Deja Vu: UKIP By-Election Victory. Again

  Yesterday’s by-election was more or less a foregone conclusion, with the Tories’ original promise to ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at Rochester & Strood having been ashes in the mouth of the Prime Minister for at least a week. So, Mark Reckless – UKIP’s candidate – retakes the seat he held as a Conservative MP from 2010, and no-one in the country with so much the suggestion of a finger on the fluttering political pulse of the nation should be at all surprised.

  That doesn’t mean the win is insignificant, however – not by any means. There have been noises for a few days now about a UKIP win triggering at least two more defections from the Tories. There are about as many candidates for this as there are Tory backbenchers, but two frontrunners are the arch-Eurosceptic Peter Bone – who has called for UKIP and the Tories to work together in the past – and John Baron, who when questioned about whether he would defect replied with the deliciously clichéd ‘never say never’.

  With the General Election approaching fast, it is more and more unlikely that the new tradition of forcing a by-election if you decide to jump ship to Farage’s mob would hold. Therefore, any future defections could well be automatic, potentially swelling the ranks of UKIP substantially in the run-up to May 2015. However, whilst Farage will be keen of course to pinch as many Tories as he can get his made-in-the-UK purple mittens on, what he is really after now is a Labour defector. This would fit in with his growing narrative about UKIP being a party of neither the left nor the right – and, considering polling shows their appeal among former Conservative voters is approaching its critical mass, it is looking increasingly necessary if UKIP want to keep up their admittedly impressive momentum.

  And what about Rochester & Strood itself? Well, with a much-reduced majority of 7.3% on a low turnout of just 50%, Reckless is far from secure. Lord Ashcroft’s polling shows that the Tories are likely to reclaim the seat in 2015, when – as Grant Schapps put it this morning – ‘the future of the country will be on the ballot paper’. Lib Dem, Labour and even Green supporters might be willing to lend their votes to the Tories to keep out a UKIP MP for a full parliament where they were not willing to do so for the sake of five months. We shall see.

  Speaking of the other parties, it didn’t go too well for them either. The swing against Labour was -12%, nearly as much as against the Tories, while the Lib Dems got just 1% and lost their deposit once again. The Green Party, meanwhile, continued their recent trend of thrashing the Lib Dems into fourth place with 4% at the expense of some of the Labour vote. Sixth place, for those who are interested, went to a dominatrix who was last year voted Britain’s favourite sex worker. She got just 300 votes less than the Lib Dem candidate.

  To summarise: UKIP continue their march, while the Tory and Labour high commands will be quaking in their respective boots at the prospect of further defections. The Greens are still doing quite well and the Lib Dems look like the next general election may well see them wiped off the face of the Earth. 2015 is going to be an interesting one, methinks.

UKIP - The Purple Menace?

Does UKIP's performance in Clacton and Heywood & Middleton mean the 'big three' are in serious trouble?

Carswell's Triumph

  Douglas Carswell's crushing victory in the Clacton-on-Sea by-election should come as a surprise to precisely no-one. The seat was described as the most-UKIP friendly in the country, Carswell had a huge personal following - demonstrated by the mass exodus from the local Tory association to his UKIP branch - and the UKIP propaganda machine has been working overtime ever since the by-election was called.

  However, the sheer scale of the victory - 59.7%, a rare majority, with the jump from 0% (UKIP did not previously contest Clacton) the biggest in by-election history - should of course be noted by anyone with an interest in the growing right-wing force. As birthday presents go, this one is probably not David Cameron's best. Carswell did not just beat the Tories, he thrashed them, and such a result will be invaluable to UKIP come 2015.


Miliband's Nightmare

  Of course, Clacton was not the only by-election result to be announced during the night - Heywood and Middleton also voted, and they voted to keep Labour in power. However, UKIP came deadly close, with just 617 votes between the two. The Labour victory is important for the party - failure to hold the seat would have been another nail in the coffin of Miliband's leadership - but the significance of this close call is huge. Farage has long proclaimed that UKIP has a broad-based appeal, attracting defectors from each of the traditional 'big three', and the near-success of the party in this northern, working-class constituency - seat of former Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, no less - seems to confirm that.

  Of course, the Labour party line is that the UKIP surge was driven mostly by the collapse of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat votes, and the nose-dive in turnout to 36.2%. This is quite probable, but that does not excuse the Labour failure to capitalise on this collapse. Anti-UKIP tactical voting should have lent weight to the only party in the seat with a reasonable chance of defeating them, and yet the margin of victory remained pathetically small. Some UKIPpers are calling for a recount, and the party's candidate John Bickley stated that “I’m under no illusions. Another two or three days and we would have won this.” Such a delay would have put the poll in the wake of Clacton and the UKIP landslide there - Bickley is probably right.


Same Old Party?

  Winning an elected MP for the first time, and their second ever UKIP MP overall, will lend a legitimacy to the party that their 24 MEPs and 370 Councillors could not do. So Westminster-focused is British politics in the 21st Century, only a UKIPper in the House of Commons would do to persuade some sections of the establishment to take them seriously. Despite Conservative HQ's line today that people will not vote for 'alternative' parties come 2015, even the most traditionally self-confident Tory must now admit that UKIP are a threat.

  The question is, what do UKIP represent - and is it something the British people will ever vote for en masse? The label 'fascist' has been applied to the party in the past and, whilst it is an exaggeration, there are some fascistic elements to the organisation. They can be seen in the party's de facto English nationalism; in the veneration of a single charismatic individual as leader; in the party's corporate backing; and in the appropriation of the odd traditionally left-wing policy in order to garner populist support.

  Glimpses of UKIP's more unsavoury aspect are also revealed by those of its members less willing to toe the party line. Though the sagas of Bongo Bongo Land and storm-causing gay marriage are beginning to recede into the past now, these kinds of people are still present in the party - just masked by an increasingly effective and media-supported propaganda machine. The fact that the blatantly and pathetically prejudiced Alan Craig, former leader of the hard-right Christian People's Alliance, has defected to UKIP and campaigned for them in Clacton - this a man who equates equal marriage with child abuse - and that UKIP has defended him demonstrates quite clearly that, however much it may have appeared to move on, the party is still stuck exactly where it was ten years ago.

  
  Will UKIP do well in 2015? Almost certainly. Will they increase their vote share? Undoubtedly. Will they pick up a handful of extra seats, the better with which to harass the Tories in Parliament? Quite probably. But will they ever become a force which the people of the UK will select to represent them on a national basis? I doubt it. Not without quite a considerable reformation of the party and a purge of those less salubrious elements within its structure.

  Meanwhile, are they a threat to the 'big three'? The by-elections of the 9th of October tell us, absolutely. And, much as I despise UKIP itself, upsetting the cosy establishment apple-cart can't be an entirely bad thing.