Let’s not over-hype the UKIP ‘phenomenon’

Yesterday there were local elections in large parts of the UK and the news reported the fact that UKIP had made significant gains, with their number of councillors rising from eight to 147 and both the Tories and Liberal Democrats losing huge numbers (335 and 124 respectively). You can find the full results (including a clickable version of the map on the right) here among other places, and it is noticeable that three rural councils in the western Midlands and three in eastern England have gone grey for ‘no overall control’. In some of these places, the Tories could form an alliance with UKIP to control the council, but not all of them — in others (e.g. Gloucestershire), the Liberal Democrats are still the second party. The press made the UKIP surge the story because it’s new; what they do not report is what has not changed, and this reporting makes UKIP look more important than they really are.

The most important thing to note is where there were no elections yesterday. The white bits on the map are the most populated areas of the country: the unitary authorities and former metropolitan counties such as Greater London, Merseyside and West Yorkshire, which are where the big and small cities all are. Many of the counties that had elections today have had the urban centres excised to form unitary authorities, and the only major city which has had an election is Bristol, and then only a third of the seats were up for election. This was an election in rural and small-town England (and one small part of Wales) and these are the Tory heartlands where there was the most to lose to UKIP. David Davis, a former Tory leadership contender who is on the right of the party, suggested that the party listen to its grass-roots rather than the “metropolitan elite”, but there are plenty of metropolitan voters who vote Tory not because they are little Englanders but because they are liberal Thatcherites, some of whom supported New Labour but many of whom have now gone where they think the tax cuts are. They are likely to have friends who are from ethnic minorities, even in mixed relationships, as well as gay friends. They are more likely to vote Labour or Lib Dem than UKIP, which despite its elitist leadership, appeals to a provincial white base.

Second, they are still a minority party, even in the white provincial ‘heartlands’, and are only the fourth biggest party in those areas, with fewer UKIP councillors than independents and the Lib Dems still having more than double their total. Only in Norfolk and Lincolnshire (which excludes the Scunthorpe and Grimsby areas, which are separate unitary authorities where there were no elections yesterday) are UKIP the second party and who knows, perhaps they might coalesce with Labour or, in Norfolk, the Lib Dems instead. That their share of the council seats is only 13% of the Tories’ may be because people associate them with their anti-EU stance and so are less likely to vote for them in a council election where they cannot do anything about that, so it is possible that their Parliamentary vote in these areas might be higher. These being council elections, there is a lower turn-out and people are more likely to vote for fringe parties because they are not voting for a government.

However, next time round, it does appear that the Tories are going to face a heavy challenge from UKIP, which will seem like less of a one-man show by Farage now that they have councillors as well as MEPs and thus a body of members who have fought elections. Labour really need to redouble their efforts to win back disillusioned voters who defected to the Lib Dems during the New Labour era and particularly the Bush wars, but they also need to make the case for remaining in the EU to counter the Little Englander threat. Pulling out of the EU will not only be bad for trade but also mean our freedom to travel and work abroad is greatly restricted, and there may well be a back flow of British ex-pats as well as an outflow of formerly legal EU migrants. People with spouses from the continent might find the going a lot more difficult as well, much as with Brits with other foreign spouses — since we are unlikely to join Schengen, as Norway has. Labour should remember that UKIP run on a similar platform to the Tories’ in 2001 and 2005, both largely based on “common sense” and press sentiment appeals, and lost handily both times. Daily Mail readers are, after all, a minority as well. Labour should also head off UKIP’s appeal to the disillusioned working class by exposing their populist appeal for what it is, because as this blog notes, Farage is not a ‘man of the people’ but an extremely wealthy man from an exclusive London suburb and his party’s policies are to benefit the rich, not the rest of us. He and his friends no more know the price of eggs than Cameron and Osborne do. It’s not envy (unlike all the Tory benefit scrounger resentment politics), it’s about electing people who know about real life, not people who just presume to tell people what they’re thinking.