In sp!ked, Tim Black explains why the modest electoral success of the UK Independence Party in last week’s council elections looms so large in the fears and worries of the major parties and their supporters:
Since the results came in at the end of last week, however, perspective has been singularly lacking. In fact, given the hysterical response among the political and media class to UKIP’s success, you could be forgiven for thinking UKIP had actually come out on top, not third to the UK’s two struggling main parties. Rarely has an electoral success prompted such agonising. UKIP, remember, is a party with fewer actual MPs than either the Green Party or the latest George Galloway Party (they both have one each). Yet while editorials have wrung their papers’ hands, tied as they are by party-political allegiance, and commentators have tried to make sense of just what has gone wrong and rightwards, it’s the party-political establishment which seems most traumatised.
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This disparity between the fairly impressive UKIP election results and the massively depressive reaction among the political class does not really tell us that much about UKIP’s electoral performance itself. It testifies, rather, to the political class’s current sense of fragility. UKIP really didn’t have to do much to prompt angst and anger in Westminster; the UK political class’s own insecurity rendered it all too eager to turn this mid-term electoral drama into a long-term crisis, and, with it, to turn UKIP and its leader Farage into a threatening political force.
The roots of this insecurity are not hard to fathom. Isolated and deracinated, today’s main political parties are terrified of one thing in particular: the people, and those whom they support. To the modern Tory and Labour parties, popularity, grounded as they see it in the ‘prejudices’ of the people, is to be feared, not embraced. Hence in the shape of UKIP, they don’t see democracy, but demagoguery. There’s little doubt that UKIP, and in particular its leader Nigel Farage, do resonate in a way that the established parties do not. Where the main parties seek mainly to dodge and attribute blame for problems, UKIP are willing to offer up solutions. Where Cameron or Miliband talk unconvincingly in PR-conscious platitudes, Farage is always keen to speak his mind. To the political establishment, UKIP embodies popular sentiment. And that is why, in Farage’s words, UKIP’s election results have sent a ‘shockwave’ through the political establishment.
