Following the wins recorded by UKIP in last week’s local
elections, the advice for other parties as to what to do next has come thick
and fast. Much of this has been directed at Young Dave and his fellow jolly
good chaps, and often by the Tories’ own well-meaning supporters and members.
And combining
that well-meaning strand with his own disconnect from reality is Daniel
Hannan.
MEP and occasional Tory Hannan has drawn the unduly
simplistic conclusion that there must be an alliance between his party and that
of Nigel “Thirsty” Farage. He has
reached this point by seeing the Tories lose lots of seats, while UKIP has
gained some of them. Therefore, in his view, there must be a blue and purple
alliance. It sounds appealing. But it’s complete crap.
UKIP posted second
place in the recent Parliamentary by-election in Rotherham. Does Hannan
want to suggest that there was some groundswell of disaffected Tory voters that
produced that result? Or the similar second
place in South Shields last week? Or the second
place in Barnsley Central in 2011? UKIP is not just abstracting votes from
the Tories.
Indeed, the UKIP
supporters involved in the foster care row in the lead-up to the Rotherham
contest had previously voted Labour. And, if disaffected voters in Labour
strongholds rally to the Farage fringe, you can be sure there are more like
them. But Hannan would not dream of suggesting an electoral pact between Farage
and Mil The Younger. And his reading of UKIP is shaky.
Farage may claim to be a libertarian, but his party isn’t:
keeping out Johnny Foreigner isn’t exactly assisting the cause of liberty. Nor
is spraying money up the wall on more armed forces, or building lots more
prisons, to enable the state to warehouse the criminally inclined. All of these
things require not a small state with low taxes, but the polar opposite.
What Farage is pushing may
be populist and popular, but it ain’t libertarian, and nor is it
intrinsically right-wing. But it is blessed with the overarching idea that UKIP
will somehow be better than the rest, because “you can’t get a cigarette paper between them”. If UKIP were to
arrange a pact with Tories, that would before long cause the former Labour and
Lib Dem voters to drift back.
So it isn’t going to happen in the near future, except as a
means of Farage bagging more headlines. Hannan’s whole approach is predicated
on his view of the world being shared by a lot more people than in reality, and
so it is as lacking in credibility as you would expect from someone prepared to
play patsy to Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse).
Small wonder the hacks can’t figure out UKIP. Nor can the politicians.
1 comment:
You pretty much ignore most comments made in this debate. Virtually every comment I've heard on whether a party should move to the left, right, europhile, eurosceptic, authoritarian, libertarian or anything else suspiciously coincides with the views of the person making the comment. Or, to put it another way, can anyone imagine a Conservative MP saying "I quite like UKIP's policies myself, but I don't think the Conservative party would do itself any favour moving in that direction"? Or vice versa.
For what it's worth, disregarding my own views on what I'd like the government to do, I think the Conservative Party is best off standing its grounds. At the time of announcing the EU in/out referendum, it was a reasonable bet that this would win back UKIP votes, but it didn't. And if that didn't work, I don't see what else will work. And the more it tries to reach out to UKIP's fringes, the more it stands to lose in the centre to Labour and (possibly) Lib Dems. Staying where they are now is the least bad option.
There was a good quote on the Sunday Politics that the Conservatives' two modes are complacence and panic, and that seems to sum up this Parliament rather well.
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