The Tories, doing less well than they should be, are running scared of challenging what Nigel Farage's crew stands for
When they hear the screams of rage of the United Kingdom Independence party, leftwingers and liberals are tempted to label them as cries from a "far right". It is not a hysterical charge, at first glance. Ukip is to the right of the Tory party. Among its members are people who you wouldn't want exercising power over your life or anyone else's.
Take Julia Gasper, former chairman (not "chairwoman or "chair" or "chairperson", because to suggest that Ms Gasper isn't a man would be political correctness gone mad) of Ukip's Oxford branch. She licensed every kind of dumb prejudice when she said: "As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the subject."
But here's a disconcerting point for those who want to chant anti-Nazi slogans at Nigel Farage. He condemned Gasper and obliged her to step down. Ukip followed up by suspending a party web forum where racists discussed the inferiority of blacks. No truly extreme-right party behaves like that. Ukip is not neo-Nazi like the BNP or Golden Dawn. Unlike the French National Front or Italian National Alliance, it has no roots in the fascist or collaborationist movements of the 20th century. Ukip is a party of the reactionary right, not the radical right, and it's worth understanding the difference.
Radicals believe the modern world is on their side. The fascists of the 1930s thought they were riding the wave of the future. The free marketeers who flourished from the 1980s until the crash thought that modernity and neo-liberalism were at one. Reactionaries loathe the present. "Modern" is an insult on their lips and nostalgia their dominant emotion. They want to return to the time of their youth, which they convince themselves was purer and better than the present. Ukip is not far right: it is the political wing of the Daily Mail; the noise from a Devon pub when the landlord locks in the regulars; the ideas your parents air when they think no one is listening.
Look at its programme. It wants to leave the EU and recreate an independent Britain. Ukip members never worry that the Scots and Welsh may not agree to go back to the future with them. It wants to make this a country where sturdy men (and women, I suppose) can keep their money by merging the basic income tax with national insurance to create a 31% flat tax on incomes over £11,500. (And abolish national insurance for employers.) Yet, as it cuts state revenues, Ukip wants to double the prison population and boost the income of pensioners (its core constituency) and, presumably, pay off the national debt, too. It wants to slash immigration so Britain will once more be a land where you can walk the streets without passing black and brown faces. Yet Farage admits we need skilled migrants. As for a macro-economic policy, it does not have one.
The Ukip programme makes no sense to reasonable people. But the crash and euro crisis have made reasonable people look like fools. We should count ourselves fortunate that the reactionary right, rather than the radical right, is benefiting from the collapse of the centre ground and look at who is sniffing around its supporters.
I wrote last week in the Spectator about the Tories' apparently dire position. The Westminster consensus was that they had had their best fortnight in months. They put themselves on the side of hard-working Britons in the welfare debate and painted Labour as the party of layabouts. Then Mrs Thatcher died and, like a grating old song on Radio 2, the bourgeois triumphalism of the 80s filled the airwaves. The Conservatives had saved Britain, made it fit to compete in the modern world, produced the greatest peacetime prime minister since 1945, since 1900, since as far back as anyone could remember.
Yet the eruption of favourable propaganda has done the Tories no good. Last Thursday, they recorded their lowest poll rating ever with YouGov: Con 28%; Lab 42%; Lib Dem 12%, Ukip 11%. I am not saying Britain has turned red. YouGov's Joe Twyman says the coalition isn't doing badly for a government in midterm during a recession. Labour ought to be worried it isn't further ahead. Still, the clock ticks and the days roll by. Soon, we will move from midterm to endgame and the temptation for the right is to look at those poll numbers, add the Conservative and Ukip figures together and notice that gets them up to 39% of the vote, just like that.
What we call the "Tory press" – parts of it are more the Ukip press – yearns for the party to move rightwards and forget about centrist voters. Cameron promises a referendum on Europe and fights a byelection in Eastleigh in which no one can tell the difference between the Tory and the Ukip candidates.
I don't believe begging reactionaries for their support will work for him – and not just because YouGov, and every other researcher who has looked at Ukip voters, says they are protest voters, not Tories in disguise who can be coaxed back. In the 2005 general election, I learned a hard lesson when George Galloway stood against Labour's Oona King in Tower Hamlets. As I despised Galloway, and had an equal contempt for the far-left Socialist Workers Party and Islamist Muslim Brotherhood that backed his campaign, I helped King get the vote out.
I knew she was finished from the moment her activists briefed the volunteers. We were not to criticise Galloway. We were not to tell Muslim voters that he supported tyrants who had massacred Muslims by the hundred thousand. We were to coax his voters to Labour by saying that a vote for Galloway would let in the Tories – in the East End of London, of all places. Labour was too scared to take on its opponent and duly lost.
The Tories are as frightened of taking on Ukip. They don't want to ridicule Farage, to say he offers no plan for a workable future, because they are frightened of alienating the reactionary rightwing press and their own reactionary backbenchers and activists. It is Cameron's fear, rather than any faith in the opinion polls or admiration for the statesmanlike qualities of Ed Miliband, that suggests to me the Conservatives may be in more trouble than they seem.
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