Watching the world burn

Elections have always been seen as a means of deciding who should make up the government. But, in recent years, there has been a growing view that it doesn’t really make all that much difference. “Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in,” people say. It looks more and more like something that is done to you rather than something in which ordinary people have a say. Another saying is “it’s like choosing which colour of stick you want to be beaten with.”

We seem to be ruled by a political class that, whichever party is in power, adopts a very similar internationalist, politically correct, metropolitan, liberal, pro-global-warming standpoint that seems increasingly detached from the grass roots. So it’s not surprising that voters have been deserting the two main parties and, over the past four years, the split-the-difference LibDems too. South of the Border the main beneficiary of this trend has been UKIP.

However, there’s a tendency to regard a vote for UKIP as a howl of rage rather than an expression of any coherent sentiment, as in this generally quite perspicacious Guardian article by Matthew Goodwin, which suggests it has a “nihilistic” quality.

What Conservatives (and Labour) fail to understand is that Ukip’s appeal is as much about a diffuse but intense feeling of unease over the direction and pace of social change in modern Britain as it is about a specific and yearning desire to end immigration, leave the EU or reform Westminster. These voters do not like how Britain is changing, and they loathe politicians even more. This explains their nihilistic quality. In their hearts most Ukippers probably know that they might not get what they want. But some people just want to watch the world burn.

Surely, though, if you believe that the major parties have forfeited the right to your support through ignoring you, you are quite entitled to vote for someone else to show your disgust or teach them a lesson. And the same applies just as much to anyone voting for the Greens or the SNP. You know that, in the short term at least, your chosen party is unlikely to be able to implement much of its programme. But you will be choosing a Westminster MP who will represent your views, and who may, depending on Parliamentary arithmetic, be able to bring some influence to bear on government policy.

As US President John Quincy Adams once said. “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” So, today, if you live in Clacton or Heywood & Middleton, go out to the polling station and do just that. No vote is a wasted vote if it reflects your own beliefs.

Revolt from below?

It won’t come as a surprise to readers of this blog to learn that I am a strong, although not uncritical, supporter of UKIP. So I was very interested to read the new book about the party entitled Revolt on the Right by academics Robert Ford and Matthew J. Goodwin. It includes an in-depth account of the party’s somewhat tortuous rise to prominence which is put across in a generally fair and balanced way that even comes across as mildly sympathetic at times, even though I doubt whether the authors are UKIP voters. It also offers an in-depth analysis of the social profile of UKIP supporters and their motivations, and looks at the potential future opportunities for an electoral breakthrough.

However, I would say a major drawback of the book is that the authors are essentially psephologists rather than students of political thought, and they fail to give sufficient coverage of the ideological motivations of UKIP supporters. They are also too ready to lump the party in with the rest of the European “radical right”, when its origins essentially lie in a free-market, small-state outlook rather than xenophobia.

They try too hard to shoehorn all their statistics into an overarching theory that UKIP essentially appeals to poorer, older voters who feel left behind by modern socially liberal, internationalist, multicultural political trends. There is undoubtedly a substantial element of truth in that, but the party’s appeal spreads far wider, and indeed many of the local council seats they have won have been in distinctly middle-class areas.

While I agree with the view that we have far too much immigration into this country, combined with too little quality, it isn’t really a hot-button issue for me. My main motivations for supporting UKIP are opposition to the European Union, scepticism about demands to use man-made global warming as an excuse for far-reaching policy changes, and detestation of the growing climate of lifestyle bullying that has found its supreme expression in the smoking ban which has ripped the guts out of the British pub trade and particularly penalised the working class.

There is a strong feeling across all social classes that a homogenised political class has grown up in the UK that is increasingly detached from the lives and experiences of ordinary people. At times, Cameron, Clegg and Miliband can be hard to distinguish – a view set out by Janet Daley in this article, in which she says “There will really be only two contestants in the next general election: the political class and the people.” That is the feeling that UKIP is channelling with growing success.

I’ve seen Nigel Farage in the flesh at a fringe event at last year’s Tory conference, and he’s an accomplished public performer with whom I would probably agree on at least 95% of political issues. But there’s evidence of a growing faultline in UKIP between the “small-staters”, who want to see low taxes, an end to banning things and the debunking of the global warming myth, and the “right-wing populists”, who are more exercised by immigration and gay marriage and even toy with such ideas as renationalising the railways. If the party ends up going too far down the latter road it will eventually run into the same sand as the BNP and leave many people such as myself who are fed up with the self-serving LibLabCon triumvirate without a political home.