In “Welcome to Militant England“, Rafael Behr provides some nuance and political context to the UKIP’s rise in England:
A few years ago Ukip was seen as the by-product of a Tory split. But now it appeals to disillusioned voters across the political spectrum and of all classes…
The rise of Ukip has been the most dynamic political element in the current parliament. Opinion polls show little exchange of voters between Labour and Conservative. Ed Miliband’s support was bolstered by left-leaning Liberal Democrats, but that defection happened almost immediately on Clegg’s decision to form a coalition with the Tories. Thanks to the perversities baked into our electoral system, Ukip’s surge could easily put Miliband in Downing Street, by taking votes from David Cameron in key marginal seats. For that reason, Labour is largely silent about the party that threatens to win the European parliamentary elections in May. “I’m not that interested in Nigel Farage,” Miliband said recently when asked about the Ukip leader. He should be.
Only a few years ago, Ukip was widely seen as a Tory schism – a secessionist republic of Little Englander reaction against Cameron’s efforts to modernise his party. That view no longer holds. While Ukip still takes more votes from the Tories than from anyone else, it plainly appeals to disillusionment from across the political spectrum, irrespective of class and region. Farage’s popularity is a symptom of something more potent. Little England is the retreat of the besieged; Ukip is animating a spirit of resistance.
In a lesson for some imagined third party here in the States, Behr notes the UKIP’s success in nicking off votes from Labour:
I met people who would reel off a list of complaints that tally exactly with the issues on which Labour campaigns – job insecurity, zero-hours contracts, soaring energy bills, the “bedroom tax”, cuts to public services. They would then declare an intention not to vote at all, or to support Ukip. When people did say they planned to back Labour, the reason was most often ancestral loyalty. (“We’re all Labour round here.” “Always Labour.”)
Ed Miliband held the seat thanks to a strong local candidate with a ground operation that knew where Labour supporters lived and made sure they voted. The potential for a better-organised Ukip machine to win over areas that were once dominated by the traditional left is beyond doubt.
“If you look at the Labour Ukippers, some of them are the kind of people who might once have been shop stewards,” says John Denham MP, the former Labour cabinet minister who served as an adviser to Ed Miliband. “For them, trade unionism was a defensive thing economically, and a defensive thing in terms of ‘our people against the bosses’. Those people feel they’ve lost that power to fight against unwelcome change and defend their interests.”
This view is supported by Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford, of the Universities of Nottingham and Manchester, respectively, whose study of Ukip’s rise, Revolt on the Right, was published in March. The book identifies the potency of the new anti-politics radicalism in social and demographic forces that have been building for generations. The authors chart the creeping monopolisation of centre-left politics by a middle-class, white-collar, university-educated elite whose lives are remote from the concerns of the old industrial working class. Civil liberties, environmentalism, feminism, racial equality and European integration became the emblems of moderate left opinion, when the most pressing matters for historically left-wing voters were low wages, a lack of social housing and job insecurity – all of which could be filtered through suspicion of immigrants.
During the boom years, the benefits of open borders and market liberalisation were obvious to a skilled, affluent and mobile elite. They were less clear to those at the sharp end of competition for work and housing (although everyone enjoyed budget holidays and cheap manufactured imports). In reality, there was less divergence of economic interest than there was cultural polarisation. The liberal determination to expunge prejudice from public discourse was interpreted as denial of permission to be cross about immigration. That feeling seems especially strong among older, low-skilled, white men, whom Goodwin and Ford characterise as feeling “left behind”: “Already disillusioned by the economic shifts that left them lagging behind other groups in society, these voters now feel their concerns about immigration and threats to national identity have been ignored or stigmatised as expressions of prejudice by an established political class that appears more sensitive to protecting migrant newcomers and ethnic minorities than listening to the concerns of economically struggling, white Britons.”
Within the United Kingdom, these crises of demographics and political correctness have caused a resurgence in the sentiment of ‘Englishness’ (e.g. national identity based on, I would argue, race) over ‘Britishness’ (e.g., the more secular, non-racial notion of implicit in the term “U.K.”):
The years of New Labour’s decline and fall coincided with a rise in English self-awareness. In a 2013 survey by the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank, 60 per cent of respondents felt their Englishness to be more important than their Britishness, with only 16 per cent feeling the opposite. Some 60 per cent also said they had come to feel this way more strongly in recent years. This was true across social and geographical groups with the notable exception of black and ethnic-minority communities in England, which still prefer Britishness.
There is a number of explanations. Scottish and Welsh devolution and the rise of nationalism in both countries raised the salience of Englishness as the least politically assertive identity in the UK. Meanwhile, the Tories had been expelled from Scotland and most of Wales and proceeded to define themselves by hostility to the EU. So the main political opposition at Westminster was simultaneously nationalistic in tone and English in composition.
It also seems plausible that Englishness came to be a haven of self-identification for people who felt excluded from the New Labour carnival of modish urbanity precisely because Britishness had been appropriated to that cause. “That Nineties thing was such a small group of people, nearly all of whom lived in London,” notes John Denham. “Most of the country was left outside that dialogue.”
