Is this man the Tories’ and LibDems’ worst nightmare?
Nigel Farage is the leader of a political party that was supposed to have been consigned to the dustbin of electoral history. After a flirtation with the TV celebrity Robert Kilroy-Silk and a one-off electoral breakthrough, it is was all going to end in tears.
The remnants of the United Kingdom Independence Party were to be picked over and shared out. This bunch of “loonies, extremists and fruitcakes” (to quote David Cameron) would then disappear back under whichever rock they’d crawled out from under.
Bad news then for Mr. Cameron - and any others who expected to laugh knowingly as UKIP entered its death throes. The party will field 500 candidates at the next General Election and may have found a genuine means to build its infrastructure after its sensational second place showing in the Euro elections. UKIP’s poll ratings (usually clumped together with the growing % for “Others”) are as high as 8% for the Westminster elections. This is no longer just a day of headlines about a quirky party doing surprisingly well in a one-off set of obscure elections. UKIP is here to stay.
Farage set himself the objective of winning ten seats in this month’s European Parliamentary elections. A big ask. He’d pledged to tender his resignation as Party Leader if he failed to hit this target - and no one disbelieved him. He comfortably exceeded it. He may be considered a fringe figure in some quarters, but he is now a definite feature of Britain’s political landscape.
Nigel Farage has made a string of very sharp tactical and strategic moves. He has a slim, streamlined, but very talented staff. Gawain Towler, his chief lieutant, is a top-grade political asset with sharp organisational and communications judgement. Not just more personable than Damian McBride (most homo sapiens clear that hurdle), but highly intelligent too.
Unlike most politicians, Farage is not afraid to send himself up and when he does so, he comes across as a balanced man who is very comfortable in his own skin - in stark contrast to the anally-retentive members of the Westminster establishment.
The really intriguing thing is that under Farage, UKIP is attempting to reach out beyond its narrow constitutional objections to the European Union. At today’s launch of the Save our Pubs & Clubs Campaign, he just turned up unannounced, matter-of-fact, mingled with other guests and then gave a short, pithy and witty presentation.
This is the sort of fleetness of foot and flexibility that, frustratingly, the leader of the Liberal Party used to have when it was smaller. Grimond, Thorpe and Steel led only a handful of MPs. This meant that their ability to set the party’s agenda themselves was considerable. A regrettable downside of having many more MPs (alongside a farcical, choking network of internal committees) is that Nick Clegg has to spend a considerable amount of time managing the party rather than just getting out there and “doing stuff.” Clegg’s day-to-day diary seems closer to that of a diplomat or ambassador, rather than that of a campaigner.
Farage is latching on to a number of freedom issues - such as the smoking ban - which the three major parties are united in ignoring . UKIP are beginning to couch their Euroscepticism within a wider narrative of antagonism towards the state. This doesn’t, of course, guarantee an automatic launch pad to 10 Downing Street, but it is a very clever “niche” strategy.
When - after the next election - the Tories become the third major party to appear to renege on a commitment to a Euro referendum, expect UKIP to have a field day.
Ranked no. 56 in the UK
Ranked no.6 in the UK
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Your right Mark Farage does come over wekll & in fact has some classical liberal cred about him.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:02 am
Mark is there a list of where the 500 candidates are being played? Would be interesting to see if one of the buggers will be taking votes away from Letwin down here in West Dorset
June 24th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Kasch - there may be a list, but strangely enough Nigel Farage didn’t hand it to me. That said, I’d be amazed if UKIP don’t fight West Dorset. This is in their stronger territory.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:19 am
The UK and the EU are where the public pay more and more to more and more politicians and bureaucrats to tell us what to do more and more. Most politicians and bureaucrats lack the experience to earn the public’s respect( Cable and Ashdown excluded). Farage understands this and is in danger of moving out of the golf club Tory audience into the larger group of self employed and those running small businesses. If they achieve this, then UKIP could take votes from Labour,Conservatives and LibDems. The problem is that the LibDems are no longer the party of the self employed tradesmen, shopkeeper, hotelier, publican and manufacturer( the last one was Cyril Smith ) and therefore do not understand the massif amount of red tape created by politicians and bureaucrats . Bureaucrtas are not politically neutral; they will support parties which give them more moneyand power and resist those who threaten to take it away. No bureaucrat has ever volunteered to become unemployed because their job is a waste of resources or been completed.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
A nice angle, but…
The whole UKIP (and Tory) anti-EU polemic is based on an identification between the word “we” (as in “we” should pull out, take back “our” powers, etc) and the Westminster government.
Westminster=us, Brussels=them. Without that, the emotional force of UKIP’s position is completely lost.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
The Norwich North by-election will be a very interesting test case. Glen Tingle(the UKIP candidate) will be snapping at the heels of the Conservatives Chloe Smith, and it could send a clear message to Cameron that he cannot count on simply being handed the keys to number 10.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
btw did anybody hear Nick Clegg at pmqs today?
June 24th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
@Charlie: No bureaucrat has ever volunteered to become unemployed because their job is a waste of resources or been completed.
Almost always true, but not quite. Johan Norberg writes about the Japanese Head of Restructuring at a Mazda subcontractor who sacked himself to cut costs, the German Postal Minister who resigned after privatising the postal bank on the grounds that he wasn’t needed, and the Swedish chief film censor who left her job because she objected to the principle of censoring films for adults.
If only more of them behaved like that!
June 24th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
@Ziggy: Yes, he asked the PM why he wasn’t honest with the country about the need to cut public spending after the recession to balance the books.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Yes might surprise some a liberal worrying about the budget deficit & proposing spending cuts.
Kind of goes against the liberal stereotype of tax & spend, which I think is no bad thing I’m fed up with explaining to people not all liberals are pseodo socialists.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
And Mervyn King agrees with Nick Clegg on the need for a plan to reduce the deficit.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
“The Norwich North by-election will be a very interesting test case. Glen Tingle(the UKIP candidate) will be snapping at the heels of the Conservatives Chloe Smith, and it could send a clear message to Cameron that he cannot count on simply being handed the keys to number 10.”
Actually I tend to doubt this - Norwich is not strong UKIP territory, it is a very ‘Left’ town where they only scored 12% in the Euros and where the Greens topped the poll with 25%. And the very well organised local Greens arent the sweet treehuggy kind either, they’re the scary ‘Green Left’ types too…if there’s a strong protest vote to be had, it’s going their way.
What it will be is a test of how durable the Green vote is in a first past the post situation. Britain’s first Green MP?
June 24th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Niklas Smith . Lets build statutes to these selfless types.
Ziggy. Totally agree . Many self employed /owners of small businessses could be tempted to vote for the LDs if we did not appear as pseudo- socialists.
Apparently in Germany they call the Green Left water melons - green on the outside and red on the inside.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Nice to see you using one of my many photographs of Nigel. I took this one on HMS Belfast which is appropriate as it helped save the EU from foreign dominance - just as Nigel is working for now.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:57 am
Precisely Charlie. Greens are just as bad if not worse than the BNP in their bigotry!!
June 25th, 2009 at 2:54 am
As we know from the ‘04 euros -vs- the ‘05 general, UKIP’s startling performance in one election can in no way be translated to another. By-elections, of course, are laws unto themselves. So who know about Norwich.
But as regards strategy, all but the most irrational UKIP supporters must surely see their chief purpose as being to pressure the Conservatives more into their line of thinking on the EU. Yet UKIP’s intransigence in demanding nothing less than a highly radical policy of withdrawal has resulted in the Conservative party now ignoring them. On the grounds that nothing presentable at a general election will placate them. With Cameron becoming leader came a new strategy of going after middle-ground ‘New’ Labour and Lib Dem votes instead.
What represents a looming disaster for UKIP are indications that Cameron’s strategy seems to be working. The culmination will be the next general election. For if, as looks likely, Cameron’s strategy gets him elected to Downing Street despite Farage’s best efforts to continue to hold the party to ransom over withdrawal, UKIP’s leverage and core purpose will be utterly shattered.
Without being able to achieve power themselves, and with no-one who has power having any reason to listen to them, what will be the point of UKIP? Merely to cash in yet achieve nothing of substance in the European Parliament?
When Cameron became Tory leader, the political landscape changed. Since then, UKIP - by ploughing the same lame old intransigent furrow - have been cruising towards Westminster irrelevance. There’s only months left now for them to come up with a radical new game plan that preserves their relevance in the first term of a Tory government.
PS. Forgot to mention the Liberal party. Doh! Despite being seen by many to have come out better from the MPs’ expenses scandal than the other main parties, the recent election results show that they’re going nowhere all by themselves.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Many people are happy to be in the EEC but not the EU. a return to a European Economic Community, enabling free trade in goods and services, scrapping the CAP and common fisheries policy ( and following fishing policies closer to those of Canada, Iceland and Norway )would be supported by many members of UKIP and Conervatives .
June 25th, 2009 at 11:32 am
@Charlie - this may be true of publci opinion, I’m not sure.
But the changign landscape makes the EEA option considerably less credible. The single market changes all that.
Very often, the debate about the EU in Britain seems to gloss over the significant differences between a free trade area and a single market. The latter is much,much more intensive.
The truth is that a country wanting a free trade arrangement with the single market would de facto be bound by single market rules and regulations without having a say in them.
June 25th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
@Carlos libertarians can be just as bigoted
June 25th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Mark, I love you to bits but you are becoming a bit of a bore on the old smoking ban thing. Now puffing (pun intended) up Farage as the Great White Hope of British politics because he turned up to a ‘bail out the brewing industry’ bash. It’s enough to turn a man to drink!
June 25th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
naughty naughty criticizing people in public Ed
June 25th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Well, am not sure Nigel Farage is the great white hope of British politics. In fairness to him, though, he isn’t advocating a bail out - just liberalisation of the law.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Mark Littlewood. Lets keep it simple. A group of countries allow free trade in goods and services. No tariffs- barriers to trade. Let the best companies prosper and the worst wither away. Countries can subsidise if they wish their own companies if they wish, but no money from the EU.
Each country decies what’s best for them.
Why should Germany subsidise the rest of the EU just because they are good at manufacturing? By making the EU just a free trade area, then Turkey can join without so many objections from other countries.
Politicians and bureaucrats like complexity because it justifies their existance.
June 25th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Oh yes the voters are always telling me on the doorstep how they wouldn’t bother voting were it not for all that fine complexity on offer from politicians.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Charlie - there’s a problem with the sugegstion you put forward, I think.
And it goes to the significant, but subtle, difference between a single market and a free trade area.
I support the former.
Firstly, on subsidies. These are, in my view, a de facto barrier to free trade. My support for full market competition goes well beyond abolition of tariffs. There are zillions of ways nation states can act as protectionists without resorting to formal tariffs (e.g banning British beef in France on erroneous health and saefty grounds). I want a stronger (international) legal regime preventing the French from behaving in this extreme anti-market way. I think you want to leave the whole matter to the nationally sovereign French state.
Secondly, there is little EU-wide support for a “free trade nation state” model. There is some. But not much. This has tactical implications.
Finally, the sovereign nation-state view of the world is an anachromism in practical terms. The flow of goods, labour and a ton of other stuff makes it an almost mystical view that we can abscribe “sovereignty” to the nations on European map. I think the most “nationally sovereign” country on the planet is probably North Korea. It’s not a model I’m keen to follow. Without extreme statist mechanisms such as exchange controls, the behaviour of the ECB - inter alia - will have a direct and unavoidbale impact on the UK. In a global village, legal national sovereignty risks being a nicety rather than a reality.