Election 2015: A Little Post-Match Analysis

  Well, I did not see that coming.

  The fact that nobody else did either is little consolation: the Conservative Party has won a majority of 6, and David Cameron will return to No.10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. Whilst most people anticipated that the Tories might well win largest party, no-one thought that they would manage to win outright. The pre-election polling has never been so drastically wrong, even in the 1992 debacle.

  So, is it time for everyone to the left of the Tory neoliberals to curl up in a corner and cry? Well, no. The temptation may be great, but I feel it is one that we should resist; for now, at least. All is not quite lost just yet. Here is a quick rundown of the major events of election night, and exactly what they mean for the future of this country.

The Conservatives won a majority of twelve. Clearly, a Tory government is not the result I or many others on the left wanted. The failures of the Conservatives over the last five years are stark: Real wages have entered their longest period of sustained decline in at least 50 years, the UK's GDP per capita is still lower than its pre-recession peak, the deep cuts to welfare have resulted in dozens of deaths and left hundreds of thousands of people destitute, the top-down reorganisation of the NHS has wasted millions and allowed creeping privatisation to continue... I could go on, but I'd only bore you. Suffice it to say, the Tories have had a terrible effect on this country.

However, all is not entirely lost. The Conservatives may have won a majority, but it is a small one; a much reduced majority, in fact, from that the Coalition has enjoyed since 2010. This means that Cameron will find it increasingly difficult to govern as backbench rebels - of which there will be many, you may be sure - hold his party to ransom. The corollary of that, of course, is that he may have to step up the anti-Europe and socially conservative rhetoric to appease the Tory old guard. So, the effects of this small majority may be good or bad, but the new government is certainly going to be far from stable.

The leaders of the three main opposition parties have resigned. Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage have all resigned as leaders of their respective parties. In Miliband's case, this is reasonable; under his leadership, the party lost seats and suffered electoral wipeout in Scotland, due at least in part to his personal inability to connect with the electorate. He represents the metropolitan champagne socialist branch of Labour, and this was obviously not something the people of the UK could believe in. 

Clegg's departure is also fair enough. The Liberal Democrats have been reduced to just 8 seats in the Commons, putting them in joint-fourth place with the DUP. From their impressive performances at the 2005 and 2010 elections, this is a long way to fall, and Nick Clegg's decision to take the party into coalition is certainly responsible.

The resignation of Nigel Farage (having failed to win South Thanet) is, quite frankly, the best news I've had all day, but it is also worrying. Farage has been the figurehead of UKIP for so long that his departure (however temporary I suspect it may be) could cause UKIP to collapse (a very good thing), or it could allow the far-right elements within the party to take over. Make no mistake, Nigel is by no means the worst of the bunch, and a UKIP pulled even further to the right is a scary prospect.

Scotland went SNP in spectacular fashion. The SNP swept to victory in Scotland, claiming all but three of the country's 59 seats. The huge bloc of nationalist MPs that Nicola Sturgeon will be sending to Westminster (led pretty soon, I suspect, by our old friend Alex Salmond) will be a thorn in David Cameron's side. He know's that his small majority means that a few rebels could rob him of the ability to govern, and the SNP will hammer home any advantage they get. However, their principled tradition of not voting on matters which do not affect Scotland will limit considerably their effectiveness. This may leave David Cameron with carte blanche to do as he wishes in England, a worrying prospect.

Turnout remained low, though it increased slightly to 66.1%. The continued refusal of a third of the country to cast their vote is a problem. Those who do not vote as a point of principle are unfortunately indistinguishable from those who simply can't be bothered; those who are frankly unable to find any political party they are capable of giving their support to count just the same in the minds of our political masters as those who just don't care. The fact that turnout is traditionally lowest among those groups (young people, ethnic minorities, the unemployed) who the Tory government will be targeting over the next five years makes this an even bigger issue. 

The number of big names who lost their seats is shockingly high. They call it a Portillo Moment when a political heavyweight falls at the ballot box, but there have been so many this time around that they might have to change the name. Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, Scottish Labour Leader Jim Murphy, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, Business Secretary Vince Cable, Energy Secretary Ed Davey, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander... the list is huge. Most are from the Labour or Liberal Democrat parties, and many fell to the SNP in Scotland, but the decimation of the upper ranks of the main political parties - together with the planned departures of old leading lights such as William Hague, Jack Straw, Malcom Rifkind and Gordon Brown - means that the new House of Commons will have a very different dynamic.

The number of women MPs increased by a third. A piece of uncomplicated good news, for a change, and pretty self-explanatory. Before the election 23% of MPs were women; now it is 29%. That is, of course, still 21% short of the ideal, but it is a marked improvement and one we should be very pleased about. One of these new female MPs, the SNP's Mhairi Black, is also the youngest MP elected since 1667, a huge achievement only made more impressive when you consider she took the seat from Douglas Alexander.

The UK's electoral system is STILL very, very broken. I will end with perhaps the most important point: the discrepancy between vote share and seats in the House of Commons continues to be a huge issue. The SNP won 56 seats with just 4.7% of the vote; meanwhile the Lib Dems won 7.9% but only 8 seats. UKIP won a single seat with 12.6% of the vote, the Greens one with 3.8%. The Tories and Labour are separated by 99 seats but only 6.5% in the vote. You get the idea - there is little real connection between vote share and seat share, and this is disenfranchising madness. You can read my article on PR for a solution to the problem, but the short answer is this: we desperately need as electoral system which ensures that Parliament represents the wishes of the people. It's called 'democracy' - you may have heard of it.


  These are just some of the most important results of May the 7th - much more will become apparent over the coming weeks. In the meantime, it is important that the progressives among us redouble our efforts to convince the public that the Tory message of cuts and rampant neoliberalism is not the only way, and far from the best way. May 2020 awaits.

Leaders Debate Brings Hope For Progressive Politics

  The leaders' debate on Thursday was a vital opportunity for those with progressive politics to gain some traction in the mainstream of political discourse. With the three establishment parties and UKIP joined by the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, those of us on the left had something remarkably close to parity with the right. This is something which does not occur very often.

The party leaders on stage in Salford

  Although the polls conducted in the aftermath of the debate show a mixed picture, what is clear from the two-hour clash is that the three women put forward a remarkably distinct vision of Britain's future from the austere narrative of three Westminster parties and the UKIP-driven, isolationist dream of a UK cut off from the rest of the world.

  All three attacked the Lib-Lab-Con austerity programme, pointing out that Ed Miliband talks 'the language of anti-austerity' but in fact has supported many of the measures that the Coalition have implemented which have cut into the economy and our public services. Sturgeon in particular was impressive - something which I did not expect to find myself saying - laying out plans to increase spending over the next few years, which would reduce the deficit at a slower rate but which would help to stimulate demand in the economy, rather than the devastation of massive further cuts.

  Bennett, too, made a hugely important point when she put forward the case for long-term investment. Just because a project cuts a little into the balance sheet now, does not make it not worth doing if it will bring huge benefits for the future - something which many of today's politicians and journalists seem to have forgotten.

  Leanne Wood - despite her slightly, ah, wooden performance - should be applauded for facing down the anti-immigration vitriol of Nigel Farage and defending immigration as something which brings a boost to our economy and immeasurable benefits to our country in terms of cultural diversity. That the leaders of the establishment parties have bought in to Farage's fearmongering on immigration is deplorable, and the Plaid leader was right to speak out.

  Most importantly, though, the leaders of these three left-of-centre parties have injected an intangible but vastly important concept back into political discourse: that politics should be about making life better for people, not just about money and power. If GDP growth slows a little or the deficit takes a year or two longer to pay off, but public services are more easily available and the standard of living for ordinary people goes up, that that is a trade-off worth making. The obsession with unsustainable profiteering which has infected mainstream politics has finally been challenged, in front of a 7.7 million-strong audience.

  Even if the results of Thursday's debate are not felt in time for May the 7th, it is my hope that this will be a watershed moment in British politics. As we move into an era of multi-party elections and co-operative politics, hopefully the rampant individualism of the last thirty-five years will start to fade.   

The Debates Debate

  The leaders' debates were an innovative feature of the 2010 General Election, giving the people of the UK the chance to see the principal contenders for their electoral affection go toe-to-toe over the major issues of the day. So far in 2015, however, they have proved an innovative way for the Conservative Party to waste everyone's time.

The History of TV Debates

  The original three debates, featuring Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, took place over a three-week period in the run-up to the election on the 6th of May. The televised verbal duel between the main contenders have been a feature of US Presidential elections for years, but - despite the efforts of previous party leaders to get them introduced since 1964 - they have not been historically used in Britain.

  The main objection to this head-to-head style of pre-election politicking is that it was suited only to a Presidential style of political leadership, which is not the way we do things in Britain. At a General Election, after all, we vote for individual MPs, not for a political party and certainly not for a party leader. In theory.
  
  The reality, of course, is that UK politics has become ever more Presidential over time, with the election and ten-year premiership of Tony Blair - the most President-like leader Britain has ever had in peacetime - sealing its fate. We vote, at election time, in most cases for the party we most identify with rather than the individual candidate that we best like. 

  So, the debates were introduced - at the insistence, mainly, of opposition leaders David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Now, however, Cameron is trying to get out of them. Recognising that the old argument wasn't going to wash in light of his own support of the debates just five years ago, he has turned instead to a plethora of others.

Proposals

  The original proposal for the 2015 pre-election debates - all the way back in October - was for a debate between Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband, a second debate also including Nick Clegg, and a third also including UKIP boss Nigel Farage. However, several smaller parties contested this decision - in particular the Green Party, who argued that they were performing on a level more or less equal to the Lib Dems in the polls.

  This began a long saga of political tussling over how exactly the debates should be held. The broadcasters initially rejected the Greens' demand for inclusion, prompting legal action. Cameron then declared he would not take part without the Greens. Miliband, Farage and Clegg wrote letters to the PM demanding he meet their challenge, but Cameron refused to budge.

  In January, the broadcasters announced revised plans: One head-to-head between Cameron and Miliband and two seven-way debates also including Nick Clegg, Nigel Farage, Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon and Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood. These plans were then confirmed on the 23rd of February, with the first seven-way to take place on the 2nd of April, the second on the 16th, and the head-to-head on the 30th of April - just a week before the election.

Political Quibbling and David Cameron's Cowardice

  These plans weren't perfect. The DUP and SInn Fein - the two principal Northern Irish parties - both complained that if the SNP and Plaid were involved, they should be too. George Galloway, the single MP for the Respect Party, made a similar argument - if the Greens were to take part, with just one MP, then his party ought to have a chance to speak too. These points are both valid criticisms.

  To my mind, the correct solution would be to have a debate between the leaders of all the parties standing nationally (Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems, UKIP and the Greens) and then separate debates featuring the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish leaders of those parties along with the nationalists. The head-to-head between Cameron and Miliband, as the only two realistic candidates for Prime Minister, also should go ahead. But this is really a side issue.

  Whatever the form of the debates, the main thing is that they should happen. In a system where the policies of political parties, and increasingly the calibre of their leaders, is important to how people cast their votes, we need to be able to see the people clamouring for our support make clear unambiguous statements of their views and then defend them. As David Cameron said back in 2010, they are essential for our democracy. And yet, he has proven the greatest block on them occurring of all.

  His latest objection is that the debates ought not to take place too close to the election, and therefore there isn't time any longer to stage the three debates which have been planned. The fact that the main reason that there is no time left is his own refusal to agree to the broadcasters' plans is clearly not something which bothers him. Instead, he is now calling for a single debate to take place before the end of March, including the seven leaders who the broadcasters have identified. The other seven-way and the head-to-head are to be scrapped.

  Both Cameron and the broadcasters have dug in their heels, the latter threatening to empty-chair the PM if he doesn't turn up. The problem with that, though, is that they might run afoul of pre-election impartiality rules if they allow Miliband to speak for 90 minutes in the 'head-to-head' without Cameron present. So, it becomes a war of attrition - each side trying to batter the other with enough political smears to make them cave in.

  Frankly, the reason for all this is that David Cameron is running scared. His delaying tactics have all been a ruse to fill out the larger debates with as many leaders as possible, in essence to reduce the airtime of Nigel Farage, who he knows will cut percentage points into Tory support with every minute he gets to speak. 

  His objections to the head-to-head debate are less obvious, but he fears Miliband may prove more competent in debate than people will expect him to. Most people's opinion of the Labour leader is the media-fuelled caricature of him as a bumbling buffoon, and whilst he certainly isn't the most charismatic leader Labour have ever had, he is a far more skilled public speaker than is perhaps apparent.

Conclusions

  At this point, it looks increasingly unlikely that the debates will happen. If they do, they will most likely be reduced to Cameron's ultimatum of the single seven-way debate before the short campaign starts on March 30th. Since this will mean having them before the parties have even published their manifestos, this makes the entire process rather less meaningful.

  Through his constant prevarications and craven cowardice, David Cameron has all but scuppered what he himself claimed were debates 'essential to our democracy'. The Prime Minister's commitment to the ideals of 'democracy' have surely to be questioned, therefore. Once again, a leading politician has put politicking before principles and sacrificed the people's right to make an informed choice about their leaders on the altar of grabbing a possible head start in the political race for No. 10.

  It is a sickening display, and he should be fully ashamed of himself. But I doubt he cares.

The Curious Case of Douglas Carswell

  Douglas Carswell was first returned to Parliament in 2005 for the Essex constituency of Harwich. A Conservative Party member since 1990, he defected to UKIP in August 2014 and stood down as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election which he won by a landslide.

  Since then, Carswell has been one of the principal figures in the UKIP surge and an outspoken member of the party leadership. He also, however, has been reported as clashing with UKIP leader Nigel Farage on a number of occasions - something he has, of course, denied.

  But it is clear that Carswell is something apart from the mass of Ukippers. Whilst he is in line with general 'UKIP-py' policies such as opposing equal marriage for same-sex couples and scepticism about anthropogenic climate change - as well as, of course, the core UKIP mission of getting the UK out of the EU - he is something of a radical when it comes to other areas.

  Particularly of interest is his dedication to electoral reform. The Daily Telegraph named him their Briton of the Year in 2009 for his commitment to shaking up what he calls 'that cosy little clique called Westminster'. In a speech at the UKIP conference on Saturday, he outlined his proposals for changes to the electoral system.

  First on his list is recall elections. The coalition has introduced a form of this in the Recall of MPs Bill, but this is a weak form of recall which only allows voters to replace their MPs if they are sentenced to more than a year in prison or the Commons Standards Committee bans them from the House for 21 days. Carswell believes that real reform means having a threshold at which a simple petition can trigger an election - in his proposal, 20%.

  Another policy of his is to mandate that ministerial appointments are confirmed by the relevant House of Commons Committee. This procedure already occurs in the USA, and would prevent the Prime Minister from appointing favourites who do not command the confidence of the House as a whole.

  Of course, the jewel in the crown of these reforms is replacement of the archaic Single Member Plurality (or first-past-the-post) system with which we choose our MPs. Moving towards a more proportional system would, of course, benefit UKIP hugely - but it would also make Parliament far more democratic. My own article outlining the reasons for reform can be found here.

  All of this is rather sensible, and somewhat removed from the immigrant-bashing, Thatcherite-plus rhetoric of the majority of UKIP's leadership. Douglas Carswell and Nigel Farage have seemed strange bedfellows since the beginning, but now with the election campaign beginning in earnest, the differences between the two may become more important.

  It is far too early to say whether the fault lines of some future split have emerged, but one thing is clear: Douglas Carswell is a UKIPper apart.

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.

Politicians: They Won't Change Unless We Make Them

For decades, and particularly since the expenses scandal of 2009, politicians have grown steadily more despised - but why should they change?

  An ICM poll, published in the Guardian on October the 13th, gave us some interesting information on the state of politics in October 2014. The party polling itself was fairly standard fare - the only real point to note is the expected 5-point increase in UKIP's share in the wake of Douglas Carswell's election in Clacton - but more interesting is the data on the leaders' personal ratings, shown below:

  One point to raise straightaway is the absence of two individuals: Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party (expected, due to the outrageous anti-Green media bias) and Nick Clegg. Clegg's absence is particularly telling - it demonstrates the total lack of regard given to the now-decimated Liberal Democrats. But more important still is the data itself.

  Notice the numbers on the graphs. It will not escape your notice that they are all significantly below zero. Now, it is clear that certain leaders have strengths in certain areas: Farage leads significantly on perceived ability to understand the public and on perceived honesty, while Miliband is clearly ahead on looking after the interests of the many over the few. 

  Farage's party, then, will use these data to improve their anti-establishment credentials; Labour will (cautiously, so as to avoid cries of 'evil socialism) capitalise on the sense that they, not UKIP, are the true party of the working classes. Cameron will do his best not to mention them at all. But none of these approaches get to the real heart of the matter - and why would they? It is in the interests of all the neoliberal parties not to raise this question. So It's going to have to be me.

  The question is this: Why are our politicians so awful that we are having to differentiate between different degrees of negative publicity just to draw out some meaningful comparison?

  At the end of the day, it shouldn't matter that Ed Miliband is only 10 points below par at looking after the working classes while Farage and Cameron are 20 points below, because the key thing is this: They are ALL seen as terrible. Even 'anti-establishment', flavour-of-the-month UKIP has a leader seen as generally incapable across these three fairly broad categories. The fact that one leader might be slightly less bad than the other two should be irrelevant. The only reason it isn't is because the leaders are more or less identical, so the minutiae become suddenly vital differentiators.

  Why, then, do our political masters get away with being seen as universally useless? Sadly, the answer is because we let them. This most recent poll makes one thing clear - despite seeing their leaders (two potential Prime Ministers and a potential Deputy Prime Minister) as incompetent, 80% of the population who state they are likely to vote in May 2015 are planning to vote for either Labour, UKIP or the Conservatives. Add in the Lib Dems - whose neoliberal policies make them virtually identical to the other three, despite their current disfavour - and that's 91%.

  Even worse than this overwhelming lemming-style rush towards parties which these data prove we have no enthusiasm for is the number of people planning not to vote at all. The same poll shows that 23% of people rate themselves as 50% certain or less to vote, with 10% saying already that they definitely won't. Results from past elections show that, on average, around a third of voters do not vote on polling day. I've spoken at length about voter apathy before, so i won't wax lyrical about it here, but this also feeds into the overall issue.

  And that issue is this: Politicians won't change, they won't become any better than their current abysmal low, until we make them. And, much as Russell brand would have you believe otherwise, refusing to participate - tempting as it is - will not do that. Neither will voting for parties who espouse the same hypocritical, neoliberal-authoritarian post-Thatcherite political consensus as the Tories - and that includes UKIP as well as Labour and the Lib Dems. 

  The only way to force a change is to get involved. Campaign on issues which animate you, which make your blood boil; speak out when things occur in the world which are unfair; vote when polling day comes around, and for the Greens or the nationalists or any other party which challenges the status quo. But don't limit yourself just to voting - Brand is right about that: the once-every-five-years electoral ballot is the establishment's way of keeping us quiet in between. Fight for the things you deserve and for what you believe in, and maybe - just maybe - we might get some politicians who aren't universally reviled.

  One can but hope.

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.

Europe 2014 - UKIP Rising

Source: UK Polling Report

  In my last post I commented at length about the increasing popularity of UKIP, with particular reference to the upcoming European Parliament Election. Well, UKIP have now overtaken Labour as no.1 party in the pre-election polls for the second time this year, as the graph above shows. The first thing to say about this is that it is by no means conclusive - Labour could quite easily swing back into first place again, and it would not be at all surprising if the two parties switched positions several times between now and the 22nd of May.

  That said, though, it doesn't spell fantastic news for the political mainstream. Taking a look at the wider trends, it would appear that the fluctuating-but-steadily-rising level of support for the far-right party have not been overly damaged by the latest spate of scandals. And they've been particularly bad this time around, including a UKIP candidate telling Lenny Henry to 'emigrate to a black country' and one of the handpicked stars of their first EU election broadcast, Andre Lampitt, launching a tirade of disgusting online abuse, of which perhaps the most shocking example was the claim that 'slavery was an act of war' and that 'you lost stop being so damn jealous and move forward'.

  The fact that BNP leader Nick Griffin defended these comments should really speak for itself.

  So, if Farage and his party can not only withstand negative publicity on this level but actually make political gains whilst it is going on, questions surely have to be asked about just what can stop them. The inexorable rise of the Eurosceptics across Europe poses perhaps the biggest threat to a united, strong and prosperous Europe - and UKIP are no exception. Indeed, their gloss of respectability which groups like Le Pen's Front National and the BNP themselves have been unable to acquire, despite considerable popular support, makes them perhaps the most dangerous threat to the EU of all.

  But perhaps it's not all doom and gloom. Another clear trend revealed by the graph is the improving fortunes of the Green Party. This is not entirely inexplicable - the Greens not only have a eurosceptic streak to them, albeit not nearly so pronounced as UKIP's, but they also represent the same anti-establishment sentiments the 'kippers do. In addition, and most critically, their policies actually make sense and don't include a flat rate of tax - a policy which would spell doom for the working poor and set the upper-middle classes and landed gentry rubbing their hands together with glee.

  To sum up: UKIP are on the rise, the 'big three' have taken a hit and the Greens - challenging the Lib Dems now for fourth place - are set to do better than ever. Something to think about, at any rate.



POSTSCRIPT
This is entirely unrelated but very interesting. No-one else seems to have picked up on this, but yesterday on the Andrew Marr show, this little exchange was heard:

     ANDREW MARR: 
          And you’re going to get Boris back in the House of Commons to lead you.  
     JEREMY HUNT: 
          Well that would be wonderful

Freudian slip, perhaps? Time will tell... Meanwhile, Cameron had better watch out...