The Rotherham fostering row and a Tory report suggesting an electoral pact have given a boost to Nigel Farage's party
Gosh, Christmas has come early for Ukip's leader, Nigel Farage. Still only November and he's opened two presents already: the gift-of-a-row over the foster parents case in byelection Rotherham on Saturday, and then a Conservative party report suggesting that David Cameron sign a non-aggression pact with Farage's stop-the-world-we-want-to-get-off party before the 2015 general election.
Admittedly the report was written by Michael Fabricant, the likeable MP for Lichfield, famous for his blonde wigs, whose authorship would require us to take him seriously, a word I have not previously heard attached to Fabricant in thought or deed, nice, herbivorous man though this former DJ – known as "Mickey Fab" – undoubtedly is. Cameron has an electoral problem with Ukip – but should know by now that appeasement is not the answer.
Never mind, the Fab plan is a straw in the wind, making life and party management harder for No 10. And, as the estimable Helen Pidd reports in Monday's Guardian, the conduct of Rotherham social services department in taking three children away from a local couple because they are Ukip members has given a boost to Jane Collins, the party's candidate in Thursday's contest to succeed Labour's expenses-disgraced MP, Denis MacShane.
Everyone from Cameron and Ed Miliband down has rushed to denounce Rotherham social services, always an easy target – damned when it intervenes and damned when it doesn't – so my natural instinct is to defend it from the mob. It's difficult. What the social workers did was quite improper in principle – judging a highly experienced and mature couple's suitability to foster on their political beliefs.
But it was also very stupid in practice.
Ukip is not a racist party in the way that the BNP or the English Defence League (EDL) are racist parties, boasting an avowedly racist analysis reinforced by a propensity for criminal violence and a misplaced admiration for the little Austrian chappie with the pencil moustache (not just in Movember either!) who made such a hash of everything he touched.
When an irritated Cameron called Ukippers "fruitcakes and loonies, and closet racists, mostly" he was wrong. He was also showing his unattractive, metropolitan and elitist side. Remember that his life has been lived entirely inside a golden triangle between his smart constituency in Witney, west of Oxford, his family home in Peasemore in west Berkshire and Westminster, most of it affluent enough not to encounter many Ukip types.
No, Ukip is essentially a lower-middle-class nationalist party in the same way as the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Artur Mas's CiU (which got an electoral kicking in Catalonia overnight) or assorted parties are in Northern Ireland – and in many other places. They embrace an ideal – a panacea, says me – which says "if only we were free of London, Brussels, Madrid, Ottawa" (etc) life would be simpler and wonderful.
It's a romantic view. Nothing wrong with that except when it collides with real life. I always find Ukip conferences rather jolly in a saloon bar sort of way. I'm sure it must have closet racists in the ranks. So do most parties – make that all parties? – but in my experience they usually hide it when they spot a Guardian reporter. The Tory MP who once gave me a lift and said "shall I run her over?" as a black woman crossed the road was just trying to wind me up.
Back to social services. Though politicians and newspapers were united – usually a bad sign – in condemning Rotherham, the fact is that social services do this sort of daft thing quite a lot. They exclude would-be foster parents or adopters for all sorts of dubious reasons, including race, religion and culture, along with age, admittedly a more sensible issue, but one that should be flexibly deployed since some older folk are ferociously tough and too experienced to be judged by a spotty 25-year-old.
Successive governments have promised to shake up the system, well illustrated by this story in – where else? – the Daily Mail. But it's harder than it looks and the public's – ie Fleet Street's - contrary obsession with risk aversion makes it harder.
Social service bureaucracy put in place to protect vulnerable children sometimes gives the impression of being better at enforcing its own foolish precepts about racial or religious sensibilities than spotting a psychotic but cunning paedophile or would-be child killer. We can all remember such cases, just as we can recall the liberal race "experts" who insist race matters in adoption cases but deny that it's a factor when teenage girls are being groomed and sexually abused in Lancashire.
When it broke in the Telegraph my first suspicion was that the Rotherham case was a put-up job, designed to improve Collins's outside chance of becoming Ukip's first properly elected MP, part of the wider revulsion against the main parties. That seems to be wrong. This was a real decision which Rotherham social services botched this month after a lace curtain twitcher's tipoff about the foster couple's shift from Labour to Ukip. The South Yorkshire Stasi strikes again, though we should await the inquiry reports to be sure of the full facts.
That doesn't mean that Nigel Farage MEP, a very sharp operator, didn't seize his chance with both hands. Who would not have done the same in his position? What's more the second Mrs Farage is German. No wonder he's sensitive to east European kids being abandoned in Rotherham, fostered, then taken away again!
As for Mickey Fab's plan to reunite "warring brothers" by offering a Tory-Ukip electoral pact – Ukip won't stand against Tories who commit to an early in/out referendum on Europe and Farage gets a ministerial job – it's not wrong as such to float such ideas. Political parties get up to all sorts of deals, usually because their voters force them to – then blame the politicians for the consequences.
They have been doing so every day since forcing the creation of the 2010 Lib-Con coalition. Yes, I know you may be muttering: "I didn't vote for a coalition." But you did, we all did. If you don't give one party a majority, that's what you have done; either coalition or even shakier minority government which would have alarmed the feather-brained financial markets in the Greek meltdown of 2010.
So a deal with Ukip would not be a crime. But would it be a good idea? Myself, I doubt it for several reasons. For starters the liberal wing of the Tory party might look at the Lib Dems and decide they would be happier there – as they might if they don't mind spoiling their careers. For a second reason the right wing of the Tory party is pretty hard to manage as things are.
An informal coalition with the Ukippers – as Jackie Ashley points out here – might make the party unfit for purpose, the purpose being to govern the UK during times of immense economic stress with – as the IFS again reminded us all on Monday – no end of the distress in sight. Ukip is wedded to a world view that there is a "commonsense" solution to everything, including Europe (we just leave).
Common sense applied by practical men is often a better guide to life than academic treatise, as the Black Swan breeder Nassim Nicholas Taleb is saying again on his current book tour of Britain. But it's never enough and Ukip policies rarely add to the sum of human wisdom. They merely act as corrective to the high-minded folly of Whitehall (or Rotherham social services department).
Even Boris Johnson, whose political talent is to combine high intelligence with populist buffoonery, knows this.
As the Guardian reports on Monday, Mayor Boris admits that the European question is more complicated than an in/out referendum question can encompass. Heavens be praised! Boris has built his hugely successful career on bogus posturing over the EU, never quite as Eurosceptic as the headline when you read the small print.
Leaving the EU, flawed and ineffectual though it so often is, to breathe the bracing free air of the North Atlantic alone is an illusion in 2012 and will be more of one in 2013 – and beyond. There's nothing in EU rules which stops Tory or Ukip panacea-peddlers from deploying their entrepreneurial skills to export to Brazil or China if they really want to do so.
My hunch is that they just want to sit in the pub and talk about it until the lights go out.
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