Britain’s Pat Buchanan Party, by Timothy Stanley. From January 2015.
A fascinating thing about the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP): the worse its press, the better it does. …
The sheer disgust that many liberals direct at UKIP reflects the fact that Britain is undergoing a culture war. On the side of ordinary folk with old-fashioned tastes is UKIP. Pitched against them is the entire edifice of the metropolitan elite located in the nicer bits of London: the mainstream parties, big business, and the media.
That this battle is taking place is no shock to anyone with eyes and ears. But that UKIP has become the people’s party is a real surprise, considering its beginnings on the marginal, eccentric right. …
Farage’s populism helped UKIP reach out to working-class voters who typically stuck with the left. All the time that journalists—such as myself—were characterizing UKIP as the party of the wealthy country-club set, the party was quietly capitalizing upon the growing sense that Labour had lost its soul. …
Yet this mix of left- and right-wing ideas makes perfect sense if you see yourself as the representative not of an ideological tradition but of a particular constituency—the constituency of people who once had something but who feel they’ve lost it, and they want it back. …
It is often said, with little proof, that UKIP voters want to turn Britain back to the 1950s. To which one has to ask, “And why not?” Who wouldn’t want to return to an era of world power, mass church attendance, and jobs for life? …
Therein lies UKIP’s problem: it has a ceiling to its support that is defined by popular perceptions of its respectability. Polls show that the number of voters who admire the party is dwarfed by those who strongly dislike it. In some parts of the country, it is toxic. When Nigel Farage visited Scotland during its recent independence campaign, he was booed, threatened, and forced to hide out in a pub—which may have been a blessing in disguise. Paradoxically, while the rise of UKIP has illustrated the failure of mainstream politics, its limited success has demonstrated the establishment’s stubborn resilience. UKIP, like Buchanan-style populism, has probably gone as far as it can go. The establishment, in turn, has been squeezed as far as it will permit its own humiliation. All the money, the power, the influence, and, critically, the electoral system itself, still favor the status quo.
That’s changed now.
