John Humphrys asks : Are UKIP really here to stay?
“The UKIP fox is in the Westminster hen house.” That was the claim of Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, after early counts in Thursday’s local elections in England showed his party stealing a march on the other three main parties. The likelihood that UKIP will have done even better in the European elections has led many to believe we are entering a new era of British politics: the era of four-party politics. If that’s the case, it will have a big effect on next year’s general election. But is UKIP really here to stay, or is its success just a temporary squeal of protest by voters against the three established parties?
Opinion polls suggested UKIP was going to do well in the English local elections and the European elections but the actual result seems to have been even better than forecast. On the usual low turnout in local elections (around 36%), UKIP has hugely increased the number of its councillors. It is widely predicted that, in terms of share of the vote, it will come top in the euro-elections.
Its success has been at the expense of all the other parties and is spread pretty much throughout the country. Only London bucked the trend with support for the party running far below the national average.
The Tories were always thought to have most to fear from UKIP. Its policies on Europe and immigration seemed designed to attract disaffected Tories, and sure enough the Conservatives lost considerable ground to UKIP in previously safe areas, such as Essex.
But Labour has also seen its ambitions dented by UKIP. The Essex town of Thurrock is second on the list of parliamentary seats it hopes to take from the Conservatives next year, but that is looking less promising as a result of the local election result there. It lost heavily to UKIP. And in its heartlands in the north, Labour saw UKIP seize ten of the twenty-one seats fought in Rotherham. In one Sunderland ward where it had never stood before, UKIP took 30% of the votes.
As for the Liberal Democrats, UKIP simply took over its old role of attracting the votes of those fed up with politics in general. The LibDems had a dismal night.
Few in the three old parties have tried to play down the threat they think UKIP now poses, but there are sharp differences within each party about how to react.
Some in the Conservative Party have called for an electoral pact with UKIP on the grounds that it is essentially a dissident force within conservatism and that only through a pact will it be possible to avoid a split in the Conservative vote, so letting Labour in. Unsurprisingly, those calls have come from the most eurosceptic Tory MPs. A pact could be achieved only by moving the Tory Party in a more eurosceptic direction which is, of course, what they want anyway.
But it is not what David Cameron wants. His whole strategy on Europe is to try to renegotiate the terms of British membership of the EU during the next parliament and then argue in favour of continued membership during the referendum he has promised by the end of 2017. So the Tory leadership rejects outright any suggestion of a pact. Instead, its strategy for dealing with UKIP seems to be simply to frighten Conservative-inclined voters with the prospect of a Labour government if they don’t end their flirtation with Mr Farage.
In the Labour Party there is criticism of the leadership for having failed to take on UKIP more directly. This is linked with wider criticism of the way Ed Miliband is leading the party. One of his MP critics, Graham Stringer, charged the leadership with being “unforgivably unprofessional” in the way it had fought the campaign.
But Mr Miliband shows little sign that he intends to change tack and seems to believe he can redirect the protest vote that has gone to UKIP in the local elections back to Labour in the general election. He said: “I think what we heard last night was a deep dense of discontent with the way the country’s run and a deep desire for change. Across the country you’ve seen people voting Labour to make that change happen. … You also saw some people turning to UKIP – and I am determined that over the next year we persuade them that we can change their lives for the better.”
For the LibDems, Nick Clegg’s strategy of tackling UKIP head on, by being ready to debate publicly with Nigel Farage during the campaign, has not paid off. The strategy now seems to be to concentrate on the LibDem heartlands, in most of which they held ground on Thursday, in the hope that the party can retain enough seats next year to give it a chance of still holding the balance of power in a hung parliament.
All these strategies depend, of course, on the voters. The two main parties are relying on the argument ‘don’t let the others in’ in order to wean back voters from UKIP. But will it work? If voters are as generally fed up with the main parties as they appear to be, then they may not much care who wins the next election, or at least not enough to persuade them to abandon their new attachment to UKIP. If that turns out to be the case, we shall indeed find ourselves in the world of four-party politics. That’s certainly what Mr Farage is hoping for. After these election results he says his party will spend the summer working out where it has the best chances of winning seats at Westminster and then “throwing the kitchen sink” at the task of trying to secure them.
- What chance do you think he has?
- Did you vote, or were you tempted to vote for UKIP in the local and European elections this week?
- If you did, was it simply as a protest at the other parties or because you were convinced by the UKIP case?
- Would you consider voting UKIP at the general election next year, or would your vote be more swayed by consideration of whether you wanted the Tories or Labour to form the next government?
- What’s your reading of those who do vote UKIP?
- Do you think their support is temporary or likely to stick?
- And do you think it would be a good thing or a bad thing if British politics became a four-party battle?
