In the Telegraph, Iain Martin compares UKIP to the Judean People’s Front:
Eurosceptic politics used to be a lot like the famous scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which a group of revolutionaries – intent on bringing down the Roman Empire – sit in an amphitheatre discussing the various sects into which their movement has subdivided. They contemplate the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front and the Judean Popular People’s Front (“Splitters!”). What, asks one of the revolutionaries, ever happened to the Popular Front? “He’s over there,” says the leader, pointing to a rival sitting forlornly on his own.
In the early Nineties, Britain’s Eurosceptics were a similarly divided rabble. The Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 by John Major, had turned the looser European Economic Community into the much more integrated European Union and cleared the way for the creation of the single currency – and, it was feared, the destruction of national sovereignty by a new federalist empire.
With the Tories split internally, assorted anti-Maastricht movements began to spawn outside the confines of the two-party system. One was the United Kingdom Independence Party, which had its origins in the Anti-Federalist League, established in 1991 by a group led by Professor Alan Sked, a historian who teaches at the London School of Economics.
By establishing a new party, Sked and his colleagues hoped to create a movement that would build support for EU exit. At the time, this sounded like an outlandish aspiration. Indeed, initially Ukip was just a small band of dedicated campaigners and eccentric obsessives almost incapable of winning elections. The activists – true to form for a small party – seemed to spend more time fighting each other than battling their Europhile opponents. Splits and leadership coups were commonplace. If the Tory end of the political establishment paid any attention, it was only to laugh at what seemed like an irrelevant bunch of jokers.
Well, the Tories are not laughing now.
