The United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) has seen support surge, most recently in the 28 February Eastleigh by-election where it won 11,571 votes â 27.8%, an increase of 24%, and enough to beat the Tories into third place.
Last year, in the Croydon North by-election, Ukip polled 1,400 votes, an increase of 4%. In Rotherham, it won 4,648 votes (21.67%), coming second. In Middlesbrough, it also finished second with 1,990 votes (11.8%).
In a recent YouGov poll the party showed 12% overall support â equal third with the Liberal Democrats.
The trends suggest that Ukip stands a good chance of gaining the most votes of any party at next yearâs European Parliament elections.
A great deal of debate has taken place in the mainstream press about whether Ukipâs recent electoral gains were just âprotest votesâ, rather than indicators of the party consolidating a longer-term, loyal base. If the vote was an expression of âprotestâ, the questions are: who was doing the protesting, what were they protesting about, and in the name of what alternative?
A study into Ukipâs vote at the 2009 European elections, where they came second to Labour and won 16.1% of the vote, argued that Ukipâs âcore supportersâ are âa poorer, more working-class, and more deeply discontented group who closely resemble supporters of the BNP and European radical right parties.â
The BNP would sometimes pitch âto the leftâ; leader Nick Griffin claimed in 2002 that his party was âthe only socialist party in Britainâ, and the BNPâs local work often has an explicitly âworking-classâ edge and includes opposition to cuts to local services. Ukipâs pitch is different.
Where the BNP might demagogically and disingenuously attack Labour for abandoning white workers, Ukipâs leader Nigel Farage focuses on attacking David Cameron for not being conservative enough. The Tories failed in Eastleigh, Farage said, because âtraditional Tory voters look at Cameron and ask themselves: is he a Conservative? And they conclude, no, he is not. He is talking about gay marriage, wind turbines, unlimited immigration from India, he wants Turkey to join the EU.â The Daily Mailâs Peter Hitchens described Ukip as âthe Thatcherite Tory Party in exileâ. Ukip wants compulsory âworkfareâ schemes for anyone on benefits, greater privatisation in education, and a part-privatised ânational health insuranceâ model to replace the NHS.
But despite its right-wing pitch, figures in the Independent show that more than 40% of Ukip supporters oppose the Toriesâ cap on tax credits and benefits, 43% want increased spending on public services, and more Ukip supporters than Lib Dem supporters believe that âthe government is cutting too deeplyâ. There is a potentially unstable contradiction between Ukipâs ultra-Tory policies and the instincts of some of its working-class supporters.
It would be patronising and complacent, though, to believe that working-class people who vote Ukip do so simply to express a vague âprotestâ without any real understanding of or belief in what the party stands for. It is dangerous to imagine that if some left-wing electoral vehicle can replicate Ukipâs populist pitch (but from the left), we can repeat their success.
The Socialist Party-led Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) stood in the Rotherham, Middlesbrough, and Eastleigh by-elections on as âpopulistâ a pitch as one could wish for â a lowest-common-denominator anti-cuts appeal. TUSC came out of the âNo2EUâ coalition, an attempt to tap into anti-EU and anti-migrant sentiment âfrom the leftâ. TUSC polled 620 votes in total across the three by-elections, less than half of Ukipâs lowest single score. Unfortunately Ukipâs vote represents a layer of anti-migrant, anti-Europe feeling amongst working-class people â which the left needs to relate to with a serious long-term political campaign based on socialist ideas and emphasising working-class unity.
Peter Woodhouse, a Ukip-voting train driver and former Labour supporter interviewed in the Guardian, said: âOne of the reasons I voted for Ukip is immigration. Iâm worried about the dropping of the barrier in January. I fully expect 2-4 million Bulgarians and Romanians to come over. Whatâs it going to be like? Weâre a small island.â Sarah Holt, a shopworker, said: âThey have talked to me about their policies and I agree with a lot of what they have told me. Thereâs going to be more and more foreigners coming in and taking everything from us. Itâs diabolical.â
Although senior Tories like Kenneth Clarke have warned against a rightwards lurch in response to Ukipâs success, a cabinet committee met on 5 March to examine âwide-ranging plansâ to restrict Bulgarian and Romanian immigration to Britain without breaching EU law.
But, critically, where is the Labour Party, the wider labour movement, and the left? Eastleigh was a dismal showing for Labour, finishing fourth in a by-election while in opposition for the first time in nearly 15 years.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was set to unveil a new immigration policy on Thursday 7 March, and while it is focusing on âcrackdownsâ on employers who exploit migrants, previous âcrackdownsâ have been used as cover to deport migrant workers rather than level up their conditions.
The far-left is politically hamstrung on the issue, having been desperately attempting to give a progressive gloss to anti-EU sentiment for years. The âNo2EUâ coalition even attacked âthe so-called âfree movement of labourââ, and âthe social dumping of migrant labourâ. A speech by the then-RMT President Alex Gordon to a 2011 conference of the âPeopleâs Movementâ (an Irish anti-EU coalition) argued for restrictions on immigration on the basis that continued âmass migrationâ would âfeed the poison of racism and fascismâ.
The left needs more than a change of approach or tactics; it needs a change of politics. Attempting to convince Ukip-supporting workers that their anti-migrant and anti-EU feeling would be better and more progressively expressed by voting for some left-social-democratic electoral formation (Respect, No2EU, TUSC, next?) than for Ukip is a dead-end.
We need to convince workers of an alternative set of ideas<, that the enemy is not âEuropeâ but capitalist austerity, and that the answer to fears about increased migration putting a strain on jobs, wages, and services is not to restrict migration but to organise all workers â British-born and migrant â to fight for the levelling up of conditions to provide living wages, decent jobs, housing, and public services for all. The labour movement needs an emergency plan that can unite workers across Europe to fight for working-class policies against the policies of austerity.
Winning working-class people to that fight is the only way to stop and reverse the rise of Ukip.
⢠Sign this statement â âEqual rights for migrant workers!â