How UKIP did it, and what that means for nationalist parties

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 19 November 2020 13:26.

Our nationalist arguments alone, however germane, however well-made, however moral, will not bring the political class and the wider British Establishment to grant our people a hearing.  We are all too well insulated from the political, and that is how our rulers like it.  Nothing will change without a very great pressure from our direction.  But how is that to be generated?  How do we make the Establishment’s dismissal politically unsustainable?  Obviously, only the people themselves can force the issue to the right conclusion.  Politically active nationalists, therefore, have the duty to free and then harness our people’s will.  To free our people’s will we must speak not merely negatively of our crisis but positively of freedom.  They must then speak of their freedom to the Establishment.

How we get from here to there is the subject of this essay.  The good news is that something very like it has been done before.  Its (for any nationalist) sobering story tells how Nigel Farage and UKIP achieved their own historic moment of victory over the Establishment.  That is the general path for any micro-party seeking to change history in a truly significant way.

The campaign for an EU Referendum grew out of the heady ideological years of Margaret Thatcher’s first government and her burgeoning atlanticism.  In contrast to the spring of freedom and change which coursed through that period, the process of European Community integration, with its Heathite corporatist connotation, appeared stodgy and bureaucratic, centralising and undemocratic.  Opposition to it arose both from within and without government, in particular among the ideological free-market members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, including Thatcher herself.  There was also a strong contingent of senior backbench Conservative MPs who were like-minded, and there was a powerful caucus of right-wing eurosceptics outside parliament, including the majority of association members and significant parts of the press.  Some senior Labour Party members in both Houses, including Tony Benn, Frank Field and the Lords Shore and Stoddart, also argued against EC integration on the basis of Brussels’ burgeoning power and emerging unaccountable structures.

The first expression of organised resistance to European integration only came later, though, and from within the Tory Establishment.  This was the formation of the Bruges Group in 1989, following Thatcher’s benchmark speech of the previous year to the College of Europe, a speech intended to set out a different vision of Europe’s future from the integrationist one advanced by Brussels.  The speech proved a watershed for ambitious men and ideological europhiles in her own cabinet.  When Thatcher was removed from office in the same year and a leadership election held, the choices being the ambitious John Major or the ideological europhiles Michael Heseltine and Douglas Herd.  Major won and quickly revealed himself to be a conventionalist on integration and just about everything else.  The Bruges Group found itself out in the cold and fighting integration alone at Westminster.

In 1991, during the struggle over the signing of the Maastricht Treaty which was due the following year, a Bruges Group founding-member, the academic Alan Sked, founded a second organisation which he named the Anti-Federalist League.  That act got him expelled from the Bruges Group, not least because the AFL intended to give voters a say by running AFL candidates at elections (which it did in the 1992 General Election and in two subsequent by-elections, failing ignonimously but providing clear confirmation, if any were needed, that to prosper in Westminster elections single-issue parties have to become full-spectrum parties).

With the signing of the Maastricht Treaty by John Major, and the European Community re-named the European Union, and with the Maastricht Rebels within the Conservative Party defeated, the struggle against integration was over.  AFL had lost its purpose.  Accordingly, Sked and most of his members committed to change tack and campaign for complete withdrawal from the EU under the banner of the United Kingdom Independence Party – only to find themselves eclipsed for a time by James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, formed in 1994 (in the 1997 election campaign Goldsmith stood over 500 candidates and spent more money on press advertising than did the Tories or Labour, all for 2.6% of the vote and no seats.  It deregistered in 1997, following Goldsmith’s early death).

That same year, with much frustration among members at the lack of progress, Sked was toppled from the leadership by a group within UKIP led by Nigel Farage.  The cause of a Referendum had never looked weaker.  Yet what no one knew then was that in Farage it had a top-class media performer and a natural communicator.  Even so Farage was not initially the UKIP leader.  Under Michael Holmes the party fought the 1999 European Parliament elections and won 6.5% of the vote, gaining three seats.  Then, much professionalised under the leadership of the former Conservative MP Roger Knapman, it fought the 2004 Europeans and won 2.6million votes, 16.1% of total votes cast, and twelve seats.  That was the beginning of the UKIP breakthrough.

The strategy had always been to pressure the Conservative Party to return to euroscepticism or, failing that, to maneouvre it to see that its own self-interest lay in giving the people another Referendum on Europe (and, in fact, both objectives would be achieved, the latter first, immediately prior to David Cameron’s election triumph of 2015, the former second with Boris Johnson’s general election triumph four years later).

On coming to the leadership in 2006, Farage quickly cemented the policy, putting together a range of populist policies to attract the Tory voter.  It did not matter that the objective was not to win power at Westminster or even to replace the Conservative Party as the main party of opposition.  It was always about instilling fear and doubt at CCHQ.  To that end, Farage also broke conclusively with the de rigeur plastic-man image of Blair and David Cameron (elected Tory leader a year earlier), and of political spin, and the fashion for youth.  Farage gave forth in the saloon bar, pint in hand, speaking unscripted and much in the manner of any rather well-informed Tory of the shires.

It worked.  The party came second to the Conservatives in the 2009 Europeans, and in the 2013 local elections it won an average of 23% of the vote in wards where it put up a candidate, and in the 2104 locals it won 168 seats.  Finally, in the 2014 Europeans UKIP won a grand total of 4,376,635 votes, 26.6% of all votes cast, and twenty-four MEPs - more than of any British party.

By the time the 2015 General Election hove into view, with David Cameron in 10 Downing Street at the fag-end of coalition government with Nick Clegg’s LibDems, and with party polling showing a likely second hung parliament, Cameron’s party strategists, fearing the loss of another four million votes to UKIP and the return of a Labour government under Ed Miliband, opted to meet UKIP’s challenge head on and include a Referendum on EU membership in the party election manifesto.

When, on the morning of 8th May 2015, Cameron found himself the surprise victor he was saddled with a campaign promise on which he never expected to have to make good.  Ever the PR executive he committed himself to an entirely cosmetic re-negotiation of British terms of EU membership with the other 27 leaders of the member states.  In the campaign which followed, Cameron’s renegotiation package sank like a stone in the public consciousness.  Even the Remain side ignored it, offering a high-handed and unremittingly hectoring defence of our membership.  The two Leave organisations, with Farage and UKIP fighting under the aegis of Leave.EU and the Conservative eurospectic ministers overwhelmingly under that of Vote Leave, presented positive and hopeful messages of a sovereign and free national future.  Optimism, patriotism and the Anglo-Saxon love of freedom had defeated Establishment bullying and deceit and the power of the old media.

The Sunderland celebration on Referendum night - the first result to be called.
The Sunderland celebration on Referendum night - the first result to be called.

So, what are the immediate lessons to be drawn from this history?

First, the party began to take itself seriously.  It did not rely on change coming from some other quarter (say, from Bill Cash and his party-first clique).  It did not rely on “worse is better” in the form of more and better banana stories.  Rather it established a clear political strategy and held to it.  Throughout its period of electoral success it also really understood the presentational nature of its mission.  It knew it had to look like its prospective Tory voters.  When the charge was made in the media that the BNP was infiltrating the party, action was taken to publicly ban anyone with past or present BNP connections – Hope Not Hate was brought in to vet new applications for membership.  The tendency, common in minor parties, for non-mainstream politics to attract marginal people was ruthlessly addressed.  Even the senior MEP, Godfrey Bloom, who bopped the deceitful BBC journalist Michael Crick on the head with some rolled-up papers, had to walk the plank.  Members who told off-colour jokes on social media were expelled.  It paid off.  The press found it had much less of an easy job to paint the party as wierdly extremist and hopelessly amateur.

Second, the party had luck and timing on its side … luck that a skilled operator like Farage, mercurial though he could be, was on its side, and that the eurosceptic cause was shared with a number of senior and respected Tories in cabinet and on the back benches.  Likewise, the Tory press was largely eurosceptic, which at least prevented it from applying an extremist sticker to the party.  The Daily Express, when under the ownership of Richard Edmunds, went one stage further and actually campaigned for UKIP, becoming almost as much a house journal for the party as the Telegraph was for the Tories.

With regard to timing, obviously UKIP under Farage was favoured in a way that Sked’s and Goldsmith’s parties never were.  When Michael Howard retired as Tory leader and David Cameron succeeded to the role, supported by George Osborne as shadow chancellor, the last of the mainstream parties dallying with euroscepticism had gone and been replaced by another internationalist clone-party.  The Tories, New Labour, the LibDems, the SNP, Plaid, the Greens … they were all europhile.  There was just UKIP, the BNP, and George Galloway’s Respect Party arguing for an end to EU membership.  UKIP, therefore, had a ready-made constituency of the deserted.  It only had to prove itself worthy of their votes.

Cameron’s uncertain grip on power was also a gift of Time.  His advisors were telling him that he was dependent on the very constituencies where the burgeoning UKIP vote could cost him anything from twenty to fifty seats to Labour or the LibDem, and thus the election.  That concentrated minds wonderfully.  The final element was the cynicism of the Tory hierarchy, who seriously believed they could steal UKIP’s clothing then, after the coalition is returned to power, send Dave out to the lectern in Downing Street to tell the voters, “Sorry folks, but Nick won’t support a Referendum.  I’ve tried to convince him, I really have.  But his whole party is terribly pro-EU, you see.  So with the greatest regret we are going to have to pass on that one.  Hey-ho.”

Third, UKIP grasped fairly early that it had to become a professional political machine.  Grandstanding about the nature of power in this corrupted world was fine for hobbyists.  But it wasn’t going to deliver votes.  As soon as Roger Knapman took over at the helm in 2002 he began to professionalise the party.  A full-time political advisor was hired, centralisation and strategising took over, and amateurism was discouraged.  By 2005 serious levels of funding had begun to flow in.  By 2011 Stuart Wheeler, a former major donor to the Tories, was installed as party treasurer.  Arron Banks donated £1,000,000 for the 2014 European Parliament election.  In March of that year Ofcom duly awarded UKIP major party status.  It was an arrival!

Love or hate his politics, Farage’s relatability, high national profile and speaking ability (so evident in the YouTube videos of his often hilariously disrespectful speeches in the EU Parliament, viewed hundreds of thousands of times) brought massive media attention, and that brought a mass party membership which peaked at 46,000 in mid-2015, making it possible to fight on the ground throughout England and Wales.

The UKIP path, as such, went through three phases: from 1994 to 2002, when the party was full of naivety and had yet to fully understand the nature of the enterprise on which it had embarked; from 2002 to 2014 when the party professionalised and experienced success and growth; and 2014-2016, when the party matured to the limit of its potential and finally achieved its grand purpose.

It was done by seriousness, a respectable and popular cause also voiced by senior politicians in the other parties, a voter-base that was inherited and so did not have to be built from scratch, a skilled communicator as leader, strong mainstream media support, good timing and good fortune in its enemies, solid funding, a mass membership, professionalism in party management, intelligent policy-making and presentation … these were the elements that together generated the UKIP phenomenon of a minor party changing history in a major way.  These are what political nationalism, in its own “same but different” context, has to broadly match.  Carry on as we are and that will never be done.  Our people will never have an opportunity to bring this criminally errant Establishment under their will.



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