The Clacton MP is thoughtful, polite, and thinks we could let more asylum seekers into Britain. As Ukip prepares for its annual conference, is he sure he’s in the right party? A few short days before the special conference at which Jeremy Corbyn will be anointed leader of the Labour party, I stand in a queue for coffee at the House of Commons with Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s only MP. It’s quite a long queue, and while we wait, we discuss Corbyn’s imminent elevation, about which it would be something of an understatement to say Carswell is excited. “The Corbynistas are part of something big,” he says, cheeks pinking. “You might call it a European-wide phenomenon. But I think it’s even bigger than that. They’ll hate me for saying this, but they’ve a lot in common with those in America who support Donald Trump. Both are dissatisfied with the status quo. Both are fed up with a corporatist economy and a parasitical political elite. Both are backward-looking. Both believe this one man can fix everything. What we must ask ourselves is: what is it that the political system has done that has allowed them to get as far as they have?” As the line inches forward, this question hangs in the air, unanswered. Carswell has momentarily stopped speaking, and for the time being, I don’t press him. It seems neither one of us is prepared to tackle The System without the aid of caffeine. Carswell sees Cornbyn as a miraculous double whammy, politically speaking. On the one hand, he thinks Corbyn’s leadership will, in the end, “see off Fabianism for ever”, the very idea of which fills him with undisguised glee. On the other, there is the prospect that the Labour leader will boost what he calls the “tapestry” of opposition to Europe in the build-up to the EU referendum (Carswell takes succour from the fact that although Corbyn, under pressure from the media, has rowed back from his once-stated view that the Union’s treatment of Greece is justification for a potential exit, some of the shadow cabinet are clearly more cool on Europe than their predecessors: John McDonnell, the new shadow chancellor, has said, for instance, that Labour will only take a view on the EU referendum once David Cameron has presented his reform package). Won’t it be odd to make common cause – should such a thing indeed happen – with someone whose politics are so radically different from his own? (By now, we’re sitting down, macchiatos in hand.) “Well, I get on very well with Jeremy. Weirdly enough, my mobile was on the green bench beside me before the recess, and he leaned across and said: ‘Someone has left their phone here.’ He could hardly believe it when I told him it was mine because there were all these stickers on it, put there by my six-year-old. Look, my politics are 180 degrees different to his. But this is the point. If we’re a self-governing democracy [ie if Britain votes to leave the EU], voters can then decide if they want Corbynism or not. The key thing is that all the people in the No campaign want a better relationship with Europe, not that they have one single blueprint of how Britain should be governed.” Continue reading...
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