‘Drinking at the same well as the BNP’ … Nigel Farage. Photograph: Olivia Harris/Reuters
Its first leader was a don at a fashionable London University, its current leader went to public school and made his money in the City. His immediate predecessor was an Etonian who hadn’t read his own party’s manifesto. Its elected officials have called women sluts, been jailed for benefit fraud, and blamed the floods on gay marriage. Its only consistent political success is in elections to a body its supporters want no part of under a system its leader despises.
- Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Extremism and Democracy)
- by Robert Ford, Matthew J. Goodwin
-
- Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
So why has this party – without a single seat in parliament – managed to change government and opposition policy on what many voters think to be the most important issue of the day? How did its leader persuade the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, into a suicide mission on prime time television? Why – next month – is it threatening to be the first third party to win a nationwide election since the end of the first world war?
In their answer to these questions, Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin have come up with something of a scoop, albeit one which they and others have been flagging up for a while. Revolt of the Right begins with a brisk summary of the UK Independence party story. Founded in 1991 by former Liberal and LSE lecturer Alan Sked, the party spent its early years being outpolled by the Monster Raving Loonies. Six years later, in the first of many bouts of infighting, Sked was overthrown in a coup. Under New Labour, Ukip was subject to infiltration by members of the BNP (until, that is, the BNP started beating them regularly in local elections) and split between those who saw it as a group to exert pressure on the Conservatives, and those who wanted it to be an electoral force in its own right.
In 2004, the party was given an unexpected boost by winning the support of former Labour MP and television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, who got himself elected to the European parliament, was appalled by the reactionary politics of his new colleagues, failed to win the leadership and, in the words of an activist, “disappeared in a puff of vanity”. As the 2010 election approached, the party began to take domestic polls more seriously. Its 2010 manifesto called for a dress code for taxi drivers and the banning of the burka, but won them more than 900,000 votes (3.1% of the total). But their real breakthrough came in a series of second-place results in recent byelections, and in the county council elections of 2013. The Conservative terror – that this funny little fruitcake fringe party could hand the keys of Downing Street to Ed Miliband – had suddenly become a real possibility.
That Ukip is, in Peter Oborne’s words, essentially “the Conservative party in exile” has been the conventional wisdom of the commentariat, including those Tories who’d like their leadership to listen less to Clegg. For Ford and Goodwin, the reason why Ukip may win the European elections is very different. In the core chapters of their book, they look first at the social and economic changes which, throughout Europe, have reduced the political power of the working class. In 1964 almost half the British workforce did blue collar jobs, 40% were in unions and 70% had no formal educational qualifications. Now manual jobs represent less than 30% of the total, fewer than 20% of people are in unions, and voters with educational qualifications equal those without. Old, white, impoverished males – once the people who decided elections – have been left behind, becoming little more than spectators of a political battlefield now dominated by a university-trained metropolitan elite. Hence the huge drop in the numbers voting in the Labour heartlands, not just in 2010, but also in 2005.
Crunching 10 years’ worth of data on 124,000 British voters (5,593 of whom intend to vote Ukip in 2015), Ford and Goodwin have found that it is this group, rather than the red-faced golf‑club bar bores of cartoonists’ imaginations, who have brought about the transformation in Ukip’s fortunes. In doing so, the party is, of course, drinking at the same well as the BNP (though – untainted with Nazi links – in much larger numbers). Like other radical-right voters across the continent, Ukip supporters oppose the European Union, dislike immigration, distrust mainstream politicians of all parties and are pessimistic about the future. Far from being a danger solely to the Conservatives, its runner-up showings in Barnsley, Rotherham and South Shields suggest that Ukip is as big, if not a bigger threat to Labour.
If that proves correct, then the party faces an existential challenge. As Ford and Goodwin put it: “During an economically rightwing administration that is pursuing an austerity agenda, the left-behind social groups who stand to lose the most show greater enthusiasm for Ukip’s radical right insurgency than for the party traditionally associated with state support for the most vulnerable”. If Labour loses these people, then it doesn’t just lose its electoral base, but also its reason for being.
But there are some caveats. The data on which Ford and Goodwin base their analysis of Ukip voters consists, as they acknowledge, of people who intend to vote Ukip, rather than those who have. On the occasions when Ukip’s vote increases dramatically (such as in European elections) their new or temporary voters are more likely to be middle-class, financially secure and from Conservative backgrounds. And, while Ukip did indeed attract more former Labour voters during the later New Labour years, they have won a substantially higher proportion of Tory voters since the coalition came to power.
So there might be another explanation for the high Ukip vote in Labour areas. As the BBC’s political research editor, David Cowling, points out, in Labour’s safest seat in the country at the 2010 election, 28% of voters still supported other parties. This is not because Liverpool Walton is peppered with enclaves of bankers and stockbrokers; it’s because a substantial section of the working class has always voted for parties other than Labour and now that vote is going to Ukip. Ford and Goodwin argue that Ukip’s success has reduced the swing to Labour among old, poor and male voters. But that’s different from saying that Ukip is eating into the existing Labour vote, as it clearly is into the Conservatives’.
A little oddly for authors of so fact-packed a study (including 24 figures and 34 tables, including one engagingly titled “‘Sod the lot’ models”), Ford and Goodwin have invented a generic Ukip voter called John, a 64-year-old former Raleigh bicycle worker in Nottingham, who voted for Thatcher, switched to Labour after she resigned, flirted with the BNP (but couldn’t stomach the Nazi associations) and was converted by a Ukip election broadcast in 2009. By contrast, Nigel Farage imagines his emblematic supporter as someone who has worked abroad for 30 years, retires to Britain, turns on the 10 o’clock news and cries “What?!”. The future of both major British parties may turn on which of those models is right.
Greg Lance - Watkins (Greg_L-W)
. Re-TWEET my Twitterings
Ukip-vs-EUkip 
Posted: 23/04/2014 10:43 BST