Both the Tories and Labour have several reasons to be troubled by the Ukip surge – and one to be grateful for it
Depending on who has been speaking, and their taste in hyperbolic metaphors, the surge to Ukip is either a "sea change" in British politics or it is a "seismic event".
To which I say: take a cold shower and calm down. Nigel Farage is understandably elated – and the established parties are naturally stunned – by Ukip's performance in the county council elections, but it is deserving of neither comparisons with earthquakes nor quotes from Shakespeare. A sea change is what happened when Jim Callaghan was booted out by Margaret Thatcher at the general election of 1979 to usher in 18 years of Conservative rule. A seismic event is what occurred when Tony Blair won the general election of 1997 by the largest parliamentary landslide in modern history. On Thursday, Ukip won just shy of a quarter of the votes in local government elections mainly confined to the shires of England, in which a third of the potential electorate turned out. That is clearly noteworthy, but it is extremely premature to start jabbering that this is a historic turning point.
No doubt Ukip's leader would retort that this is typical of the condescension that his party has received from those who dwell inside the "Westminster bubble". Actually, I've never dismissed them. I forecast many months ago that they were very likely to top the poll in next year's Euro-elections, a prediction that then looked a bit bold, but is now hardening into a consensus expectation. I fully expected the Farageists to do very well in these county contests. My point is that there is a very important difference between a local election upset, even a big one, and events that recast the political landscape forever.
Several forces are at work, some fairly particular to this moment, some more deep-seated, which have been powering Mr Farage's gang. One is the desire of a section of the electorate to thrust an angry two fingers up at the entire political establishment. That urge is especially intense when a government is at midterm, there is a tight squeeze on living standards and there is no great enthusiasm for the principal party of conventional opposition. The beneficiaries in the past were usually the Lib Dems and sometimes other parties, such as the BNP and the Greens and Ukip itself, which did very well at the Euro-elections of 2004 and 2009 only to fizzle out by the time of the general elections a year later. Since the Lib Dems made the transition from party of protest to party of government, that vote has been in need of a new way of expressing itself.
Before Thursday, Mr Farage seemed generally content to accept the idea that his party was principally a party of protest, suggesting his main aim was not to win parliamentary seats but to draw the other parties, especially the Tories, on to his agenda. In the wake of the results, he has been emboldened to claim they are an endorsement of his party's "positive policy solutions".
I don't think so, Nigel. I have a hunch that Ukip did not attract support because of its plans for the health service or its industrial strategy. Actually, it is more than a hunch. Polling of Ukip voters by YouGov finds that less than 10% of them back the party because they think it "would run the country well" and more than 60% say a main reason to support Ukip is because they are "unhappy with the major parties" or want to "send a message".
The arrival of four-party politics in England, something the Welsh and the Scots have been used to for more than a generation, certainly poses big challenges for those established parties. Ukip voters are not coming only from the Tories, but their principal effect is to split the vote on the right. The Conservatives, who did such a good job of persuading people to reject electoral reform in the referendum two years ago, may live to regret not embracing the alternative vote.
The Tories are more confused and divided than ever about how to respond. They have tried attacking Ukip, but labelling them as "clowns", even if often true, only seems to enhance their appeal as an anti-establishment party. The new Tory line, scripted from the top, is to be polite. So they are now fruitcakes whom the prime minister "respects".
The right of his party are predictably clamouring for David Cameron to get into an auction for Ukip voters. Here they go again. Be tougher on immigration. Slash even deeper at welfare. Scrap gay marriage. Harden up or advance the pledge to hold a referendum on membership of the European Union. They clearly did not notice that chasing after Ukip voters is exactly what the Tories did during the local election campaign. There was the clumsy announcement of the termination of international aid to South Africa, noises about toughening up prison regimes and cracking down harder on welfare and immigration, and suggestions of firming up the pledge on a EU referendum – all moves designed to woo the Ukip-inclined. The Tories tried the same at the Eastleigh byelection and it didn't work then either. As I've remarked before, you can't outkip the Kippers. If Mr Cameron succumbs to the internal pressure to move right, he risks further diminishing the appeal of the Tory party to the centrist voters without whom he cannot possibly hope to win a general election in 2015.
The better Tory strategy would be to focus on the fact that Nigel Farage is not going to become prime minister. This won't stop him demanding a place in any televised leaders' debate, but I would wager as many pints as he can drink between now and May 2015 that he is not going to be kissing hands with the Queen. The majority of Ukip voters tell pollsters that the Conservatives are their second-choice party. That gives Tories reasonable grounds to hope that many can be won back at a general election, when they will present the choice as a binary one between David Cameron and Ed Miliband. There is only one problem with this strategy. It requires the Tories to keep their heads and holding their nerve is something they find hard to do for two minutes, never mind two years.
In terms of what they indicate about political enthusiasm and momentum, these elections are also troubling for Labour. Ed Miliband's people can point to some encouraging performances in key battleground areas in southern England such as Harlow in Essex and Hastings in Sussex. But Labour's overall performance was underwhelming. While most obviously a threat to the Tories, Ukip is also attracting support from less affluent, traditionally Labour voters. What ought to worry Ed Miliband a lot is that these "squeezed middle" voters are precisely the people whom he has been targeting for nearly three years now. A significant slice of them prefer Mr Farage's beer-swilling, right-wing populism to the Labour leader's theorising about a new paradigm of capitalism. Sticking the Labour leader on a pop-up soap box – it is actually a pallet – has not solved the problem. A lesson for Labour to learn from the Ukip leader is that it is essential to translate ideas and policy into accessible language that can be sold on the doorstep.
It is for the Lib Dems that these results have the most paradoxical implications. They lost another slew of councillors and were humiliated at the South Shields byelection, coming in seventh, only just ahead of the Monster Raving Loonies. Yet in terms of the larger picture, there are a few glimmers of encouragement for Nick Clegg's party. They did better in areas where they hold parliamentary seats. Neither the Tories nor Labour show a convincing capacity to mobilise enough voters behind them to justify any confidence that they can win a parliamentary majority. That is a strong pointer towards the next general election producing another hung parliament.
The big challenge for all the established parties is how to deal with the "anti-politics" mood that Ukip is feeding off, the resentment felt by many voters that Britain is run in their own interests and those of their friends by a lookalike metropolitan elite who are all implicated in the economic mess. It is quite amusing that this vote should flow to Ukip. Its leader is a very well-paid MEP, who is never backward in putting in for his expenses, the son of a stockbroker who went to private school, used to trade commodities and likes to prance around in a green Barbour and a fedora. Ukip's treasurer, Stuart Wheeler, is a multimillionaire old Etonian who lives in a Jacobean castle. These are rather unlikely characters to be the tribunes of the people against the political class that Ukip claims to despise.
Ukip may be inhabited by oddballs, the unsavoury and worse, but there is one sense in which the mainstream parties should be grateful to this particularly English way of protesting. Across Europe, austerity is fuelling a revolt against the political establishment that is manifesting itself in surges of support for the hard left or the far right – parties such as Marine Le Pen's Front National in France and the fascist Golden Dawn in Greece. We will have done well if Ukip is as ugly as it ever gets here.
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