The political world of Alan Titchmarsh

Readers of today’s Observer magazine have a treat in store: the profound philosophy of life of the TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh.

It’s in the regular feature titled This much I know, which in Titchmarsh’s case turns out to be not very much once he strays beyond gardening.

Amongst other things, he says “it’s an insult to suggest this is Austerity Britain”, thinks that older women on TV shouldn’t “whinge” about the lack of career opportunities, and sympathises with people who vote for UKIP because there is “a danger of homogenisation in Europe”.

In short, he’s the sort of bloke you meet down the pub who insists his views are “not political, just common sense”.

I’d stick to the hydrangeas, mate.

Bad news for UKIP: the EU defends English

How will UKIP handle this counter-intuitive news?

The translators at the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg have come to the defence of proper English. They have just published A Brief List of Misused English Terms in EU Publications (pdf).

This list is actually not that ‘brief’ – it runs to 58 pages. But it is fluent and succinct, and arranged in a user-friendly format.

The introduction to the document explains why it has been written:

Over the years, the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English. It includes words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions and often even to standard spellcheckers/grammar checkers (‘planification’, ‘to precise’ or ‘telematics’ for example) and words that are used with a meaning, often derived from other languages, that is not usually found in English dictionaries (‘coherent’ being a case in point). Some words are used with more or less the correct meaning, but in contexts where they would not be used by native speakers (‘homogenise’, for example).

It also anticipates an obvious criticism:

WHO CARES?

A common reaction to this situation is that it does not matter as, internally, we all know what ‘informatics’ are (is?), what happens if we ‘transpose’ a Directive or ‘go on mission’ and that, when our ‘agents’ are on a contract, they are not actually going to kill anyone. Indeed, internally, it may often be easier to communicate with these terms than with the correct ones (it is reasonable to suppose that fewer EU officials know ‘outsource’ than ‘externalise’, for example). However, the European institutions also need to communicate with the outside world and our documents need to be translated – both tasks that are not facilitated by the use of terminology that is unknown to native speakers and either does not appear in dictionaries or is shown in them with a different meaning. Finally, it is worth remembering that, whereas EU staff should be able to understand ‘real’ English, we cannot expect the general public to be au fait with the EU variety.

As an example, the document gives a slap on the wrist to Eurocrats who refer to ‘bovine’, ‘ovine’, ‘caprine’ or ‘porcine’ animals. It suggests they use the more familiar ‘cattle’, ‘sheep’, ‘goats’ and ‘pigs’ instead. And if any feel tempted to refer to a ‘hierarchical superior’, it recommends the simpler ‘manager’ or ‘boss’. As for ‘modality’ (a non-word unique to the EU institutions), that is right out.

UKIP has been silent on the issue of English grammar, probably because it is not one of Nigel Farage’s strengths. As UKIP’s founder Alan Sked explained:

The academic also said that he received letters complaining about the spelling and grammar used in Mr Farage’s election literature.

“There seemed to be a bit of problem distinguishing its from it’s,” Prof Sked recalled, adding that Mr Farage did admit that writing was not his area of expertise.

So the lesson is, when you want to stop Johnny Foreigner taking diabolical liberties with the Queen’s English, don’t bother waiting for UKIP to get its arse in gear – ask a Eurocrat.

UKIP racism row: latest

The Lincolnshire Echo has breaking news about UKIP Councillor Chris Pain, leader of the opposition on Lincolnshire County Council, who has been accused of posting “racist rants” on Facebook:

Chris Pain has stepped down as East Midlands chairman of UKIP amid a police investigation into racist remarks on Facebook.

He is still protesting is innocence, insisting his Facebook account was hacked. Meanwhile, police investigations continue.

We should not be complacent and assume that such rows will necessarily damage UKIP. The party has been embroiled in various scandals before. Two UKIP MEPs, Ashley Mote and Tom Wise, were jailed for fraud but this appeared to have no effect on their party’s reputation.

Indeed, the prosecution of Councillor Pain may even win support among the sort of people who believe this is “political correctness gone mad” and that UKIP is telling you what the establishment “doesn’t want you to hear”.

UKIP founder says party has “gone completely fruitcake”

Remember Professor Alan Sked? He was the original founder of UKIP in 1993 but left the party shortly after the 1997 general election. Today he is the subject of an entertaining interview in the Sunday Telegraph:

Professor Alan Sked, who set up the euro-sceptic party 20 years ago, believes the party has become “anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual and racist”.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the historian also revealed that he once expelled Nigel Farage, the party’s ebullient leader.

Sked seems to think he has created a Frankenstein’s monster:

“My great regret is that the party I founded has been captured by the radical Right and has gone all anti-intellectual. It’s gone completely fruitcake.”

He obviously has little time for UKIP’s present leader:

The academic paints a vivid picture of a young Mr Farage, the loquacious and hard-living former City trader who has led Ukip since 2006.

Prof Sked said it was not uncommon for the commodities broker to turn up at the party’s national executive evening meetings in a “relaxed” mood after a long day working — and drinking — in the Square Mile.

Not just drinking but, worse, bad grammar:

The academic also said that he received letters complaining about the spelling and grammar used in Mr Farage’s election literature.

“There seemed to be a bit of problem distinguishing its from it’s,” Prof Sked recalled, adding that Mr Farage did admit that writing was not his area of expertise.

“It was not always easy to portray us as a party that took education very seriously in such circumstances.” Mr Farage attended Dulwich College, the leading public school, in south London.

Ukip’s original leader even said that he tried to oust Mr Farage when he organised a conference exploring Ukip’s future direction after it failed to win any seats in the 1997 general election.

UKIP contains the seeds of its own destruction. These seeds seem to propagating nicely. We need to switch our attention to a more fundamental problem, popular disaffection from democratic politics, which has created the space for a party even as chaotic as UKIP to thrive.

UKIP: Police probe ‘racist’ councillors

The front-page headline in today’s Lincolnshire Echo: “Police probe ‘racist’ councillors in Lincolnshire”.

This news follows last Sunday’s post about the UKIP group leader’s comments on Facebook.

Three councillors are under investigation but all insist that their Facebook accounts were hacked:

Cllr Pain, leader of the opposition at Lincolnshire County Council, insists his Facebook account had been hacked into at least three times.

At least three times? If that were the case, did it ever occur to Councillor Pain to change his password?

UKIP’s new councillors: the revelations continue...

More sordid details of UKIP councillors have come to light.

Following the resignation of “race-ranter” Eric Kitson from Worcestershire County Council, today’s Sunday Mirror has unearthed more racist rants on Facebook.

The Mirror reports several nasty outbursts but pride of place must go to Chris Pain, UKIP leader of the opposition on Lincolnshire County Council and the party’s East Midlands regional chairman. He wrote:

“Have you noticed that if you ­rearrange the letters in ‘illegal ­immigrants’, and add just a few more letters, it spells, ‘Go home you free-loading, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, baby-making, non-English-speaking ********* and take those other hairy-faced, sandal-wearing, bomb-making, camel-riding, goat-********, raghead ******** with you.’”

Councillor Pain came up with a predictable excuse:

Mr Pain said the comments on his Facebook pages were “not my original posts or writings”, claiming his ­account had been hacked.

What Councillor Pain cannot deny is a report in the Lincolnshire Echo that his group made a unanimous decision to refuse to sign an anti-racism declaration.

The UKIP group took this decision in a week when, just a few miles from the county council offices, there were commemorations at RAF Scampton to mark the sacrifices of the Dambusters who died fighting the Nazis. It is probably safe to assume that Councillor Pain failed to notice the irony.

Postscript: Three UKIP councillors in Lincolnshire are now being investigated by the police.

Queen’s Speech amendment: “an act of venal self indulgence”

Former Tory MP Jerry Hayes is usually worth reading and his verdict on those Tories backing the Queen’s Speech amendment is no exception:

The amendment to the Queen’s Speech could be the beginning of the end of the Conservatives in office. It is an act of venal self indulgence which will horrify those sentient members of the electorate who actually think and care and will antagonise those who fear for their jobs and families.

What is it meant to achieve? No parliament can bind another. But this amendment doesn’t even try to. It is just an expression of regret that the government’s legislative programme doesn’t mention a referendum. Most Labour MPs and all Lib Dems will vote against so it will be defeated.

What a thoroughly futile and pointless exercise. And according to some MPs this is just the beginning.

So apart from making them all look like incompetent fools more interested in a stunt to save their own miserable skins it is a gift to the Faragistas.

Hayes’s views (which once would have been a mainstream Tory perspective) now seem like a voice in the wilderness. No wonder he is exasperated with his former colleagues:

This freak show has got to stop. But it will get worse. This is a gift for Farage giving him a sense of importance that is totally unwarranted.

But this whole farce is just beginning to gain momentum. The Onanistic wing of the Tory Party are now pressing for a referendum on gay marriage. Completely nuts.

Hayes recognises something that eludes most fanatical eurosceptics. In all the grandiose talk about what the Great British Public thinks about the European Union, an important fact is forgotten. Most of the Great British Public couldn’t give a flying fuck one way or the other.

UKIP’s new councillors: the implosion begins...

It’s started.

In Worcestershire, UKIP “race-ranter” Eric Kitson is embroiled in an on-off controversy over whether he has resigned as a county councillor, only a few days after being elected.

UKIP’s national office says he has resigned but the county council confirms he has not – at least not yet. The council is nevertheless investigating Kitson’s racist comments on Facebook.

In case you doubt the terms “race-ranter” and “racist”, consider this:

The posts made on Mr Kitson’s facebook profile, which has now been taken down, included one of a Muslim being spit-roasted on a fire fuelled by copies of the Koran.

He also said, in reference to Muslim women: “Hang um all first then ask questions later.”

UKIP admitted it had not been able to vet its candidates before this May’s elections, so we can expect more such episodes in the coming months. But given that the pre-election media hatchet job seemed to have no adverse effect on UKIP’s vote, don’t assume any post-election embarrassments will necessarily damage UKIP.

Postscript (1): Eric Kitson’s resignation is now confirmed. Kitson has also been interviewed by the police.

Postscript (2): More revelations here.

UKIP, 1963 and the Fall of Man

Deep down, what is the true source of UKIP’s appeal?

Recent posts here have discussed UKIP supporters’ resentment at everything that’s happened since 1963 and that the only thing they like about Britain is the past.

1963 seems to be a key turning point, and not just because of Philip Larkin’s poem. The significance of that year was analysed in an article by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian.

Jeffries acknowledges that everything didn’t suddenly change in 1963. But 1963 was significant as the year of the Profumo scandal, when the hypocrisies of the establishment were laid bare. It was also the cusp of a long process of sexual liberation:

Writing of the effects of liberalising legislation on abortion, gay sex and the reduction of censorship in the 60s, Andrew Marr in A History of Modern Britain stresses this lapsarian image: “A fair verdict is that the changes allowed the British to be more openly themselves, and that while the results are not pretty, the apple of self-knowledge cannot be uneaten again and returned to the tree.”

The key word here is ‘lapsarian’. Might this be the real reason for UKIP’s appeal? Its supporters are yearning not just for the 1950s but for a time of innocence. Their yearning is based on the oldest idea of all, the basis of Judeo-Christian mythology, the Fall of Man. Deep down, UKIP supporters want to return to a time before Adam and Eve ate the apple, when God punished them by driving them out of the Garden of Eden and into the world where they would be subject to sickness and pain and eventual death.

So Nigel Farage thinks he can turn the clock back that far? Good luck with that.

Nick Clegg’s dog-whistle politics

How often does it need saying? There is no need, repeat, no need for the Liberal Democrats to be spooked by UKIP or to appease xenophobic opinion.

UKIP is basically the Conservative Party’s problem. It is threatening the Tories’ right flank, giving Tory backbenchers the jitters and prompting the Tory leadership to react with rightward moves on various issues (as today’s Queen’s Speech demonstrates, with its emphasis on immigration and the dropping of policies on plain cigarette packaging and overseas aid).

UKIP is not the Liberal Democrats’ problem. There is no rational reason why the Liberal Democrats should move rightwards on immigration or Europe. If anything, the effect of UKIP on the Tories opens up a greater space for liberal opinion. The opportunity is there for the taking, to appeal to voters who don’t buy into the UKIP/Daily Express ‘drawbridge up’ agenda.

Nick Clegg obviously doesn’t see things that way. The Daily Express reports:

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, the Liberal Democrat leader said: “We need to be an open country in terms of welcoming people who want to make a contribution to the United Kingdom, but of course we should stamp out abuse.

“We need to stamp out levels of illegal immigration and of course we need to make sure that our public services and our benefits are not simply a free-for-all when of course there needs to be some relation to what you put in and what you get out.”

The idea that hordes of immigrants are coming to Britain to sponge off the welfare system is a complete myth. There is no “free-for-all”. It’s a non-problem. Despite this, Clegg seems to think that action to combat this imaginary threat is vital (and it’s a topic on which he has recent form).

Clegg continued:

“My advice to the Conservative party, if they’d listen to it, is don’t run after Ukip as it would just strengthen Ukip’s hand.”

In which case, why is Clegg ignoring his own advice and indulging in this unpleasant dog-whistle politics?

Thatcher and UKIP – the ‘patriots’ who hate Britain

Nigel Farage likes to boast that UKIP rather than the present-day Conservative Party represents the true spirit of Margaret Thatcher.

And he is right, but probably not in a way he would like you to think. Because the dirty secret about Thatcher and UKIP is that, for all their flag-waving jingoism, both dislike their own country.

Thatcher’s contempt for much of Britain emerges clearly in a remarkable essay by Andrew O’Hagan in The New York Review of Books:

...by the end she left Britain a greedier and seedier place. Despite the pomp and circumstance of her funeral and the many plaudits she has garnered since her death, her great experiment actually didn’t work: the people who could get rich got richer, of course, but she and her followers had no plan to relieve the economic misery that befell the others, the people who were now forced to live on state benefits, which continued to grow. It is the communities of the other—where no new investment took hold, where no new jobs came to replace the ones that were scrapped—that continue to fester in modern Britain.

There was a country that died, the one in which the classes felt a little responsible for one another, survived wars together, a country in which young people used to have options outside the service industry or the gambling fraternity. And you can still see that country dying every day of the week on television. Gap-toothed and overlagered, unemployed and proud of nothing, the great-grandsons and daughters of the respectable working class are seen screaming at each other on The Jeremy Kyle Show, a tribute to Thatcher’s legacy and her impact on British social cohesion.

It was an impressive work of social engineering but ultimately a dreadful one. She created a population that is more dependent and less productive. She made us more individual but less cooperative. It must have looked heroic on paper or in the essays of Milton Friedman. But what she did was incredibly coarse in practice: she ground the unions down but left workers with no alternative form of self-esteem or protection, and the result, today, is a workforce of the alienated. She boasted of setting people free but British working people have never been more enslaved to the whims of fashion, corporate greed, and agism than they are now. A young person from a former mining community where there might have been classes in the evenings and a sense of propriety, decency, modesty, and community can now only hope for a place in “the zone”—the world of the “haves”—by winning a celebrity contest or by thriving on the black market.

Thatcher was a divisive figure because she governed only for her own kind:

She couldn’t hold the nation together, indeed she drove it apart, and that is because she didn’t really believe in the nation except as a sentimental or martial entity. That’s the strangest legacy of all about Maggie: if you listen to those who loved her and thought she was manifestly right, you find, after a while, that you are with people who don’t know their own country and don’t like it either. They think they like it because they don’t like Europe, but in fact, they abjure both. They like their own lives, of course, and their own kind, but they imagine the rest of Britain is mainly an unspeakable place of aliens and scroungers. This feeling borrows heavily from Thatcher and her notion that there is no such thing as society. We heard it recently from George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, when he spoke about people who are dependent on housing benefits, and you can find the same stuff every day in those apocalyptic screeds against the poor that adorn the Daily Mail...

None of her acolytes will grasp the irony of her political life: that, with Thatcherism, she set out to save the soul of the nation and ended up selling it off to the cheapest bidder.

Thatcher’s contempt for Britain and the British thrives in the present-day Conservative Party. It can be found in the recent book Britannia Unchained, in which a group of new Tory MPs condemned British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”, adding that “too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work”.

This tirade of abuse prompted Robin McGhee to ask in Prospect magazine, “Conservatism in 2013 faces an existential problem: how can it reconcile free markets with traditional values?”. The authors of Britannia Unchained, like Thatcher, have clearly resolved this dilemma in favour of the former, and have thus ceased to be ‘conservative’ in the true sense of the word.

Ironically, UKIP has made a similar choice. Despite its claims to patriotism, UKIP actually has little time for most British people or the Britain of today. This emerged in a recent article in the Observer by Andrew Rawnsley, where he recounts a telling anecdote about UKIP voters:

All the main parties have cause to be anxious about Ukip and so all have been trying to understand the rise of the Farageists. One way they do this is to put together focus groups of voters who have switched to Ukip to try to fathom why these people are attracted to Nigel Farage’s gang. One senior party strategist says he listened in some wonderment as his focus group of Ukip voters spent an entire 90-minute session wailing and gnashing their teeth about the state of Britain. Not a good word did they have to say about the country today. At the end of the session, he thanked them for their time, and said he had one more question. Was there anything about Britain that made them feel proud? There was a silence. Then one man leant forward and said: “The past.” The rest of the group nodded in agreement.

The past they yearn for is imaginary, of course – a rose-tinted view of the 1950s. One suspects that if most UKIP voters were plonked down in the real 1950s, they would soon baulk at the thick smog, Teddy Boys and lack of choice in the shops – that is, if they weren’t already dead because of the retarded state of medical science.

Admittedly, they would not be as angry as they are with the Britain of today. Like Thatcher, they hate everyone who isn’t like them. And you cannot call yourself a patriot if you hold most of your fellow countrymen in contempt.

But there’s another irony about UKIP. The profound sense of loss that elderly UKIP voters feel is rooted in the erosion of society, an increasing sense of insecurity and a decline in traditional values. Those destructive trends are the result of Thatcher’s economistic values, where nothing matters anymore apart from the bottom line.

What has UKIP to say about this destruction? Far from wanting to rebuild social cohesion, UKIP supports precisely the sort of extreme laissez-faire policies that destroyed so much of the traditional Britain its elderly supporters mourn. It is doubtful that many UKIP supporters’ sense of security would be enhanced if UKIP stripped them of the welfare state, employment protection or health and safety regulations, and gave big business even more freedom to let rip.

Daniel Trilling made a similar observation in the New Statesman. Although UKIP appeals to “a more profound feeling of disenfranchisement”, its policies would make that problem worse:

The irony is that the kind of “independence” Ukip offers – opening Britain further still to the ravages of market forces – would intensify the process. Far from being anti-establishment, Ukip’s leaders want the same as the elite they condemn, only more so.

Is it patriotic to want a Britain organised for the benefit of a wealthy few and where everyone else is left to sink or swim? So long as Nigel Farage can keep the level of debate closer to the gut than the brain, it is a question he will not have to answer.

Stop worrying about UKIP and learn to love Liberalism

So Nigel Farage thinks last Thursday’s local elections are a “game changer”? As any Liberal Democrat with a rueful memory of ‘liberal revivals’ could remind him, one swallow doesn’t make a summer.

To capture around 25% of the vote from a standing start is very good going. But to put that in perspective, the turnout, as usual in local elections, was only about 25 to 30%. 25% of that is only about 7% of the whole electorate. The fact that 7% hate foreigners, gays, wind farms and everything else that’s happened since 1963 is neither remarkable nor a threat – the only surprise is that this percentage isn’t higher.

What UKIP did well was to give that 7% a reason to vote. In marketing parlance, UKIP has a clear USP (described by Stephen Tall on Liberal Democrat Voice as “stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off-pull-up-the-drawbridge-nothing-against-them-personally-but-we’re-full-and-another-thing-health-and-safety-some-of-my-best-friends-are–all-the-parties-are-the-same-I’d-emigrate-if-I-could”). This USP may be just a mishmash of bar-room prejudices but it chimes with the gut feelings of a substantial minority of voters. Furthermore, such voters were not deterred by the Tory-inspired media hatchet job on UKIP candidates – if anything, the disapproval of the political establishment would have spurred them on.

But UKIP has done more than simply provide an outlet for Daily Express readers’ prejudices. Nigel Farage is surely onto something when he says:

“People have had enough of the three main parties, who increasingly resemble each other. The differences between them are very narrow and they don’t even speak the same language that ordinary folk out there, who are struggling with housing and jobs, speak.”

Voters have been offered little real choice since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘end of history’, which cemented a neoliberal consensus (TINA). The replacement of ideological conflict by managerialism paved the way for the rise of the identikit professional politician and the adoption by such politicians of triangulation. And these politicians speak in an abnormal language of party mantras and robotic slogans.

In contrast, UKIP is not afraid to use plain language, challenge the consensus or stand up for what it believes in. The question for Liberal Democrats is why they don’t display a similar level of assertiveness and pride in their values, which would enthuse and mobilise their own base. The answer is that their leader Nick Clegg firmly believes in the old consensus, as his latest appeal to the ‘centre ground’ demonstrates. This is all of a piece with his increasingly technocratic and managerialist approach, his insistence that he is above ideology and ‘pragmatic’, and the repeated implication that his views are somehow obvious or inevitable and therefore beyond argument.

This is a far cry from the 2010 general election campaign, when Clegg openly criticised the fundamental failings of the political system and promised not just change but that the Liberal Democrats would be that change. In a complete reversal, he now rejects that approach as nothing more than being a ‘party of protest’ and therefore part of a history that must be jettisoned. Instead, he presents the act of assimilation with the old establishment consensus as a sign of political maturity.

Clegg’s ‘centre ground’ strategy could not be more wrong. As Tory MP Bernard Jenkin recently pointed out:

Politicians often talk about “the centre ground” of British politics, as though there is some big bell curve of voters in the middle where we have to be in order to get elected. The three main parties are crowded there in the facile belief that being anti-immigration, anti-EU, pro-business, tax cuts and tough on crime is “right wing”; while more spending, concern about the poor, pro-EU, pro-human rights and CND is “left wing”, and therefore sensible moderate people weigh up these “extremes” and finish up somewhere in between. And, of course, most people are sensible.

The Clinton/Blair people called it “triangulation”. The architects of Conservative modernisation copied it and made David Cameron in this respect the “heir to Blair”, but the result is that all the parties are now losing to “extremes”. Eastleigh showed there is no such thing as the centre ground – a great pile of voters in the middle waiting to be harvested by politicians’ cynical positioning. Nor is there a magic bullet labelled “immigration” or “Europe” either.

Public opinion is both diverse and changeable – it is neither clustered round a settled consensus nor immutable. Hence converging on an illusory ‘centre ground’ does not increase the Liberal Democrats’ appeal but makes them seem indistinguishable from the other mainstream parties. Clegg’s claim to be more centrist than the other centrists is not a USP but merely competing in the blandness stakes. Worse than that, the dominant consensus of the past thirty years has been fatally damaged by the financial crisis and is due for replacement. By clinging to that sinking ship, Clegg risks taking his party down to the bottom with all hands.

The alternative is not to realign with UKIP. As Mark Pack’s bar chart demonstrates, of the three mainstream parties in the local elections, the Liberal Democrats suffered least at the hands of UKIP. The Liberal Democrats have no tactical need to trim on issues like Europe or immigration (even if to do so were morally acceptable, which it isn’t).

There is only one way forward for the Liberal Democrats, and that is to stop banging on about the ‘centre ground’, stop apologising for being liberal, stop trimming and, instead, come out, loud and proud, for enlightened, cosmopolitan and tolerant values. Only then can the party build its base and provide supporters with a compelling reason to get off their arses and vote with the same enthusiasm that UKIP supporters did last Thursday.


Postscript (1): Max Dunbar’s blog post about UKIP is well worth reading (with thanks to Jonathan Calder).

Postscript (2): See Anthony Wells’s analysis of UKIP at UK Polling Report.

Postscript (3): See Chris Dillow’s blog post, which explains why UKIP is not the anti-establishment force it purports to be.

Postscript (4): See A Very Public Sociologist (writing just after the Eastleigh by-election), in particular the quotation from Lord Ashcroft’s analysis of UKIP voters. They are driven by outlook rather than policies.

No one ‘won’ the local elections

I spent yesterday doing journalistic coverage of the county council election results and it was hard to say that anyone ‘won’.

It is true that UKIP got its surge to about 25% of the vote, but for any liberal to think this must herald some long-term change in politics may be premature. We’ve all seen ‘liberal revivals’ as protests at someone else’s mid-term that hauled in many more seats than UKIP now has, and which duly vanished a few years later.

In terms of local council seats, UKIP is now more or less level-pegging with the Green Party, but its gains are very patchy. The novelty is that UKIP’s surge has come in one go.

Since UKIP has a policy of ‘no whipping’ in its own council groups, it is hard to see how anyone will be able to do a deal with it on a hung council, with the result that there will probably be a lot of minority Tory administrations when the dust settles.

And since UKIP has suddenly elected all manner of odd people who never expected to win (not a situation exactly unknown to Liberal Democrats), it seems reasonable to expect plenty of splits and defections, especially from a party whose two main policy areas – Europe and immigration – are not under the influence of county councils.

Labour should have done much better. It was remarkable enough that it lost Lancashire and Staffordshire in 2009 – even more so that it failed to win back either this time and only scraped home against the eccentric incumbent in the mayoral election in Doncaster. Labour can enjoy its gains but surely a party expecting to win a general election should be doing better?

As for the Liberal Democrats, it was another bad set of elections, though not a massacre. A trend is now becoming clear that the party – shorn of its old protest vote – is falling back on its core vote. And since it has persistently failed to cultivate a national core vote, this turns out to be found only in the parliamentary seats it holds or recently held, or those it might plausibly win. The party might fare a lot better in terms of seats in 2015 than some expect, but it is on its way to ceasing to be a national party.

The Tories also had a bad night without being massacred, but for them it is hard to see a way ahead – trim to the right to win back UKIP voters and lose others from the centre; or continue, at least in their own terms, to ‘modernise’ and gamble that centrists will stay while UKIP voters will come back when forced to choose a government. The Tory right will probably force the former course on their party, with the result that it suddenly looks more vulnerable and its leaders may regret their opposition to AV.

And finally, let’s hear it for the country’s most curiously-named party. Sadly, the Idle Toad Party is no more, banished from Lancashire County Council by a Tory.

How far right must you go to be rejected by UKIP?

It comes as no surprise to discover that several UKIP candidates in the local elections hold some rather unpleasant opinions.

According to today’s Daily Telegraph, some of them have such extreme views that even UKIP has baulked. Scrutinising various candidates’ statements, however, it is hard to tell where UKIP draws the line.

The following views appear to be acceptable for a UKIP candidate to hold:

• Mick Philpott, who killed six of his children in a house fire, should have faced “chemical castration” to stop him claiming benefits for more than two children. Philpott should be “hung or burned at the stake”.
• Objecting to police charges against “three blokes [who] kill a pedo”, adding “if they can’t do it we will”.
• Endorsing the far-Right English Defence League.
• ‘Liking’ Facebook groups with names such as “No more mosques in Britain”, “Women deserve as much respect as men … LOL joke” and “Racism? No mate it’s just ethnic banter”.
• Referring to a risk of tuberculosis after barriers to Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants are lifted next year: “I would suggest not going to London after January 2014 unless you absolutely have to and if you do, adopt the Japanese practice of wearing a face mask.”

These views, on the other hand, are sufficiently unacceptable to UKIP that you will be withdrawn as a candidate:

• Blaming Jewish people for the Holocaust.
• Being a former member of the British National Party.

Of course, it is perfectly possible that there is no morally consistent dividing line because UKIP is an incoherent shambles. If there is a clear threshold, it is probably not a moral one but a cynical calculation about what you can get away with.

Ex-UKIP MEP admits UKIP’s climate policy is “very amateurish”

An exclusive story from EurActiv:

An ex-UK Independence Party (UKIP) MEP says that the party’s climate change scepticism was callow and so eccentric that party press officers often had to contradict the views of its climate spokesman, Lord Monckton.

“The policy was very rudimentary and their [climate change] position was very amateurish,” said Marta Andreasen, who left UKIP to join the Conservatives in February.

“Climate change is not a reality for UKIP,” she added.

The more you hear about UKIP, the more you realise what a shambles it is. So the question is why it has become so popular. The grumpy old right-wing Daily Express-reading vote can account for only part of it.

The main reason UKIP can thrive is that the three mainstream parties are all converging on an illusory ‘centre ground’ (as discussed previously here, here and here), with a similar non-ideological and managerialist approach, and so appear indistinguishable to voters. The Liberal Democrats, in losing the ‘protest vote’, seem to have forgotten why so many voters were disillusioned with the political system and protested in the first place.

South Shields is not Eastleigh

The resignation of David Miliband as an MP means there will be a by-election in his South Shields constituency. But this will not be another famous Liberal Democrat victory, more a case of damage limitation.

Liberator has looked up the South Shields result in the 2010 general election so you don’t have to:

52.0% Labour
21.6% Conservative
14.2% Liberal Democrat
6.5% BNP
2.1% Green
3.6% Others

Labour majority 11,109
Turnout 57.7%

In short, it is a safe Labour seat and Labour will hold it. A Labour hold will not be an achievement. A Labour hold will not be news. There will be more interest in the performance of the other parties.

Liberal Democrat prospects are not good. The party’s vote in 2010 had fallen by 5% since the previous general election in 2005 and, on present form, may fall still further, with the risk of a lost deposit. There is no local government base and not a single Liberal Democrat councillor in the constituency; South Shields is in the Labour-dominated metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, which has 48 Labour councillors, 1 Conservative, 1 UKIP and 4 independents. The by-election will almost certainly be held on the same day as the local elections on 2nd May. For all these reasons, the Liberal Democrat campaign will not attract thousands of volunteers as in Eastleigh; instead, the party is more likely to play the whole thing down as it did in Barnsley Central and Rotherham.

The more observant among you may have noticed there was no UKIP candidate in 2010. That won’t be the case in this by-election. Indeed, the bookies reckon UKIP will come second, as it did in Eastleigh. This is not so much because of Eastleigh but because, once Tory voters realise the Tories have no hope of winning, they will feel safe in switching to UKIP as a protest vote.

The perception that a Labour victory is certain will, of course, have another consequence. The turnout will be abysmal.

That UKIP manifesto in full

Ask anyone to name UKIP’s policies and they would probably struggle to produce more than this:

1. Britain should leave the European Union
2. Er...
3. ...That’s it.

But UKIP does have other policies, and the Independent on Sunday has published a special report (‘What voters should know about Ukip’), which provides some long overdue scrutiny. One overriding theme emerges:

If Ukip had a name that truly reflected its priorities, it might be called the UK Immigrationphobe Party. Ostensibly the anti-EU party, an obsession with immigration and exit from Europe as a means to close Britain’s doors is its prevailing motive. The word immigration runs through its policy statements like red lettering in seaside rock, and its proposed five-year ban on entries to the UK is the message it rams home on every doorstep.

But there is more to UKIP than xenophobia. Its policies are a saloon-bar bore’s wet dream; a catalogue of the sort of prejudices you would expect from a bunch of cantankerous old gits:

[UKIP] is deeply sceptical of global warming, wants to abolish inheritance tax, employers’ National Insurance contributions, aims to partially reverse the recent hunting and smoking bans, and would increase defence spending by some 40 per cent. It is, in thought if not yet in personnel, the extreme right-wing of the Conservative Party in exile; a party run in the main by self-made businessmen with an agenda to match. And it has a record of defections, internecine squabbles and acrimony, plus scandals that have led two of its former MEPs to jail.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant, so the most effective way to deal with UKIP is to expose it to scrutiny. There is a risk that publicising UKIP’s wackier and uncosted proposals may inadvertently rally more cantankerous old gits to its cause. That is a risk we can cope with.

So if you hear any Liberal Democrat ‘strategists’ argue that, to deal with the rise of UKIP, we must trim to the right, have them taken outside and shot.

“The biggest waste of money in the EU”

“You know what I think is the biggest waste of money in the European Union of today? That’s the salary we all pay to Mr Farage.”

ALDE leader Guy Verhofstadt on splendid form in the European Parliament, taking apart the claims of UKIP leader Nigel Farage:

No excuse for Euro-defeatism

A startling graph published by PoliticalBetting.com shows that public opinion on Europe is not where most politicians imagine it to be.

Voting intentions in a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU are changing. Successive opinion polls show that the proportion of people who would vote to stay is increasing, while the proportion who would vote to leave is decreasing.

That’s not all. A poll on voting intentions in the next European parliamentary elections shows that support for UKIP has fallen to fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats. And this is a poll by YouGov, which usually gives the lowest ratings for the Liberal Democrats.

We need to be cautious and see whether these trends continue. In any event, there is no cause for complacency – a referendum and the European elections still require a campaign. The point is that – for all the bullying by the eurosceptic press and for all the cowardice of pro-Europeans – euroscepticism is not as popular as we are led to believe.

And that means there is no excuse for the Liberal Democrats to run another defeatist European election campaign in 2014, as they did in 2004 and 2009. Both those campaigns were run on the assumption that it was more important to mollify Eurosceptic opinion than to enthuse the party’s more cosmopolitan base. Both campaigns were a failure, securing fourth place behind UKIP.

Say what you like about UKIP, but at least it campaigns for what it believes in. The Liberal Democrats should do the same – if they don’t, pro-European voters have nowhere else to turn.

Oh no, not them again

If you thought that Neil and Christine Hamilton had left politics for good, think again.

Michael Crick reports that both are likely to become UKIP MEPs in 2014.

Neil Hamilton’s political career and subsequent disgrace in the cash-for-questions affair are now largely forgotten. He and especially Christine are much better known as regulars on the TV chat show/game show/reality show circuit.

But is politics to entertainment then back to politics a smart move? The only precedent for this career trajectory is not a happy one. Robert Kilroy-Silk moved from being a Labour MP to a daytime TV host to a UKIP MEP. He then fell out with UKIP (as UKIP MEPs so often do) and formed his own party (Veritas), which he also fell out with before disappearing into obscurity.