The genie called UKIP

“Adam and Eve
were made for each other,
In sex there is no fall.
It was Cain who sinned
by killing his brother
O heed the Muezzin’s call!”
From The Waist Band by Bachchoo

The newspapers in Britain say the campaigning for the 2015 general election has begun. There is, to adapt a discredited phrase, a white man lurking in the woodpile. In other words there is a political threat to all parties from an ideology that is, in decent circles, unmentionable.
It is a genie that has escaped from the political bottle and is now addressing the British electorate and getting a response. Genies pop questions: What does the princess wish? This particular genie is called the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), formed by one Nigel Farage, a dissident Tory. UKIP relentlessly asks the electorate a few rhetorical questions to which they provide the answers:
“Do you want Britain to be its own master and make its own laws?”
“Do you want Britain to withdraw from the European Union immediately?”
The prompted answer to both questions is “Yes”.
A further question is cleverly framed. It asks whether the British Parliament should have the absolute power to determine who enters Britain’s borders, for how long and for what purpose. UKIP is careful to avoid making overtly racist or xenophobic statements but the party’s single policy, which stands out because it has no others, appeals to what it calculates is the latent racism and xenophobia of the British people.
If the party was not burdened with appealing to a democratic electorate or if it was speaking to the faithful from a platform in, say, Nuremberg, the questions would be framed differently. The followers would be asked how and how soon they wanted all foreigners banned from this green and pleasant land. The subsequent question would be how and how soon some of the immigrants now living here should be encouraged to go back from whence they came.
The implementation of these wishes depends on leaving the European Union. With this withdrawal credo, UKIP has, in the last local elections, in two parliamentary byelections and in several opinion surveys, made some headway with the British public. It hasn’t gained a single seat in Parliament but has had several councillors elected to local municipal bodies. The party startled Britain when in byelections its vote overtook that of the Liberal Democrats who contribute 50 members of Parliament (MP) to the governing coalition.
UKIP, the surveys found, took most of its votes from disillusioned Tories, but it also attracted voters who traditionally owed allegiance to and voted for the Labour Party.
Alarmists analysing this statistic concluded that former socialists, given the ideological opportunity, would stand unveiled as their crypto-fascist selves. That is, of course, nonsense.
The Tory party has had to take note of this UKIP bogey lurking behind it. One maverick Tory MP, Nadine Dories, has announced that she is willing in the next election to stand, if both parties endorse her, as a joint Tory-UKIP candidate. She boldly maintains that at least 11 sitting Tory MPs have said they would follow her lead and stand as joint-party candidates.
Rattled by the defection of Tory rank and file a deputy chair of the Tories reportedly called the stalwarts of constituency parties “swivel-eyed loons”. He and British Prime Minister David Cameron subsequently denied that this was their opinion, but the damage was done.
Even so, it was, for me, as vivid an image as that of dancing daffodils.
The Tory leadership has attempted to negate the appeal of UKIP by announcing their own measures to limit the rights of entry of immigrants and their access to welfare benefits.
Mr Cameron, caught between keeping Britain’s economy solvent and buoyant and the swivel-eyed loons among his base, has attempted to appear “hard” on the European Union and has announced in guardedly vague terms what he would demand from Brussels.
His reaction is by no means unexpected. There is an elephant in his front room and if he attacks and attempts to kill it he will be lumbered with removing its insistent bulk, so he chooses to lure it out into the open with the bait of luscious hay, bananas or whatever elephants like eating.
Labour MP Ed Miliband and the leadership of the Labour Party have also taken note of the fact that UKIP is capturing part of their votebank. Their stance so far has been to sound as tough on protecting the borders of Britain as they can without committing themselves to any policy which may seem overtly racist or swivel-eyedly chauvinistic.
Mr Miliband’s deeper problem is that the only policies Labour can offer the electorate are modified Tory or Liberal ones. The party professes that it can manage the economy better than the coalition. They want to be known as being nicer to women, gay people, disabled people and… well, they don’t quite want to say they’ll be generous to immigrants!
Labour began as a party to fight for the rights and advancement of the working classes. Their main instruments of political advance were the trade unions that fought for better pay and conditions. They won decisive victories and their appeal to broader humanitarian, socialistic policies, within the confines of a capitalist economy, projected them into government several times in the last century.
Then globalisation came. Bangladeshi textiles, for instance, were cheaper than those manufactured in Yorkshire. The mills closed. There were no textile workers’ unions left. So with other industries. Though the Union movement still exists and millions of workers are members of it, they are employed in sectors whose wage bill is paid through the government budget or in sectors which have to compete internationally.
Promising an advance in the wages and conditions of the former conflicts with balancing the tax and expenditure budget of government. Advancing the wages and conditions of the latter drives capital out of the UK to places where labour is cheaper. It leaves one proclaiming an impasse for labour and feeling sorry for
Mr Miliband.