The UK Independence Party has achieved a decisive political breakthrough in Britain - although it has derisory levels of support in Scotland. It is now widely predicted that the next parliament will have at least 20 MPs. Many believe this will cause a split in the Conservative Party.
KIP, a right-wing, authoritarian bourgeois party, has succeeded where its fascist predecessors like the British National Party (BNP) and the 'storm in the streets' English Defence League (EDL) failed. The trick was to present thinly-disguised racism in respectable garb, which the fascist organisations could never do, given the role of the Second World War and Nazism in the country's collective memory. Such a spectacular turnaround in the political order represents the coming together of a number of social and political processes, including the crisis of the traditional centre parties, Labour and the Conservatives, the likely terminal decline of the Liberal Democrats, and deep changes wrought in Britain's social order by decades of neoliberalism which intersect with the changing structure of the working class and ethnic profile of the country. It is impossible to explain UKIP without referring to major sociological changes that underpin the decline of traditional working class, 'social democratic' consciousness. In the latter part of 2014, UKIP had its first two MPs elected, both defectors from the Conservative Party, who resigned their parliamentary seats and stood again for UKIP Both were re-elected with huge majorities in constituencies on Britain's south east coast reflecting some deep social changes - the destruction of traditional jobs and a white working class mired in long-term poverty - upon which UKIP depends for a significant proportion of its votes. By any standards UKIP's forward surge represents an extraordinary turnaround, coming as it does after the May 2014 European elections in which UKIP won 27.5 percent of the vote, and the local municipal elections in England the same month where they won 163 seats (up 161), with about 17 percent of the national vote. UKIP leader Nigel Farage says his party could hold the balance of power in the next parliament. This is not mere bluster - although the prospect of tactical voting by anti-UKIP electors makes the exact number of UKIP MPs that will be elected hard to assess. But the stakes are bigger than just the number of seats UKIP gets. There are deep divisions inside the Conservative Party and revolt on the Tory right is at near insurrectionary levels. Dozens of Tory MPs are apparently ready to 'jump ship after the May and perhaps form a new party with UKIP. Many see a split in the Tory party as inevitable, something that would seal the fate of Prime Minister David Cameron, and start to re-cast the whole of the British political terrain. Coming simultaneously with the 45% vote for independence in the September 2014 Scottish referendum - a vote with a significant left wing character in the urban centres - the prospects for the two main parties are being rewritten. What is being played out is the result of 30 years of neoliberalism, Conservative Party 'Thatcherism' followed by Labour Party 'Blairism', that has sapped support from both Tories and Labour, putting the two-party system in question. Why now? Why has this right wing surge happened now? Millions of voters are disillusioned and cynical (to put it mildly) about the main Westminster parties. This is especially the case seven years after the 2008 financial crash that deepened poverty among millions of working class people and after the parliamentary expenses scandal that
15 Britain peaked in 2009. Mass cynicism with mainstream politicians has only been confirmed by them awarding themselves a 12% pay increase while most people only got 1% or 2% last year - or nothing. Since 2008, and especially since the 2010 general election, there has been a conscious attempt to pay down the government financial deficit by driving sections of the working class into permanent poverty of a type not seen since the 1930s. There have been sharp reductions in welfare payments; a rise in 'zero hours' work contracts; a vicious 'sanctions' regime against the unemployed forcing them to accept pitifully paid part time work, or work for no wages but just unemployment benefit. Claimants are sanctioned and thrown off benefits for a host of "misdemeanors" including for example turning up half an hour late for an interview at a job centre. There has also been a huge rise in the price of houses and of rents, taking 50% of the income of millions of workers, especially in London. This combines with wage freezes and continued hikes in utility bills to force millions into utter poverty. Forty per cent of the employed workforce is reckoned to be one electricity or gas bill away from financia ruin. All this has led to a sharp increase in homelessness and people reliant on food banks The Labour Party, has shown itself utterly incapable of presenting an attractive alternative which promises anything very significant to working class people and cannot provide a narrative that explains the economic crisis and points a way out. But why exactly has Labour's abject failure benefited UKIP in such a spectacular way? Three factors are important: 1) The social changes as a result of neoliberalism and austerity. 2) The sharp turn in UKIP's policies and target audience in 2010-11. 3) The turmoil inside the Conservative Party. I will deal with each in turn. Since the Thatcherite era in the 1980s there has been a prolonged collapse of 'traditional' manufacturing industries, including mining, with very uneven geo graphical effects. In the north of England, Scotland and the Midlands there are whole towns that have never recovered from the economic collapse of the early-mid 1980s. Long-term unemployment has only partially been alleviated by part-time and 'zero hours' jobs in call centres and warehouses. Young people have moved away, but many middle aged and older men haven't worked for years. In these white working class communities in urban centres, resentment against the political class and a more
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16 UKIP and the politics of ultra-Thatcherism nebulous 'middle class, London-based elite' In the 2010/11 period UKIP carried out a major renovation of its tactics to target the poor white working class, and to try to consolidate a dual base - among the middle class Conservatives in the south of England and poorer sections of the working class. The party was at first built around opposition to British membership of the European Union and mainly attracted dissident, middle-class, Conservatives. The UKIP leadership spotted a potential opening as a consequence of the strong vote in some white working class areas in the European elections of 2009. To gather that vote they decided to downplay the European issue and put immigration to the forefront. In doing so they were able to 'steal' the small but significant base being built up in the European elections and municipal elections by the fascist British National Party (BNP), which elected 33 local councilors in the 2006 municipal elections and two MEPs in the 2009 European elections. Shocking though the vote for the BNP was, it was always hamstrung by the fact that the least hint of fascism is political death in Britain. Once UKIP was obviously becoming a major player in British politics, the BNP vote mainly switched to UKIP. UKIP could not have made the advances it has without disaffection inside the parliamentary Conservative Party itself. UKIP's breakthrough is part of a wider process in British politics, and not just down to the actions of Farage and UKIP although they are the cutting edge of this process. As a realistic challenger for Westminster seats, with even the possibility of holding the balance of power at the 2015 election, UKIP is the culmination of a prolonged campaign waged by the Tory right-wing, key sections of the media like the Mail and the Telegraph, former Tories in smaller right-wing parties and right-wing TV commentators to make another decisive shift in British politics to the right. Not content with the anti-working class reforms of the Thatcher-era, the ultraThatcherites want to dump Cameron and the coalition with the Liberal Democrats, deepen the counter-revolution of the Thatcher years and even further weaken the forces of the labour movement and social progress, further dismantling the welfare state and victimising immigrants. So in reality the decisive move to force the Conservatives even further to the right has come in the form of a party outside the mainstream, three party system. But UKIP pulling off this as the vanguard of the whole of the hard right in British politics has been made possible by a significant shift in the party's profile and politics in the last five UKIP is the vanguard of the hard right movement for a further deepening of the ultra-Thatcherite project, one that makes a more definitive break with the post-war settlement, wrecking the welfare state as well as the mixed economy that has already gone. A government that imposed this vision would usher in a highly authoritarian Britain, with many more people in prison, nationalism and xenophobia at rampant levels, Britain probably out of the EU, the NHS and social services slashed to ribbons, trade unions being further crushed and civil liberties and human rights in the This type of social order is not - in the main - in the objective interests of big business or the capitalist class as a whole. In fact the profits crisis of Tesco - Britain's largest supermarket chain - shows that prolonged deflationary austerity is not in the interests of significant sections of the bourgeoisie, although ironically companies like Tesco that operate on the basis of minimum wage labour are helping to sustain the deflation and the reduction of working class income that is wrecking their business. It is not in the interests of British manufacturing or finance capital to be outside the EU. But the issue of Europe is central for the Tory ultras because British nationalism and British exceptionalism are key to its ideology. This is a view of Britain as exceptionally cultured, democratic, enlightened, etc - and definitely a world leader - that is based on the long history of the British Empire, something that of course today does not exist. But politics is not a game in which the interests of the capitalist class are simply ranged against those of the working class. Rather politics is traversed by irrational and self-contradictory elements. Right wing Tory irrationalism stretches right into the heart of the cabinet and into the heart of the Conservative Party more generally. How did this right-wing trend in the Conservative party start? There have always been hard right, extreme reactionary trends in the Tory party, and Margaret Thatcher mobilised them superbly. The new Tory parliamentary levy from the 2005 and 2010 elections are the sons and daughters of Thatcher, steeled in neoliberalism and the nationalistic patriotism that is the ideological cornerstone of their party, utterly hostile to the EU and especially the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Convention. The one nation Toryism of Harold MacMillan and Rab Butler in the 1950s, and even Edward Heath in the 1970s, has been buried by successive waves of Thatcherism and now ultra-ThatchThere are however significant strains even inside the hardest of the hard right Tory neoliberals. This is evident in the new levy of ultra-Thatcherites who came into the Commons in 2010 who unlike UKIP and the traditional Tory right, are socially liberal. Five of them, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss, have published a book Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity, which is dripping with vicious right-wing class hatred and a demand to finally end the post-war political settlement which gave workers a welfare state and employment rights. This kind of vehement class hatred permeates the Tory right and is grist to the mill of UKIP. The objective role of UKIP at this stage is to push the whole political discourse to the right. At a later stage -maybe - UKIP can link up with the Tory right, either by forming a new party together with Tory right wingers, or by building its own significant parliamentary representation in the hope of the government being formed by coalition with the Tories, adopting much of UKIP's programme. However there remain contradictions in the hard right, because the Britannia Unchained team and those who think like them will go along with the Eurosceptic right in vicious class warfare, but are much less keen on the racist and homophobic dimension of much of the Tory right and of course UKIP's aging supporters. A fake people's crusade In the run-up to the 2014 European elections, UKIP leader Nigel Farage claimed to be leading a 'people's crusade' against the 'establishment, and over immigration was prepared to attack 'big business'. But this is a fake demagogic 'crusade'. In order to deepen and consolidate his party's base outside its long-term petty bourgeois base into sections of the working class itself, it has required some nifty political footwork, disguising the rightwing, pro-business agenda of the party. Like the US Tea Party movement, the trick is to get tens of thousands of working class and middle class people to campaign for a series of policies that are against their interests. Like lots of right wing populist parties UKIP's policies can be a moveable
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2 IMMIGRATION one of the 70+ Scottish MPs in the British parliament is a Conservative - an extraordinary result for the main governing party. The main Scottish conurbation - the Strathclyde region around Glasgow - has been traditionally radical since the days of Red Clydeside' before and after the First World War. For decades it returned mainly Labour MPs with huge majorities. Now all that has changed with the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), accelerated by Scottish hostility to the right-wing leadership of the Labour Party in Britain. In the 'devolved' Scottish parliament, the majority party is the SNP and the first minister is the leader of the SNP until recently Alex Salmond but now Nicola Sturgeon. Labour leads the opposition. There is simply no room and no ideological sympathy for UKIP in Scotland, largely seen as an 'English' party with ultra-Thatcherite views. The party that represents revolt against the establishment in Westminster, and to a limited extent a defence of the At the 2010 British general election Labour
17 *Britain won more than 40 of the 70 seats elected in Scotland. Now opinion polls predict a Labour bloodbath at the May 2015 election, with perhaps only three Labour MPs being elected. The continued failure of Labour to present any coherent and radical alternative to Conservative-Lib Dem austerity is part of the reason for this, but the final blow to Scottish Labour was the October 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. Given the perceived unpopularity of the Conservatives in Scotland, the Tory leaders hardly appeared during the campaign, and it was left to Labour to be the main voice of the 'no' campaign, in the form of the former Labour finance minister Alistair Darling and former prime minister Gordon Brown. Given the vagaries of the British 'first past the post' election system, the SNP could end up with more MPs in the British parliament than UKIP In any case the resignation of the SNP leader Alex Salmond and his hand-over to his deputy Nicola Sturgeon is widely seen as preparation for him leading a substantially strengthened SNP contingent in the Scottish parliament.
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18 UKIP and the politics of ultra-Thatcherism It remains to be seen what effect Scottish radicalism has on English politics In Revolt on the Right by Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin show the gender and ethnic distribution of support for the different parties. UKIP supporters were the most heavily male, with 57% to 43%. The Greens were the most heavily female, with 56% female as opposed to 44% male. All other parties had a slight majority of their supporters being female. Support for UKIP among non-white people was not suprisingly UKIP has by far the oldest group of supporters, the highest proportion of manual workers, the least educated cohort. of supporters and the most male group of supporters. By contrast the Greens and the Lib Dems had the most educated and the highest proportion of younger supporters. These figures are no cause for smug contempt from political opponents of UKIP What they show is that a section of the white manual working class that used to vote Labour now supports UKIP. Terrain that was once occupied by the social democratic left is now occupied by the racist reactionary right. This is a major defeat for all forces fighting for social progress and against racism. Terrain that is lost in this way is very difficult to win back. What Farage has succeeded in doing has some very unfortunate historical precedents. He and the group round him have maintained their base in the reactionary petty bourgeoisie while at the same time extending it into sections of the poorest and "left behind' working class. UKIP has succeeded in focusing hostility against 'the political establishment', university-educated professionals, and sometimes even big business' - but not of course against austerity or capitalism as such. But UKIP must expand its social base into younger sections of the population or it will simply die out over time. Having a major impact at this general election will be crucial to that. Role of the media Given that the rise of UKIP is universally seen as part of the crisis of the centre of British politics, why does the radicalisation goes mainly to the right and not the left? There are several related factors. The record and role of Labour Party, the ideological collapse of British social democracy, is part of the answer. A connected part of the same process is the decline in the organisational weight and political clout of the unions, hobbled from taking effective action by the anti-union laws and in the main politically tailing the Labour Party leadership. Miliband can get away with saying he will not support strikes or give the unions any promises about what Labour would do in office, because most trade union leaders have no political vision outside the framework of the Miliband leadership itself. The decline of the organised labour movement of course a major factor, but the role of television and the newspapers in Britain is often underestimated or even dismissed by socialists. The press is overwhelmingly right wing, and generally rabidly so. The Daily Express, owned by former porn mogul Paul Desmond, is viciously racist and attacks Cameron from the right. Desmond has himself donated £300,000 to UKIP's election fighting fund. The two most widely read papers, The Sun and Daily Mail, are both right-wing Tory papers that have given acres of publicity to Nigel Farage and UKIP Only the Daily Mirror of the 'tabloids backs Labour and Miliband. Of the serious 'broadsheets, the Times is, like the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch and backs the Tories, and the huge circulation Daily Telegraph is virtually the house journal of the Conservative right-wing. Only the left-liberal Guardian stands out against this UKIP has received millions of pounds worth of free publicity from this right-wing press. By contrast there is in practice a near-total ban on publicising activities of the left, the labour movement, the Greens and the peace movement - however large and significant those activities are. The columnists of the Daily Mail and Express are the functional equivalent of the United States radio and television 'shock jocks', who rant extraordinarily violent Of course the main source of news is television. The BBC was savagely attacked by the Blair government for its coverage of the 2003 Irag war and has frequently been attacked by Conservatives for alleged left-wing bias - and crucially has been threatened with the withdrawal of its license fee and role as public service broadcaster. Nowadays BBC news coverage sticks within the framework of the main political parties. The same is true of IT, with the exception of the Channel 4 news. Sky TV news is basically Conservative news. Panelists brought in to discuss the news are overwhelmingly right wing and reactionary. In other words, although television news is never allowed to be as rabid as newspaper columnists, it sticks to a mainly right-wing agenda. In 2014 UKIP leader Nigel Farage was a semi-permanent occupant of television studios. Invitations to Green leader Natalie Bennett - which throughout most of the present parliament has had one MP to UKIP's nil - are very infrequent. And the socialist left is banned, period. Labour leadership and the Left Many commentators have picked up on the fact that UKIP has appealed to a section of mainly older, and mainly poor white, working class voters disillusioned with Labour. Racism is widespread in this part of the community as it is in older sections of society as a whole. But in general the tactic of appealing to this constituency on the basis of racism has been enabled by the pathetic inability of Ed Miliband's 'Blairism lite' to connect with the dispossessed white working class on crucial economic and social This is not exactly rocket science. If Miliband just promised a national minimum wage at £10 an hour (not exactly luxury), the banning of zero hour contracts, pay increases for public sector wages, enforcement of the minimum wage for all workers including immigrant workers, a major programme of house building and a massive extensions of social housing at affordable rents, a wealth tax, significant increases in pensions and welfare benefits for single parents and a national child care system - with just this small basket of proposals a major left crusade against the Tories and UKIP could be started. This is absolutely not enough and way below the demands of the militant left, but even this would swing huge numbers behind the prospect of a Labour government. Ed Miliband's failure is compounded by his groveling to the reactionary right over 'tightening' his immigration policy. The Miliband-Balls debacle is just a consequence of the failure of the party leadership to break from the fundamentals of Blairite neoliberalism and propose a significant alternative to But the failure of the 'left' is wider. Why is there no left wing analogue of UKIP? Why no left wing formation that can rival the pull of the hard right? Part of the reason is objective. As explained above, while UKIP and the right will always get onto the TV and in the papers, it is always going to be more difficult for the left, who are bitterly opposed by the mass media and traditional politicians. In Britain there is something near to a boycott on television and in the press of left-of-Labour organisations and radical But an even bigger reason for the absence of a left equivalent to UKIP lies in the failures of the left-of-Labour forces themselves. The
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Morning Star and its patron, the Communist Party of Britain, have stood umbilically tied to Labour, immobile and incapable of change. Also since the 1970s/early 1980s the so-called revolutionary left in Britain has numerically declined and been beset by numerous splits and crises. The British left needs to create a strong and militant united political party that can pose a national political alternative. The potential for a radical alternative is massive. This is shown by the huge turnout for the cinema showings of comedian Russell Brand being interviewed by left wing journalist Owen Jones. Widespread radicalism and opposition to the reactionary right means absolutely nothing if it is not articulated by a mass party project. It will go nowhere unless and until all the campaigns, demonstrations, coalitions and conferences get focused on building a unified Left party. The 2015 general election At the time of writing (December 2014) opinion polls are predicting that UKIP will win up to 19% of the vote at the next general election in May 2015. However it will take votes disproportionately from the Conservative Party. Rosa Prince comments: "The Conservatives could lose nearly two million voters to the UK Independence Party at the general election, an academic study has found. The analysis, based on a survey of 30,000 voters, found that as many as one in five of the 10 million voters who supported the Conservatives in 2010 are on the verge of defecting to UKIP It suggests that the rise of Ukip will damage the Tories significantly more than Labour, which is set to lose 500,000 voters to Nigel Farage's party, and the Lib Dems, who are expected to lose 700,000 voters." (Daily Telegraph 8 Whatever this means in terms of seats, it will amount to a major victory for UKIP and could even make it a contender in the formation of a government coalition with the Conservatives. Both the Conservatives and UKIP however in the long term face major debates and conflicts. The Conservative leadership is worried by UKIP's attraction of its voters and wants to cut off that process by being 'hard' on immigration. However it is also worried about its lack of support among ethnic minorities, which could have very difficult long-term consequences. Rob Ford "This brings us to the crux of the dilemma for today's Conservatives: they can try to appeal to the older white voters who are anxious about immigration, or to the growing ethnic minority electorate which distrusts them, but they cannot credibly do both." "There is a deep generational divide running through the current British electorate. Older voters' political and social outlooks reflect the very different Britain grew up with decades ago. They find the profound social changes they have witnessed since - mass migration, multiculturalism, globalisation, and European political integration, among others - alien and threatening. Their grandchildren, however, have grown up in a diverse and outward looking country and see themselves as citizens of an outward looking, multicultural nation. UKIP have placed this value divide at the heart of political debate, by harnessing the anxieties of older voters to fuel their meteoric rise, unsettling all the traditional parties' electoral calculations in the process. UKIP are one side of this argument, Britain's rising ethnic minority electorate, who still shun the Conservatives, are the other. Cameron must decide whether he wants his party to represent Britain's past, or Britain's future. He cannot do both." (Daily Telegraph, 14 October) UKIP itself is not free from some of these contradictions. The party's flirtation with anti-big business populism and its underlying anti-immigrant racism both have their internal critics. In a tongue-in-cheek article Mark Wallace has identified "The Five Tribes of UKIP" which reflect the different emphaEGAL UNITED AGAINST UKIP WIMAN
19 *Britain ses of its outlook (Conservative Home site December 10, 2011). The central one is whether such a backward looking party based on old people can sustain itself in an increasingly multicultural, multi-ethnic nation. An optimistic view is provided by Sunny Hundal, who in 2013 wrote an article proclaiming the victory of multiculturalism in Britain. He pointed out that a survey organised by Lord Ashcroft revealed that 90% thought that Britain had irrevocably become a multicultural nation and 70% thought this was a good thing. He said: "Seventy percent of all Britons think becoming a multicultural country was a good thing for the UK. This is an extraordinary figure, one that certain parts of the country will always hate to accept, and has social and political implications for our country. The poll found that only group where a majority (57%) were opposed to multiculturalism was Ukip voters." (Guardian 22 April 2013). It would be nice to believe that this is true and that the support for multiculturalism is here to stay. But so long as UKIP has huge levels of support, it would be complacent to believe in the inevitability of the decline of racist reaction in Britain. • This is an edited version of a chapter written for a forthcoming book on the Far right across Europe forthcoming from Resistance Books. FARAGE YOUR HATRED (S AMELON TING