Westminster Politicians: How Out-of-Touch Are They?

November 21, 2014, 1:39 PM GMT+0

UKIP’s victory in the Rochester and Strood by-election was so widely predicted that when it happened it seemed almost an anti-climax. Yet it is extraordinary. The constituency was 271st on the list of seats the party hoped it might win. Mark Reckless turned the majority of over nine thousand he enjoyed as the Tory candidate in the last election into an almost three thousand majority for UKIP over his old party. Labour’s share of the vote was halved and the LibDems were humiliated with a mere 349 votes.

Many explanations have been given for UKIP’s continued roll, from coming top in the euro and local elections in May, to winning its first parliamentary election in Clacton last month and now to taking Rochester. But the most common refrain is that the main parties have simply lost touch with voters. Is this true and, if so, what can they do about it?

What is certainly clear is that UKIP’s main appeal to voters does not derive from its most fundamental policy and the one that gives the party its name: withdrawal of Britain from the European Union. Polls show that despite the widespread unpopularity of the EU and the tendency to blame it for many of the problems this country faces, voters are far from certain that Britain should leave the EU. Faced with the hypothetical choice between UKIP’s policy of leaving come what may and the Conservative policy of trying to negotiate a reformed EU and then staying in it, the electorate seems to favour the latter.

Instead, what most seems to appeal to voters about UKIP is its populism: Nigel Farage, its leader, is regarded as pretty much unlike any other politician in his apparent ability to say what lots of people think but which mainstream politicians are unwilling or afraid to utter.

The consequence is that UKIP is able to attract votes from a much broader cross-section of the electorate than simply the eurosceptic, right wing of the Tory Party from which its two elected MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless came. It would seem that the willingness of half of Labour’s 2010 vote in Rochester to switch to UKIP in the by-election was far from entirely due to a wish to give David Cameron a bloody nose. UKIP has been picking up Labour votes elsewhere in circumstances where the one to end up with the bloody nose was Ed Miliband. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg has bandages all round his head.

What the voters seem to wish to tell the mainstream parties when they vote in such large numbers for UKIP is that the parties led by Messrs Cameron , Miliband and Clegg are simply out of touch with what matters to them.

For a long time now, Labour has tried to stick the ‘out-of-touch’ label on the Tories, an easy thing to attempt when the Prime Minister and most of those round him went to Eton and when the cabinet is full of millionaires. But the electorate appears to think that the whole political establishment, not just Tories who happened to go to Eton, are out of touch and, in effect, all much the same. They all look like identikits of Oxbridge-educated, London professionals who don’t understand how the rest of the world lives or what it believes.

In fact the party that has emerged most damaged in this respect from the Rochester by-election is not the Conservative Party but Labour. Friday morning’s newspaper headlines were dominated by the resignation of Labour’s shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, who had tweeted while campaigning in the constituency a photo of a terraced house, draped in the flags of St George with a white van parked outside. The photo was marked simply ‘image of Rochester’. This outraged many in the party (including, it is said, a livid Mr Miliband) because it appeared to sneer at the attitudes of the white working class Labour has long claimed to represent and still needs to rely upon. UKIP’s claim is precisely that Labour has lost touch with these roots and that Mr Farage’s party now better represents them.

Ms Thornberry may have grown up on a Guildford council estate but she is now a very affluent resident of Islington, her own constituency, and married to a highly successful barrister. For all her protests that she had had no intention of offending anyone, least of all the family who lived in the house, the tweet seemed to many to confirm the notion that our main political parties are led by a London, liberal elite who look down on the attitudes and lifestyles of those they seek to represent.

To many of those who live outside London, the capital has become a world apart, almost another country. It is not just that London attracts the able and ambitious, but its whole lifestyle is different. Its success, not to mention the astronomic rise in the value of property, lends those lucky enough to enjoy its benefits an assurance, even an arrogance that can seem alienating to those who live elsewhere.

In particular, London in general benefits from globalisation – indeed it is often called the global capital of the world – and this affects attitudes on issues such as immigration. Londoners have been used to immigration (over half of people living in London were born outside Britain) and, at least as long as there is economic buoyancy, take it in their stride. Immigrants do not seem to Londoners a threat to their lifestyle in the way they may seem to do in communities that have long existed as overwhelmingly ethnically British.

So it is not surprising that national politicians, who spend so much time in London, should become imbued with its ethos and thus seem out of touch to everyone else. UKIP is demonstrating that this constitutes a major threat to the other parties’ success. So what should they do about it?

The central problem may be that politicians look as if they have all been cut from the same cloth. This used not to be the case. Within living memory, the Tory benches contained a large contingent of country squires as well as bankers and lawyers, and the Labour benches included trade unionists who had been working miners, railwaymen and steel workers, as well as professionals such as lawyers and academics. Now large numbers of MPs from both the major parties have lived their whole working lives within politics (some of them, their whole lives – a new generation of Kinnocks, Straws, Benns and even perhaps Blairs looks likely to be elected as Labour MPs at the next general election). In other words, Westminster looks to many like a self-perpetuating clique.

One way round this would be to open up the selection of parliamentary candidates to a wider electorate. The Tories have experimented with this. Sarah Wollaston, the Tory MP for Totnes, was chosen as the party’s candidate in the 2010 election by an electorate that went wider than the local party members. And the Tory candidate in the Rochester by-election was similarly chosen (though it didn’t do her much good).

Another approach would be to try to loosen London’s grip on our national political life by devolving powers, so encouraging regional and local politicians to come to the fore. That lay behind John Prescott’s attempt to introduce regional government to England and the present government’s pursuit of directly-elected mayors for the major cities. The trouble is that voters, perversely perhaps, threw out the plans. For the time being, at least, London will continue to dominate.

The beneficiary is likely to go on being UKIP. Whether that means the party will achieve a real breakthrough at the next election remains unclear. As Mr Farage himself has said, anyone who thinks he can predict what will happen next May is wasting his time. What does seem likely, though, is that if voters continue to regard their MPs as remote and insensitive to their concerns, they’ll be punished.

Do you think the main Westminster parties are out of touch with voters and, if so, what do you think they should do about it?

Let us know your views.