UKIP

9 Key excerpts on "UKIP"

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  The Politics of the Right

  Socialist Register 2016

  • Leo Panitch, Greg Albo(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Monthly Review Press

    (Publisher)

  This was an election won by the right, but not in the way the media suggested. It was not a case of a resurgent Conservative Party, but of changing alignments. The share of the vote for both Labour and the Conservatives barely altered between 2010 (29 per cent and 36.1 per cent, respectively) and 2015 (30.4 per cent and 36.9 per cent). UKIP, however, increased its vote from 3.1 per cent to 12.6 per cent. Deploying a political strategy which I will call ‘counter-transformism’, UKIP consolidated the right wing, energized it, hardened its positions, polarized the debate to the right, and kept a weak Labour leadership on the defensive. With the petty bourgeoisie as its bedrock, UKIP assembled an impressive, cross-class coalition, with moderate advances into the Liberal and Labour vote. It has extended beyond its typical conservative southern England strongholds to the Labour-voting northeast, northwest and South Wales. Only in Scotland, where Labour is the main party of British nationalism, and Northern Ireland, where British nationalism has more locally rooted variants, are UKIP absent.

  UKIP achieved this in part by modifying its rightist ideology with more populist interpellations; yet the UKIP vote was overwhelmingly a right-wing vote. Farage used his national television coverage in the final run of the campaign to campaign from the hard right. By vituperating against ‘foreigners with HIV’, he consolidated his core rather than appealing to moderates. UKIP was the most dynamic force in this election, increasing its vote more than any other party: quite an accomplishment for a party derided by Cameron as ‘fruitcakes’ a decade ago. Even so, within a week of this triumph, the leadership of UKIP was in turmoil. Disgruntled leadership elements attacked Farage and demanded his resignation. That success so quickly led to the brink of ruin points to the fragility of the UKIP project, straining with contradictions only barely managed through fortune, influential support, and Farage’s considerable skill.

  ORIGINS: THE CONSERVATIVE SPLIT OVER EUROPE

  UKIP represents a profound realignment in modern Conservatism. Originating as a split in the Conservative base, its metastasis has been fuelled by a long-term and continuing crisis in the Conservative Party. The old, distinctive blend of British nationalism, racism, social authoritarianism and economic liberalism that worked wonders for Thatcher, no longer avails the Conservatives. But those voters still exist, and UKIP has emerged to organize them.

  UKIP has its origins in an attempt by the Thatcherite historian Alan Sked to lobby the Tories from a hard Eurosceptic position. Sked’s basic orientation was to defend a highly Atlanticist, ‘free market’ British capitalism against European integration. Mrs Thatcher’s famous Bruges speech in September 1988 expressed this credo well: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level’.2 In anticipation of the Maastricht Treaty, Sked founded the Anti-Federalist League to stand against pro-European Tories. The early campaign was a shambles, with the League relying on support from the old racist Enoch Powell, and falling back on traditional nationalist exhortations that Britain faced its worst threat ‘since Adolf Hitler’.3

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  The Nested Games of Brexit

  • Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Pauline Schnapper, Simon Usherwood, Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Pauline Schnapper, Simon Usherwood(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Reif and Schmitt 1980 ). For a long time, UKIP was therefore limited to playing a role only in the European elections once every five years.

  Yet, several factors combined to push the party to the first-order game of national politics. First, UKIP undertook a strategic populist shift under the leadership of Nigel Farage: it rebranded its original Euroscepticism by incorporating it into a wider populist narrative, an anti-establishment discourse, while at the same time making immigration the party’s number one priority (Tournier-Sol 2015a ). UKIP successfully connected its core policy on Europe, which was a low salience issue for voters, to immigration, which on the contrary was a high salience issue. This decisive strategic shift was made possible following the expansion of the EU’s free movement zone to Eastern European countries (the A8 countries1 ) in 2004 in the UK.

  This opportunity for UKIP was created by the interplay between the European level and the domestic level (Putnam 1988 ). As argued by Hooghe and Marks, mainstream parties were reluctant to politicize European integration, as the issue cut across traditional left-right cleavages and was therefore potentially divisive, both internally (as for the Conservative party in the 1990s) and electorally (Hooghe and Marks 2009 ). This strategic dilemma was compounded by the fact that mainstream parties had been at the very origin of the project and process of European integration. On the contrary, UKIP seized the opportunity and skillfully capitalized on this politicization, building upon it to devise its own ‘winning formula’ (Kitschelt 1995 ). UKIP was therefore a major agent of the politicization of European integration in the UK, as other comparable tan (traditionalism/authority/nationalism) parties elsewhere in Europe (Hooghe and Marks 2009

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  English Uprising

  Brexit and the Mainstreaming of the Far Right

  • Paul Stocker(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Melville House UK

    (Publisher)

  Yet the collapse of the BNP did not reflect the failure of this group to achieve a political voice, but the beginning of its ascendancy, as UKIP embarked upon a genuinely unprecedented electoral rise following the 2010 general election. We must therefore grapple with the moral quandary that although defeated, many of the BNP’s ideas live on. UKIP ultimately represents the further mainstreaming of political xenophobia which polluted the national debate in the prelude to Brexit.

  Cranks and gadflies

  That UKIP rose to become a significant, radical right-wing populist party which would have a substantial impact on British politics was certainly not inevitable. It began as a single-issue party. UKIP’s origins lie in the febrile debates over Britain’s EU membership in the early 1990s, when Eurosceptic group the Anti-Federalist League was founded by Dr Alan Sked, a historian from the London School of Economics. Sked had previously stood as a candidate for the Liberal Party in 1970, but the Anti-Federalist League would quickly become a home for disgruntled Tories. After an ineffectual first two years, the party was rebranded as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in 1993.

  UKIP sought to recruit Eurosceptics from the right of the Conservative Party, who had seen a series of run-ins with leader and Prime Minister John Major, particularly over the Maastricht bill (which further integrated Britain into the European Community) in May 1992. Its early years would be fruitless – the party was severely prone to infighting and could not agree on an electoral strategy. At its first general election, its vote would be massively overshadowed by millionaire Sir James Goldsmith’s lavishly funded Referendum Party – which essentially ran on the same issue of opposition to the European Union. The Referendum Party won over 800,000 votes, whereas UKIP got just over 100,000, a miserable 0.3 per cent of the vote.

  They were to achieve something of a breakthrough in 1999 during the European parliamentary elections. UKIP benefited from the disbanding of the Referendum Party following Goldsmith’s sudden death in 1997, both in terms of monopolising the Eurosceptic vote and attracting Referendum Party candidates. Profiting from the European proportional representation system, UKIP achieved around 7 per cent of the national vote, which gave them three seats in the European Parliament. The vote provided the party with publicity it had not previously enjoyed. One of UKIP’s first MEPs, a young Nigel Farage, described his first Eurostar commute to his new place of work, beset by BBC cameras: ‘We opened a bottle of champagne, partly just because we wanted to celebrate, partly because it gave us something to do with our mouths other than putting our inexpert feet in them and with our hands other than scratching, nose-picking or whatever.’2

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  Varieties of Populism in Europe in Times of Crises

  • Manuela Caiani, Paolo Graziano, Manuela Caiani, Paolo Graziano(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Shooting the fox? UKIP’s populism in the post-Brexit era Simon Usherwood

  ABSTRACT

  The UK Independence Party (UKIP) has moved from being a single-issue party par excellence to a broader party of protest, taking advantage of wider feelings of discontent and disconnection. However, the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the EU fundamentally challenged its development and operation, by removing a core part of the party’s rationale and identity, and radically shifting the overall political landscape. This paper considers the re-positioning through the referendum period, both rhetorically and organisationally. Drawing on party press releases and media coverage, the paper argues that UKIP has become caught in a set of multiple transformations, pushing it in the longer term towards a more conventionally populist position in a way that carries important resonances for other Eurosceptic parties across the continent.

  One of the defining features of European populism is the wide variety of manifestations found across national systems. This variety moreover cuts across ideological lines, but also programmatic priorities and development over time. While it is right to search for underlying commonalities in this diversity (e.g. Hernández and Kriesi 2016; Mair 2013; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013), it also remains important to recognise that particularities remain and have an impact (Caiani and Graziano 2016; Gidron and Bonikowski 2013). This paper considers precisely this impact, by considering the case of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the wake of the June 2016 UK referendum on membership of the European Union.

  Furthermore, one of the recurring features of populism is its adaptability (see Mény and Surel 2002; Taggart 2000), casting and re-casting its core elements – of ‘the people’ against pernicious ‘elites’ (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2007) – to suit very different situations. Importantly, this is not only an adaption to different national situations, but also to different situations over time within national contexts: populist parties are incomplete and temporary manifestations of underlying structural developments in politics and society. The opportunity structures that present themselves in any national system will change over time, usually gradually but occasionally radically, in part through the actions of the political actors involved (Kitschelt 1986). So it is with UKIP and the radical upheaval of British politics that has come with the decision on Brexit. The party was built on a foundation of a single issue – as seen with other European populist parties (Ivarsflaten 2008) – of opposition to European integration, and this has been the policy it is most associated with in the public’s mind, notwithstanding the growth in importance of a more conventionally exclusionary policy on immigration. With the referendum validating the original policy and securing its core demand, the question that immediately rises for the party is one of whether it has any continuing purpose. UKIP has been successful in mobilising and representing a broad coalition of supporters in the years running up to the referendum for reasons that extended well beyond the European issue (Ford and Goodwin 2014), but it now has to adapt to the apparent removal of that core of its work. As this special issue invites reflection on the changes wrought in Europe in recent years on populism, the central research question is whether Brexit has made UKIP into a more conventionally exclusionary European populist party. This natural experiment thus offers an instructive counterpoint to the disruptive processes found in other European countries (e.g. Lisi et al.

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  None past the post

  Britain at the polls, 2017

  • Nicholas Allen, John Bartle(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  4 The rise and fall of UKIP, 2010–17 Paul Whiteley, Matthew Goodwin and Harold D. Clarke

  It is impossible to understand the outcome of the 2017 general election without reference to the remarkable rise in support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) that occurred during the period of coalition government after the 2010 general election. The high point of UKIP’s success was the referendum on British membership of the European Union (EU) in June 2016. The party’s downfall came only one year later when it was virtually wiped out at the 2017 general election. In 2015 UKIP had fielded 624 candidates and received nearly 13 per cent of the national vote. In 2017, by contrast, it fielded just 377 candidates and its share of the UK vote crashed to 1.8 per cent. In 2015 the party polled at least 10 per cent of the vote in 450 constituencies. In 2017 it achieved this milestone in only two. While UKIP’s growth was rooted in long-term social changes, it has turned out to be a ‘flash’ party, a term political scientists use to describe new parties that are here today and gone tomorrow.1

  In its rise and fall, UKIP resembles the Social Democratic Party (SDP) of the 1980s. The SDP had been formed in 1981 after a widely publicised ideological schism split the Labour Party. Although the SDP quickly became a prominent player, it failed to ‘break the mould’ of British party politics, as its founders intended, and was eventually taken over by the Liberals in the newly formed Liberal Democrats. Its long-term impact was negligible.2 In contrast, UKIP’s impact on British politics has been profound. Its rapid success prompted David Cameron to call a referendum on EU membership, and there is a strong case for arguing that the United Kingdom would not have voted to leave the EU in 2016 without UKIP.

  This chapter has two objectives. The first is to identify the factors that explain the remarkable rise in support for UKIP after the 2010 general election, in particular the party’s electoral success in the 2014 European Parliament elections and 2015 general election, as well as its contribution to the victory for the Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum.3

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  David Cameron and Conservative renewal

  The limits of modernisation?

  • Gillian Peele, John Francis(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  The rise of UKIP not only appeared to threaten the Conservatives’ prospects of winning the 2015 general election, but exposed and added to the longer-term challenges facing the party. For much of the twentieth century, the Conservatives were a national, patriotic party with a cross-class appeal who pursued effective statecraft in office and did not face major challengers on the right. These foundations of Conservative dominance were already crumbling but UKIP’s emergence hastened the process.

  The Conservatives had previously benefitted from party fragmentation to their left while remaining largely unchallenged from the non-extremist right. When new right-of-centre parties did emerge as direct challengers – e.g. Rothermere’s Anti-Waste League or Beaverbrook’s Empire Free Trade Crusade in the interwar years – they were either vanquished or absorbed before they inflicted lasting damage. But the rise of UKIP has opened up a significant schism on the right. Key debates on the right have previously taken place within the Conservative Party, with the most successful challenge from the right to the political orthodoxy coming from Thatcherites. Now, the right is fragmented with UKIP leading a popular insurgency and attracting one of the Conservative right’s radical voices, Douglas Carswell, into its ranks.

  UKIP positioned itself in the political space vacated by the Conservatives’ move towards the centre ground. It offers traditional conservative positions on immigration, defence and education plus economically liberal policies on taxation. Furthermore, UKIP targeted Conservative vulnerabilities on a range of issues, including gay marriage, grammar schools and HS2, where Cameron’s position jars with those of some Conservative voters. Populist messages also feature prominently in UKIP’s narrative, while the low levels of trust that many UKIP voters have in the major parties makes it difficult for the Conservatives to win them over with policy-based appeals.

  Issues concerning identity politics (e.g. patriotism, the Union and Empire) were a Conservative strength for much of the twentieth century, but European integration, immigration and England’s place in the post-devolution UK have proved difficult in recent years (Hayton, 2012

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  Understanding Movement Parties Through their Communication

  • Dan Mercea, Lorenzo Mosca, Dan Mercea, Lorenzo Mosca(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  UKIP stems from the Anti-Federalist League, a cross-party pressure group established in 1991 by British academic Alan Sked, which subsequently evolved into a self-standing political party in 1993. The party lingered at the margins of the British electoral arena until the 2000s, scoring a series of unimpressive results until the accomplishments in the European Parliament (EP) elections of 2004 and 2009 (Ford & Goodwin, 2014). UKIP’s performance reached its peak under the leadership of Farage, gaining over 4.3 million votes (27.5% and 24 seats) in the 2014 EP elections and almost 3.9 million votes (12.6% and one seat) in the 2015 general elections. Its demise after the Brexit referendum has been, on the other hand, quite rapid: UKIP returned an overall 1.8% in the 2017 general elections and an all-time low 0.1% in the 2019 general elections. After the Brexit referendum, and the departure of its leader Nigel Farage, the party joined the ranks of other ‘weakly organised, poorly led, and divided’ British far-right parties (Carter, 2005). Amid internal organisational struggles, and especially under the leadership of Batten (2018–2019), UKIP started flirting with the far-right subculture and opened up to the movement sector. Among other things, Batten’s injection of far-right activists into the party was instrumental in establishing War Plan Purple (WPP) as the culturalist branch of UKIP in July 2018. Ultimately, UKIP’s drift towards far-right territories prompted former leader Farage to leave the party in late 2018 and form the Brexit Party in early 2019. With the stated objective of delivering UK withdrawal from the EU, the Brexit Party gained the largest share of votes in the 2019 EP election (30.5%)

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  Populist Parties in Europe

  Agents of Discontent?

  • Kenneth A. Loparo(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The UKIP looks at a country badly led for 40 years, deeply depressed in a mood of hopelessness in which cancers breed, trapped in a feeling of being helpless to prevent national decline. But we believe in the only national resource that ultimately matters, the innate character and abilities of the British people (UKIP 1994: 11).

  UKIP remained committed to its populist and anti-EU message after Sked was ousted from the party in 1997, and after various subsequent leadership changes. Thus, in its 2005 general election manifesto, titled ‘We want our country back’, the party claimed: ‘[o]nly outside the EU will it be possible to begin rebuilding a Britain which is run for British people, not for career politicians and bureaucrats’ (UKIP 2005: 1). In the 2010 manifesto (‘Empowering the People’), the party voiced similar rhetoric: ‘the British system of government is in serious disarray. Bureaucracy overrules democracy at every level, from Brussels to Whitehall to the town hall. UKIP will give meaningful power back to the British people’ (UKIP 2010: 13).

  In addition to its anti-EU and populist discourse, UKIP began to place more emphasis on the issue of immigration over the years. The 1994 interim manifesto still explicitly stressed its acceptance of ‘multiracialism’ and rejection of racist views (UKIP 1994: 9). While UKIP continued to distance itself from racism, the party did take a more restrictive position on the issue of immigration in the 2000s (Gardner 2006: 176). In 2010, under the leadership of Lord Pearson of Rannoch, UKIP’s manifesto urged an end to ‘mass, uncontrolled immigration’, and the party called for ‘an immediate five-year freeze on immigration for permanent settlement’ (UKIP 2010: 5). UKIP also proposed to make it easier to deport ‘dangerous Imams’ and to end ‘the active promotion of the doctrine of multiculturalism by local and national government and all publicly funded bodies’ (UKIP 2010: 6). Pearson, furthermore, invited Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders to show the anti-Islam film ‘Fitna’ in the House of Lords in February 2009.

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  The Routledge Handbook of Euroscepticism

  • Benjamin Leruth, Nicholas Startin, Simon Usherwood, Benjamin Leruth, Nicholas Startin, Simon Usherwood(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  While UKIP has grown in membership, representation and support, this process has not been smooth. Success in European elections in 1999 and 2004 was followed on both occasions by major disagreements within the party and changes of leadership. Even in the years on either side of the party’s victory in the 2014 EP elections, UKIP lost two MEPs and after the success of the Leave campaign in the referendum the party had three different leaders in a very short space of time. These tensions can be explained by its shift from a party trying to win seats for the first time (in the EP), to a larger organisation seeking votes in national and local elections by campaigning on a range of issues beyond UK withdrawal from the EU (Abedi and Lundberg 2009), and attempting to become a pivotal party at the national level.

  Victory for the campaign to leave the EU in the June 2016 referendum means UKIP strategists have to plan carefully the political direction the party should take, having achieved its central policy objective. In the short term, it will make sense for the party to push for a Brexit which takes the UK out of the single market. The party will also need to prepare itself for a post-Brexit UK if it is to become a lasting feature of the political landscape. In any case, UKIP’s growth has sent ripples through the UK’s party system forcing the mainstream parties to react to the hard Euroscepticism of UKIP and its linking of EU membership to the issue of immigration.

  Notes

  1 I am grateful to Gemma Loomes for invaluable research assistance. This chapter draws partly on research funded by a Leverhulme Research Project Grant F/00 212/AD and conducted with Philip Lynch.

  2 The 2004 and 2009 Euromanifesto coding schemes differed. The coding of the 1999, 2004 and 2009 manifestos referred to here was conducted using Euromanifesto’s 2009 coding scheme (Braun et al.

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