Revolt on the Right

Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain

Robert Ford, Matthew J Goodwin, Matthew Goodwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317938545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Winner of the Political Book of the Year Award 2015

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is the most significant new party in British politics for a generation. In recent years UKIP and their charismatic leader Nigel Farage have captivated British politics, media and voters. Yet both the party and the roots of its support remain poorly understood. Where has this political revolt come from? Who is supporting them, and why? How are UKIP attempting to win over voters? And how far can their insurgency against the main parties go? Drawing on a wealth of new data – from surveys of UKIP voters to extensive interviews with party insiders – in this book prominent political scientists Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin put UKIP's revolt under the microscope and show how many conventional wisdoms about the party and the radical right are wrong. Along the way they provide unprecedented insight into this new revolt, and deliver some crucial messages for those with an interest in the state of British politics, the radical right in Europe and political behaviour more generally.

1

A SINGLE-ISSUE PRESSURE GROUP

If only one day could lay claim as the bleakest in the history of the British Conservative Party, then 2 May 1997 would be a strong contender. As Conservatives awoke that morning to digest the results of the general election, they found they had been shunned by voters and battered by Tony Blair and New Labour. They had been thrown out of office after eighteen years and won barely 30 per cent of the national vote. It was their lowest level of support since the birth of British party politics in 1832. In the House of Commons, they now had only 165 MPs, who sat opposite the largest gathering of Labour MPs in British political history.¹ Some naïve Tories talked about a quick recovery but the reality would be quite different. They would not return to government for thirteen years, and even then they would be forced to share power with the Liberal Democrats.

Though few Conservatives would have noticed, the general election in 1997 also saw the debut of a new challenger in British politics. The UK Independence Party were a largely unknown and disorganised fringe group of Eurosceptics fighting their first parliamentary election. They had gone into the battle with high hopes. United by their defining goal of pulling Britain out of the European Union, UKIP wanted to place a ‘hard’ rather than ‘soft’ form of Euroscepticism at the heart of British politics. As hard Eurosceptics, they were opposed to the very principle of European political integration and demanded that Britain withdraw from the ‘Europe project’. This stood them apart from ‘soft’ Eurosceptics who do not oppose the EU tout court: they want EU institutions and policy reformed, rather than junked; and European integration slowed or reversed, rather than ended altogether.² UKIP’s message was total opposition to Europe: ‘The UK Independence Party’s policy of withdrawal is the only viable option. THE ONLY WAY IS OUT.’³

Beginning the revolt: the formation of a new party

The story of UKIP had begun six years earlier, in 1991, with the foundation of a small pressure group called the Anti-Federalist League. The League wanted to rally opposition to the Maastricht Treaty that had been signed earlier in the year, and which paved the way for the EU and a single European currency. The Anti- Federalists attracted little attention but when they did they talked of wanting to stop the UK ‘becoming a province of a united European superstate’.⁴ While some suggested the League’s name had fascist connotations, their founder, Dr Alan Sked, was a former candidate for the Liberals and a historian at the London School of Economics who had chosen the name for its historical resonances: ‘I thought it would be the equivalent of the anti-Corn Law League. Just as the anti-Corn Law League converted [Robert] Peel to free trade, the anti-Federalist League would convert the Tory Party to Euroscepticism and to British Independence.’⁵

Sked’s Euroscepticism had developed in the 1980s, while convening the European Studies programme at the LSE: ‘I just kept meeting all these bureaucrats and other Euro-fanatical academics who came to give papers, politicians from different parts of Europe, and reading endless MA theses on the EU. I just came to the conclusion that the whole thing was mad.’ Influenced by Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘Bruges speech’ in 1988, in which the Conservative Prime Minister warned against efforts at the European level to ‘suppress nationhood’, ‘concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate’ and fit nations ‘into some sort of identikit European personality’, he joined other influential Eurosceptics in the Bruges Group, a right-wing think-tank that received financial backing from Sir James Goldsmith, who would soon play a more central role in the Eurosceptic movement.⁶ But writing pamphlets was not enough for Sked, who wanted to take his message to voters. After launching the Anti-Federalist League and making clear his plans to stand against Conservatives at the 1992 general election, he was dismissed by the Bruges Group as an ‘embarrassment’.⁷ Sked and the Anti- Federalists were on their own.

Their early ambitions, however, were soon disappointed. At the 1992 general election the Anti-Federalists talked of making such an impact that Conservatives would be forced to adopt their harder brand of Euroscepticism. But with only seventeen candidates and no real resources they were barely visible. There was only one target seat, Bath in the South-West of England, a region that over the next twenty years would become an important source of support for Eurosceptics. But while Sked talked about inflicting serious damage on the incumbent Conservative MP, Chris Patten, who was known for his pro- Europe views, in his own words the campaign was run ‘on a wing and a prayer’. Still he battled on, hoping to attract publicity by describing the Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, as the most incompetent leader in postwar Britain and declaring that after the Maastricht Treaty British sovereignty faced ‘its greatest threat since Adolf Hitler’.⁸ Patten did lose his seat, to a Liberal Democrat, but Sked won only 0.2 per cent of the vote in Bath while his fellow Anti-Federalists also failed to have an impact. Where they did put their heads above the parapet they averaged a paltry 0.5 per cent. Combined, they attracted fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party.⁹

In the aftermath, Sked attempted to get back on track by contesting two parliamentary by-elections, one of which saw him enlist help from the famous former Conservative arch-Eurosceptic and serial rebel Enoch Powell, but at both contests he won less than 2 per cent.¹⁰ With the League failing to capture the public imagination, the small band of activists who had coalesced around Sked now began calling for a change of direction. They wanted a political party with a new name and a serious electoral strategy, as one recalled: ‘In 1846 the word “anti” may have sounded good. But it took a long, long time for a group of us to convince him that it would never work.’ These discussions led to a meeting at the LSE on 3 September 1993, at which a new party would be born.

While those who gathered in Sked’s office were eager to begin their revolt against the established parties, they were also aware of the need to distance their embryonic movement from a more toxic element-that had resurfaced in British politics. As most would have known, in the 1970s Britain had seen a minor insurgency by an extreme right-wing party named the National Front (NF), which was openly racist and less than keen on liberal democracy. Despite the NF’s reputation for fascist ideas and violence, for a brief moment they attracted significant support, winning over 100,000 voters at the general election in October 1974, almost 200,000 at the general election in 1979, and a couple of impressive results at by-elections.¹¹ But the NF fell as quickly as they had risen. By the end of the 1970s the party were rapidly leaking support to Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives, who had reached out to NF voters by openly sympathising with their concerns over immigration. The NF was also torn apart by infighting and split into several tiny, warring factions. One of these successor movements was the British National Party, who formed in 1982 and would later come to dominate the extreme right.¹²

Unlike the Anti-Federalists, some of whom had strong links to established politicians, the BNP were firmly rooted in the NF’s extremist tradition of racial nationalism and were treated as a pariah by other parties and the media. Much of this reaction stemmed from the BNP’s purely ‘ethnic’ conception of British nationalism, which defined whether somebody could become a citizen of the nation based on their race and ancestry. The BNP argued that ethnic identity is fixed from birth, and that people from other ethnic and racial groups could therefore never be British. The party were deeply hostile towards non-whites and immigrants who were seen as a threat to the survival of the British race, and Jews whom they argued had orchestrated multiculturalism to encourage race mixing and the dilution of the purity of the British race. This worldview contrasted sharply with the mainstream ‘civic’ conception of nationalism in Britain, which defines national identity by voluntary affiliation and acceptance of the laws and traditions of a country. By this account, anyone who regards themselves as ‘British’ and respects the laws, values and institutions of the country can rightly call themselves British, regardless of their race, culture or birthplace.

But despite being ostracised, the BNP did manage to put the extreme right back on the map of British politics.

In the same month that the Anti-Federalists met to launch their new party, the BNP made national headlines after capturing their first ever local council seat, in London’s East End.¹³ The party’s growing profile and poisonous reputation had clear implications for the Anti-Federalists, as Sked recalls: ‘We didn’t want British [in the party name] as that was supposed to be too racialist and associated with the British National Party. So we called it UK Independence Party. It was all done very quickly. It was obvious to all of us that if we rule out British then it had to be UK. What we stood for basically was independence.’ But despite these early efforts to distance themselves from the BNP, UKIP’s relationship with the extreme right would continue to generate interest for years to come.

UKIP had not even marked their first birthday when the first battle arrived. In June 1994, voters went to the polls to choose their representatives in the European Parliament, a distant institution that many knew little about.¹⁴ Hoping for their first success, UKIP took their message to the electorate in a television broadcast but lacked the money and manpower needed for a ground campaign. ‘You just didn’t have the luxury of campaign strategy’, noted Sked. ‘We had very little in the way of money. We all paid our own deposits. Whatever funds we had were scraped together by the candidate, their family, friends and the old man and his dog who might contribute 50p. It was all done on a shoestring.’ The results were uninspiring. UKIP won only 1 per cent of the vote and finished fifth, well behind the three main parties and beaten easily by the Greens. The message and the new name had failed to resonate.

Nor were these early problems confined to elections. Like most new parties that cannot afford full-time and experienced staff, UKIP relied heavily on a handful of ideological true believers and novice volunteers. Most of those who took control of high command lacked political and organisational experience, and had strong and conflicting opinions about how to run a party. The result was continual infighting. Rare moments of opportunity were frequently lost through an absence of basic party discipline and, at several points, full-blown chaos where UKIP seemed unable to unify activists around a leader or strategy. As one journalist would later remark, while the three main parties in British politics have each had their share of internal warfare, none have come close to rivalling the self-destructive tendencies of UKIP.¹⁵

One early point of tension was Sked, whose personality and intellectual preoccupations drew criticism from activists who had little time for theory and abstract debate. Many also disagreed with his argument that they should refuse to accept any seats they might win in the European Parliament, a move that Sked saw as ‘a rebuke to Euro-federalist pretensions to represent the British people’.¹⁶ But, from the start, deeper tensions were also inherent within the party.

One of the most important centred on UKIP’s overriding goal. Were they setting out to convert their Conservative rivals to hard Euroscepticism? By extension, were they simply a single-issue pressure group, focused on poaching disaffected Tories, who would fold once their goal was accomplished? Or were UKIP destined for greater things, to lead a broader revolt against the established political class and realign British party politics, by appealing to voters across the spectrum? This unresolved tension about the nature of the party would spark regular disagreements over strategy, particularly over relations with the Conservatives. For some Ukippers the centre-right encompassed a faction of vocal Eurosceptics who were their natural allies. Aware that their efforts might draw support away from Eurosceptics who were already elected to Westminster, and in seats UKIP were unlikely to win, some thought Eurosceptic Tories who had revolted over issues like Maastricht should be given a free run. UKIP, they argued, should stand down against these candidates or run ‘paper candidates’ who would be named on the ballot but not backed by an active campaign. In this way, and while not elected themselves, UKIP would help to ensure that Eurosceptics had the strongest possible presence in Westminster, which kept open the possibility of a more formal alliance between the two parti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. A single-issue pressure group
• 2. Becoming a serious contender
• 3. Origins: a long time coming
• 4. The social roots of the revolt
• 5. The motive for rebelling
• 6. Overcoming the barriers to entry
• 7. The paradoxes and potential of UKIP's revolt
• Appendix: Data and methods: analysing UKIP's voters
• Index