If I feel a sense of déjà vu as I watch UKIP’s rise today, just imagine the view from Crosby’s chair at Conservative Party HQ. David Cameron’s election strategist hasn't just seen this film before - he's already written the script.
Tim Dixon is political director at New York-based Purpose.com
With all the disorder in Conservative ranks, it’s tempting for progressives to see UKIP as David Cameron’s worst nightmare. Yet UKIP’s ultimate legacy could be to change the politics of immigration and national identity, weakening one of Britain’s greatest strengths and eroding the progressive vote.
We won’t know the real damage UKIP inflicts, or against whom, until the smoke clears – but one recent historic parallel underscores how right-wing populists present a greater long-term threat to the left than the right.
Parallels with Australia
Fifteen years ago in Australia, a similar populist insurgency pulled the rug out from under the established parties, breaking records with 23 per cent of the vote in a Queensland state election. Spectators of the UKIP phenomenon will see many parallels, starting with the same 23 per cent vote this month.
This party – somewhat disconcertingly for today’s British politics, called ‘One Nation’ – energised its supporters with grave warnings about open-door immigration, the betrayal of national economic interests and the self-serving behaviour of the political class. Its leader, a former fish-and-chip-shop owner named Pauline Hanson, spoke in the common sense nostrums of mainstream voters.
And just like Nigel Farage, wherever Hanson went, she was welcomed by voters expressing their relief that at last someone was ‘saying what the rest of us have all been thinking’.
Within a couple of years One Nation went off the rails. Like Farage, Pauline Hanson had been a powerfully disruptive force, who brought colour and movement back to politics. She even taped a video message to be released in the event of her assassination, in which she stared down the barrel of the camera to announce, “Fellow Australians, if you are seeing me now, it means I have been murdered”.
However the One Nation members who won elections were unready for public office. Their ranks were filled with just a few too many crackpots, opportunists and cranky malcontents.
Farage knows the risks and wants to prevent UKIP flaming out as One Nation did. It won’t be easy. Populist parties lack political polish. At first that’s an invigorating change from the mind-numbing soundbites of professional politicians. But the moment UKIP’s inexperience morphs into public displays of incompetence or indiscipline from its members – fiddling expenses, getting uppity or turning on each other – public support could collapse.
Long-lasting influence
While pop-up populists may be put back in their box, they can exercise influence long after they have disappeared. Power is derived from changing the debate as much as by winning seats.
In Australia we learnt the hard way. For a time, One Nation boosted Labor’s electoral prospects. As mostly conservative votes bled to One Nation, Labor first won office in Queensland and then won a majority of votes in the national election in 1998. Both were Labor’s first election from opposition, following successive terms of government.
Maybe UKIP will have a similar effect on British politics, splitting the right-of-centre vote and returning Labour to office. Certainly, it has destabilised the Tories and driven down the Conservative vote.
But UKIP’s legacy might be quite different. Australian conservatives also stumbled at first in the face of the populist insurgency.
But over time, that changed. Conservatives got smarter. First One Nation shifted the political debate to the right, bringing into the mainstream views on immigration, Indigenous affairs and asylum seekers that had previously only simmered on the political fringes. Then conservative prime minister John Howard followed, embracing many of those once-fringe views with a relish that often dismayed his own party’s moderates.
This was the legacy of Australia’s populist insurgency: a new politics of identity, race and asylum seekers. It delivered some short-term gains for Labor, but ultimately it cost Labor heavily. Conservatives learned from One Nation how to tap into a set of concerns shared by many Labor voters.
Labor’s response was confused and seemed disconnected from voters’ concerns. A swathe of blue collar voters defected to conservatives and stayed there.
Maybe UKIP’s rise may be just another example of the ‘flash politics’ of a news cycle obsessed with novelty and surprise. Maybe. But more dangerously, UKIP might break-up Britain’s broad consensus on immigration and Europe. That is dangerous, both to Britain and to Labour. It demands a front-footed response, and one that engages people while shifting the frame of the debate, as reports from organisations like British Future and Hope Not Hate have argued in recent years.
It won’t be easy. It may be crucial.
Country to country parallels in politics only extend so far, of course, and the Tory madness on Europe often feels like it’s from another planet. But there’s one last correlation. The campaign director for Australia’s conservatives during the whole period of One Nation was Lynton Crosby. If I feel a sense of déjà vu as I watch UKIP’s rise today, just imagine the view from Crosby’s chair at Conservative Party HQ. David Cameron’s election strategist hasn’t just seen this film before – he’s already written the script.
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29 Responses to “UKIP’s populism could present a greater threat to the left than the right”
OldLb
Quite right.
The question is then, what’s the right policy?
1. Longer times to get citizenship. 25 years strikes me as right.
2. if you want to come here, you have to pay more tax than the average government spend, per person, per migrant.
3. You have to pay that up front, or have a firm guarantee it, or take out an insurance bond.
4. Assessed at the end of the year by the tax form. Above, a thank you. [Would be nice for the rest of us], or you have to top up, or leave within 3 months.
That uses the exist system, the tax system to administer it. It means only those beneficial to the UK come and stay. Its clear and simple and removes lots of causes of problems. The poorer get housing, the poorer get jobs. There are less stresses on schools and hospitals. If you earn the sums of money involved, you are less likely to commit crimes. You will be better educated. …
It’s also non racist. There is no racism involved.
OldLb
Quite. They just want to dictate. Hence there need for referenda.
When too will politicians realise that referenda are for the difficult questions.
e.g Gay marriage. Let the public vote and decide, then you have a real debate with a clear answer
Lady Magdalene
The impact of EU membership has been on our Democracy and Sovereignty. The Government we elect to the Westminster Parliament can no longer govern this country. Instead, the vast majority of our new laws originate in a supra-national organisation that is completely immune from the Democratic process.
IF the proposal to join a Federal Union of Europe had been put to the British people, so that the implications were debated and the people voted to join there wouldn’t be a problem.
But The British Establishment knew that the people would never agree, so they set out to achieve the same result by stealth. They can hardly complain when the people wake up to the deceipt and start demanding that their Democracy and Sovereignty be restored.
There may be a value in being a citizen of Europe. But there are plenty of downsides as well. WE should make that decision and LibLabCON have been conspiring for decades to ensure that we don’t.
Matt Tysoe
A Guardian journalist attended a UKIP meeting and interviewed the people there, the entire evening was spent moaning about everything about the UK when she asked one of them if there was anything they still liked about the country the answer, ‘The past.’
If the reports that over the weekend there has been a surge of Conservative Party members joining UKIP are true, I wonder when the telegraph will be printing the headline, ‘Will the last person in the Tory Party please switch out the lights’ with Cameron’s head framed in a light bulb.
Make no bones about it – UKIPs absolute priority now must be to do the same to Labour. Hopefully their new manifesto when it appears will reflect that.
The Little Englander movement is gaining momentum. And I say Little Englander with pride because it is classless.
People who are turning to UKIP come from all walks of life and not just the working class. There is a whole cross section of new members from Business, Industry, Pensioners and especially younger voters, who want to be part of the growth of a party that stands firm for British Values, Sovereignty and Democracy, ecomomic growth and prosperity; where we can make our own laws and decide who and how many people we want to receive as immigrants into the UK, instead of evermore being run by some unelected corrupt individuals in Brussels.
Vance Wells
What an idiotic article. No idea whatsoever. Political director indeed! Who lets these people out of the nuthouse?