No Right Turn: UKIP gives the PM a headache.
What started as a small cross-party organization
morphed initially in to a single-issue political party, then – more worryingly
for Prime Minister David Cameron – into the default protest vote party and a
far more wide-ranging quasi-Conservative right wing group. But in every General
Election since 1992, both incarnations of the organization have won precisely
nothing. So why is everyone talking about UKIP?
The Anti-Federalist
League
It’s 1991, Prime
Minister John Major is battling to ratify the Maastricht Treaty, which will
extend the powers of the European Commission and effectively pave the way for
the European Union and a single currency. Opinion polls suggest there is little
public support for the treaty and the government will not allow the British
people a say on the issue. All three main parties have pledged to support the
ratification, but some MPs are against it. Vehemently against it.
At one point, the
number of Conservative MPs defying their party and their Prime Minister was
larger than the government’s majority. Put simply, this anti-Europe movement
and the Conservative ‘Maastricht Rebels’ came awfully close to bringing down
the Government on more than one occasion.
Planning to restore
the democratic process and offer the people a vote on Europe, this movement,
now dubbed the Anti-Federalist League, tried – and failed – to win a handful of
seats in the 1992 General Election.
Despite failing to
make an impact at the election, the whole affair caused chaotic scenes in the
House of Commons throughout 1992 and wreaked havoc on Major’s government. This
meltdown of the Conservative party is largely seen as one of the reasons for
their tumble into oblivion in the decade after 1997.
If this Conservative
disarray is a simple fever, fixed by David Cameron’s ointment of confidence and
slick charm and the rebranding and rebuilding of the party firmly in the centre
ground of British politics; what the Maastricht Rebels and the AFL have
unleashed is far more dangerous to the Conservative party – they have given
rise to a more extreme right wing group that, twenty years later, could quite
possibly begin eating away at the Tory’s historical base.
UKIP:
A chat show host and a rightful king
After its founding as
a full-blown political party from the ashes of the AFL in 1993, UKIP’s single
raison d’etre was withdrawal from the European Union. The party’s early years
offered few highlights in terms of election results, with the exception of the
1999 European Parliament elections where the party won 3 seats and 7% of the
vote.
Despite this
achievement, the end of the millennium proved a turbulent time for the party as
ordinary party members forced the resignation of party leader Michael Holmes
and the party’s entire National Executive Committee having grown tired of their
infighting and on-going power struggle.
Unsurprisingly, the
party headed in to the 2001 UK General Election with little hope of any
victories, and were rewarded accordingly with 1.5% of the vote and no
representation in Westminster, the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly.
In 2004 a somewhat
stabilized party continued its trend of solid showings in European
Parliamentary elections by winning over 16% of the vote – more than double its
previous best – and claimed 12 MEPs as a result. It failed, however, to sustain
this momentum heading in to the 2005 UK General Election, winning an improved
but hugely mediocre 2.3% of the vote - again too few votes to take any seats in
Westminster.
Some argue the party’s
dwindling momentum in 2005 stemmed from former Labour MP and chat show host
Robert Kilroy-Silk’s unofficial coronation as a de facto face of the party.
Kilroy-Silk himself had refused to deny speculation that he would mount a
leadership challenge to Roger Knapman and it has been suggested that the
resulting infighting destabilized the party much as the Holmes/NEC
power-struggle had done less than 5 years earlier. Others suggest the increased
awareness garnered by having a nationally recognizable face should have helped
the party to broaden its support further.
 |
| The Face of UKIP - Robert Kilroy-Silk |
Whatever the impact
of the Knapman/Kilroy-Silk furore, it is fair to say that the party remained
too much of a single issue one trick pony to be considered a viable domestic
political alternative even in the context of an unpopular Labour government facing
the monumental fallout from the Iraq war and a weak, Michael Howard led
Conservative opposition.
The party clearly
needed to change, and for its next leader it turned to a man rooted in
Maastricht and UKIP history. A man who knew that in order to make real progress
domestically, the party had to ditch the single issue perception. Nigel Farage
had been there in the early 1990s - in fact he was an instigator of UKIP -
deserting the Conservative party when John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty. His
vision has been for UKIP to replace the Liberal Democrats as the third party of
British politics and upon his election in 2006 he commissioned a full policy
review with a view to broadening the appeal of the party whilst standing for
broadly conservative views.
 |
| A rightful King - Nigel Farage |
Farage resigned as
party leader for a little over a year in readiness for his ill-fated challenge
to John Bercow’s Buckingham constituency seat in the 2010 General Election
(ill-fated in more than one sense – he both lost resoundingly and was involved
in a serious aircraft crash on polling day). But returned to win the UKIP leadership
election in late 2010, beating his nearest rival by almost 40%. UKIP’s king was
back.
Single
issue or Real Right Wing?
UKIP could argue
(indeed they already do) that despite poor showings in General Elections (in
its early years, a single issue party based on ‘Europe’ was always going to
perform better in European Parliamentary elections) they are now the third
party, though how much of that is down to the Liberal Democrats all but
renouncing the title upon forming a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010
would be a subject of further debate.
Regardless, UKIP’s
website claims the party is the ‘only one now offering a radical alternative’
to the current political landscape and it is fair to say that the party is
evermore shedding its ‘single issue’ label.
The idea of building the
perception of UKIP being the real protest vote party is a brilliant strategy
that wouldn’t work for any other party. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the
Conservative Party are too tainted by recent attempts to govern, too attached
to current problems. UKIP is different, it is a little more extreme – David
Cameron will be worried that UKIP is just radical enough for disenfranchised
people to vote for. Radical enough to stop him winning in 2015.
This is not radicalism
in the BNP sense of the word (although UKIP’s Google description does reassure
people they are a ‘non-racist party’). This is radicalism in a different way.
The same kind of right wing radicalism that in fairly recent history would not
have looked out of place in the Conservative party. This brand of radicalism
causes a real headache for the incumbent Prime Minister
and his distinctly centre ground Government.
Cameron’s
Conservative Government may be happy
to sit in this centre ground of British politics, but the Conservative Party is a whole lot less comfortable
with being told to sit there, and given Cameron’s ability (or lack thereof) to
control his back benchers this could be a recipe for trouble. UKIP was given
life by rebel MPs unhappy with John Major’s Conservative Government. It has
previous when it comes to causing chaos in the Commons and now that it has the
appearance of a cohesive Right Wing alternative it isn’t too much of a stretch
to imagine history repeating itself. One problem for David Cameron would be
UKIP winning over its target voters, ie: diluting the vote of the political
right and stealing historically Conservative voters – Labour and the Liberal
Democrats would remain largely untouched. Worse, the nightmare scenario is UKIP
stealing a handful of the PM’s back benchers and hoarding enough votes to play
kingmakers in a 2015 coalition.
Cameron’s plan for
the Conservative party after a mid-90s meltdown and a decade in the wilderness
had to include a move to the centre, and he has rubbished the idea of picking
his Government up, carrying it three steps to the right and plonking it back
down again either in reaction to UKIP or to mollify his own back benches. His resilience
would appear to be a logical move – it is widely suggested that the kind of
right wing politics craved by the right of his party will not allow Cameron to
keep the keys to Number 10 in two years’ time. But this refusal to move - by
its very nature - will antagonize the right wing of the party and the question
remains: If John Major unwittingly created Anti-Federalist League ‘The Insurgency’
in 1992, will Cameron alienating the right wing of his party in 2013 unleash
UKIP ‘The Unstoppable Beast’? And if this is the case, how does the Prime
Minister navigate a route to victory in 2015?
FURTHER READING: 17th March 2013
Samuel Bergmanski's take on UKIP's immigration policy
Dr. Shantanu Panigrahi's investigation into the nationalism of UKIP
FURTHER READING: 17th March 2013
Samuel Bergmanski's take on UKIP's immigration policy
Dr. Shantanu Panigrahi's investigation into the nationalism of UKIP
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