Lab, Lib-Dem, some Tories) who see the "final solution" to be the abolition of social diversity by first abolishing Sovereign Nations in Europe and then extending this scheme until the world is full of coffee coloured people singing the same song. See Are Internationalists the Ultimate Racists? for more discussion.
The EU is a giant combine devoted to miscegenation? Crackpot arguments of the far right have taken a quality nosedive of late.
ReplyDelete