Seeing through the Ukip grandstanding

The UK Independence Party (Ukip) provides a civic service that goes beyond standing for election and promulgating ideas. It is also the greatest gift to confirmation bias in public life. The party is so inchoate — with its anarcho-capitalists and authoritarians, its globalists and autarkists — that anyone angry about anything can pretend Ukip springs from the same grievance.

Those who have always wished to leave the European Union (EU) interpret Ukip as a eurosceptic phenomenon, despite evidence that this is not the principal bugbear of the party’s voters. Tories who have always hated David Cameron, their leader, interpret Ukip as a reaction to his “modernisation” of their party. That this reaction scraped 3 per cent of the vote at the 2010 general election, by which point he had been leading the Conservatives for five years, does not shake their theory. Ukip has boomed during a Cameron premiership whose most eye-catching work has been austerity and preparation for the first EU referendum for 40 years. Wishy-washy metro-liberal things like that.

If Ukip’s success is a crutch for people who need external verification of things they already believe, that does not mean the party is defined by nothing at all. It is a howl at the modern economy. The 15 per cent who support Ukip are on the wrong side of globalisation. Next to the average Briton, they are older, less educated and more fearful of their prospects. They live in seaside towns such as Clacton, which gave the party its first elected MP last week, and old industrial areas such as Heywood and Middleton, which nearly yielded a second. These voters matter, electorally and morally. They deserve representation and do not get it from a lofty tier of mainstream politicians who relate to them uncomprehendingly if they relate to them at all. But who is worse: The elitist who shrugs at people left behind by the modern world, or the huckster who offers them false hope?

Ukip’s smarmy conceit is that Clacton and their other target seats are doing badly because of some remote Other: Europe, migrants, environmentalists. Structural economic change, of the kind that has been laying waste to livelihoods from the American Midwest to northern France in recent decades, does not merit a mention. Yet, Britain can leave the EU, stop all immigration and rescind all green taxes — and the party’s core voters would be no better off.

Immemorial dominance

Nigel Farage, Ukip’s leader, likes to say that Westminster has been denuded of power. He does not know how right he is. The government of an open, medium-sized country can only do so much against the impersonal forces of history and economy. British politics has become a great exercise in pretending otherwise. The Tories say better rail links can create a “northern powerhouse” to rival London. The capital’s immemorial dominance, which has survived uncountable government projects to erode it, does not stop politicians raising grandiose hopes.

Meanwhile, the Labour opposition claims stagnant wages are ultimately down to a vindictive political choice that only a new government can reverse. Automation, the doubling of the global labour supply, Britain’s productivity problem: this is much harder to talk about so they do not try.

However, if Ukip is not unique in peddling snake oil to the vulnerable, it is the most shameless. This is a party supported by people having a hard time, led by privileged and rather too gleeful ideologues. It is hard to detect in the Farage grin any belief that his ideas would put an extra pound in the pocket of the people he cheers as the spine of Britain. A politician who cared about these communities would honour them with candour. He would tell them that governments can ameliorate economic decline with practical interventions: Redistribution, low-tax zones to lure business. But they cannot reverse it, and certainly not by fighting culture wars.

If a town relies on an industry, and that industry loses out to technology or foreign competition, the local resentment will always exceed the government’s ability to stir a revival. Britain has been here before. The industrial north was victimised by economic trends that touched Detroit and Calais too, not by Margaret Thatcher. It was just easier to blame a face and a name. Anyone in the same plight would nurse the same rage. But the politicians who egged it on, as though deindustrialisation was one woman’s whim, were contemptible.

Matthew Parris, a Tory MP back then and now a columnist, has become the Marie Antoinette of Ukip demonology since urging politicians to accept that its voters are lost to modernity. Ukip can accuse him of casting too cold an eye on Britain. He can accuse them of worse.

— Financial Times