The Point

Last updated: 27 June 2022.

Paradigm Poll – UKIP and the Euro elections

Green left activist Adrian Cruden looks at this years euro-elections, and why this time, it’s quite different

 

Tradition has it that the European elections don’t really count. And yet, whatever the case in the past, the received wisdom has never been further from the truth than this year.

Perhaps because of a combination of the proportional voting system and the perception that the Euro-elections are different, voters clearly feel freer to vote the way they really would like to in other elections but for various reasons don’t. Consequently, if you review the previous Euro-results, the so called main parties have frequently performed extremely poorly even when they have come first[1] for example, in 2009, the Tories “won” with barely 27% of the national vote.

But this year more than ever we see a political class in crisis as the Euro-vote threatens to make a major and lasting impact on the British political scene.

 

The lead story is of course UKIP, its supposed insurgency the repeated subject of often wildly inaccurate, sensationalist reporting by ill-informed journalists, whose previous ill-informed pronouncements and even downright lies on issues from immigration to the shape of bananas have largely contributed to the rise of Farage’s bandwagon. Time and again, in spite of polling evidence to the contrary, the media have run stories of UKIP being set to sweep the polls in May. In truth, with the sole exception of their near miss in Eastleigh after Chris Huhne’s disgrace, UKIP have scored pretty mundanely in parliamentary by-elections – in the three previous by-elections in this parliament they averaged 12% of the vote[2], while in the three Scottish Parliamentary by-elections since 2011, they averaged barely 3.8%.

And while they polled well in the English counties last year, precisely the areas they might be expected to do well in, their 160 councillors were soon depressed in number for reasons ranging from defection to other parties, breakaway UKIP groups, expulsion (remember the UKIP anti-gay “weatherman”?) and resignation from the party (and even from the council in the case of a few surprised-to-be-elected councillors). It’s all a good bump up from last time but not exactly the overwhelming surge that you’d be forgiven from assuming from the wall to wall coverage of Farage and his acolytes.

The sensationalism however at least appears to have worked – and now, in spite of a series of stories on corruption, alleged marital infidelities, and revelations of soaring expense claims, the latest poll shows the party nudging just ahead of Labour into first place for the Euro-vote[3].

For progressives, it is a frustrating and worrying development. UKIP, in spite of all the evidence of their hypocrisy and incompetence – from their leader’s disavowal of their entire manifesto to their two-faced claims to be campaigning to protect women from FGM while actively opposing attempts by the European Parliament to curb it – seems to have caught a feeling, a mood, which no number of statistics and facts thrown at them by their opponents seems able to dislodge.

This phenomenon is no doubt in no small part due to the repeated myths peddled by the press about The Other: immigrants have stolen our jobs, our benefits, our NHS, don’t pay taxes, sell drugs, are given free cars and mobile phones by the state, jump the housing queue and even run the housing queue and, of course, a good number of them are terrorists as well. There is a (probably urban) legend about a writer who went on a diet of Daily Mail stories, blocking himself from all other sources of news for a whole month. At the end of his experiment, it is said, a medical check found a heightened heart rate and substantially increased anxiety levels. But whether true or not, can you even begin to imagine months and years, even decades, of being fed the screeching diatribes of the likes of Richard Littlejohn and Melanie Phillips? Who wouldn’t develop a deep distrust of the world and anyone at all who tried to put forward any sort of counter-narrative?

 

But this is the nature of both the product of and the challenge to the neoliberal consensus. UKIP was birthed by the old parties’ mind-numbing collaboration to create a mere semblance of democracy: the illusion of choice[4], as Chomsky has named it. With three (or two and a third) completely interchangeable mainstream parties fixed around a corporate consensus, people are looking for an alternative. UKIP claim to offer that, but in truth as a sort of Establishment-sponsored rebellion, like the pseudo-opposition parties in Putin’s Duma. Farage and Co attack the handling of the financial crisis while simultaneously opposing action to curb bankers’ excesses; they catch public hostility to greedy MPs while happily filling themselves with Brussels gravy at the public expense; and they deride wind turbines for damaging the view while smacking their lips at the prospect of fracking well-heads dotted across the landscape.

In effect, for all the faux media talk of UKIP as an insurgency, they are actually a means of containing insurgency: they absorb anger, neutralise it and in turn hope ultimately to become just another part of the Establishment Club, just as the Lib Dems before them. Hence the recent decision by Ofcom to give them parity on broadcast media with the three main parties was unsurprising in the extreme.

And meantime, the frustration of people struggling by, out of work or on low wages and zero hours or temporary contracts, goes unresolved but dangerously deflected onto a range of vulnerable groups – migrants, people with disabilities, the unemployed, and so on. With each new wave of disappointment, the only solution the Establishment will offer will be ever more scape-goating. Our society will become harsher and policy will be to contain social problems rather than seek any genuine solution – because the only real solution would be a transformative redistribution of wealth and a return (if return is the right word) to communitarian values in both public services and resource ownership.

This is where the other narrative for the Euro-elections kicks in. It is currently ignored by the mass media for precisely the reasons related above, but it is real and offers genuine progressive hope.

In several regional constituencies last time, Green candidates narrowly missed being elected – in Yorkshire & The Humberside, just 1.28% of the vote separated us from the BNP, who took a seat; while in the North-west the Greens’ Peter Cranie was pipped by Nick Griffin by just 0.3%. Similarly close results elsewhere leave the Greens, currently with 2 MEPs, challenging realistically for 4 or 5 additional seats in England, especially with the fracturing and collapse of the BNP. And with a recent Scottish Parliamentary opinion poll showing the Greens ahead of the Lib Dems and within sight of the Tories, a Scottish success is also not a long-shot any more.

 

Of course, there are a number of other progressive and socialist parties standing, some staunchly anti-EU, as opposed to the Greens’ more reformist approach. Yet as a measure of a rise in the non-Labour left vote, it is the Greens, running at between 5% and 12% in UK-wide Euro-polls, who so far at least are making the electoral running. It is far from inconceivable that we will overhaul Lib Dems throughout the UK in the elections – with even their President, Tim Farron MP, already warning his members to brace themselves for a “wipe-out”, where all 12 of their MEPs will be swept away[5].

A recently leaked memo from the Lib Dem elections[6] unit revealed the depth of their verdant fears with plans to “smear” the Greens over our opposition to the secretly developing Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership between the USA and EU. Clegg’s Orcs curiously plan to condemn the Greens’ concerns about a free trade arrangement which will allow big multinational corporations to sue European Governments if regulations to protect the environment, public health, employment or consumers damage their profits. Our lead candidate in Yorkshire & the Humber, Cllr Andrew Cooper, has responded by challenging the local Lib Dem (and former Tory) MEP to debate TTIP, which he has rebranded simply as the Big BAD treaty – Big Business Against Democracy (@BigBadlaw).

Seeking to highlight the Lib Dems evident disarray and their far from unenthusiastic sell-out to the Tories in their all-out assault on the welfare state and public services, Greens ran a (stunt) Field Hospital for Lib Dems outside their federal conference in York in March. It offered a range of services including conscience examinations and heart implants to try to kick re-start Lib Dems’ empathy with other humans. Although we enjoyed our stunt, it was an ultimately depressing (if unsurprising) event - the remnant Lib Dems ranged from the utterly, bafflingly naive through irritated denial to the frankly sociopathic.

But it is vital that Greens and other progressives engage voters directly about the issues that are driving the apparent rise in UKIP and this means doing much more than trying to highlight UKIP’s many foibles and excesses. It means waging a relentlessly positive campaign about the alternative path on offer: of a more equal society, public or community ownership of key services such as transport and energy, welcoming migrants and returning to the principles of universal welfare as something to be celebrated rather than anathematised as some last chance saloon. On these and related issues, Greens have been marching with trade unions, sharing platforms with the People’s Assembly and working with NHS defence campaigns.

During a focus group set up to find out why people in Eastleigh voted UKIP, the sole positive thing the participants came up with about Britain was, literally, “the past”. Striking and depressing in turn. We need to help currently disenfranchised people feel good about themselves again, about their neighbours and communities and, more than anything, about their future – and the only way to do that is to project a vision of a world where we can indeed have very different lives and societies, where we are at ease with each other and fulfilled in ourselves. The stakes have never been higher, but nor have the opportunities been clearer than now.

If UKIP poll strongly, and especially if they outpoll the Tories, Cameron’s position in his divided party will become ever more precarious. Although it will take a huge shift of support for UKIP to be able to win Westminster seats in 2015, its position may be shored up strongly enough that a divided Tory/UKIP vote under first-past-the-post could lose scores of Conservative seats. Panicking Tory MPs are likely either to seek local accommodations or even defect to Farage – either way, Cameron will be a target as in particular Michael Gove develops his currently furtive love affair with UKIP[7] in pursuit of a populist Fronte de Droit to try to catapult the hard right back into the running.

On the other side of the coin, if they are eclipsed by the Greens, Clegg’s Lib Dems, perhaps headed up by the Janus-like Farron, are similarly likely to push the self-destruct button on both their leader and the already frayed Coalition. And the implications of that are immense: fixed-term Parliament or not, a UK General Election by the autumn hoves into view.

But of course the third element of this paradigm shift sits firmly in the hands of Scottish voters in September’s independence referendum. If the Westminster triumvirs’ attempts to dictate to Scots on sterling pushed a swing of about 10% towards YES, how much more momentum will be generated if UKIP emerges in second or first place in England and in the ensuing crisis a Farage-Gove ticket becomes a possibility for the next UK Government? Would Scottish voters, with their long and proud left-of-centre tradition, really feel Better Together with people who openly regard them as freeloading scroungers and support abolition of the Scottish Parliament in favour of a unitary state?

It would be Faustian in the extreme to anticipate any good, however obliquely, coming from any form of UKIP success – especially for progressives here in England. But this is where the Greens’(and others of the Left) potential advance offers hope that, just as the right is developing new forces, a new, coherent and inclusive grouping on the left is indeed emerging outside of the “nearly New” Labour Party. The will is clearly there – from Occupy and UKuncut to anti-fracking protests and the burgeoning movement to defend the NHS against the ongoing privatisation in England. 22 May could and should be the catalyst that drives this up to a new level.

So whatever the longer term outcomes, this fact is true: the European elections have never mattered so much as they do this year. They offer a real prospect that we will see not only the unravelling of the old party system but of the 1707 Union as well. The challenge for all of us on the Left will be to ensure that what comes next is not a narrative of selfish division and hostility, but rather a new story of community and comradeship transcending borders and transforming politics throughout our islands.

Adrian Cruden

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