UKIP continues to be over-exposed in the media - along with the very real risk that every discussion about its threat may very well turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There now seems to be a couple of different takes on UKIP - essentially these boil down to Farage and his crew being either nasty racists or just crass and daft - or possibly all of these things.
But the thing about UKIP is not so much that they are Oswald Mosley as that they are Jeremy Clarkson. Or Alan Partridge. Smug xenophobic and small-minded yes - but cryto-Fascists not so much. Their immigrant scape-goating is no less of a threat - but in truth the 'mainstream' parties are not so very behind in jumping on that particular band wagon.
The real danger of UKIP is not that those golf club reactionaries of Mail-land are turning to them in droves. This will only cost the Tories some votes amongst the aspirational lower middle classes. The real danger is that genuinely disaffected working class voters might just actually swallow the insidious nonsense that UKIP reflects their interests.
The real way to challenge UKIP is to expose the falsehood that they are a party of 'real people' who stand outside the elite political class that has come to dominate all the parties.
Farage might well be a bigot and a twat, but the most important thing you need to know about him is that he is a public schoolboy, a fat cat former city trader, the son of a stockbroker, and a politician from his early days as a Young Conservative. He is every bit as avaricious and corrupt as the rest of them. And most importantly of all, his party wholeheartedly supports a vicious austerity programme whilst also wholeheartedly opposing any sort of workers' rights.
In other words UKIP has absolutely fuck-all to offer the very people it is now trying to appeal to - and that is the message we need to be taking up rather than name-calling.
1 comment:
I have read almost every version of the UKIP are racists narrative, from the right wing tabloids to the left anarchist blogs. All singing the same tune. To me it indicates the decline of the left. Yelling racist at anyone whose views one disagrees with is a poor substitute for argument, yet it is the main weapon in the left's arsenal, and with it the denigration of working class people as gullible sheep who buy into racist propaganda.This kind of attack on UKIP actually devalues our understanding of racism, like people who trot out comparisons with Hitler at every minor opportunity. Look at the map, see the votes that went to UKIP at the last election - all along the proposed route of the proposed high speed train. Racist nimby trainophobes eh. UKIP are promising to give people power back. They can't or won't deliver on that promise, and as a believer in collective working class intelligence I am aware that most people know that. But voting for our lad in the pub Nigel is a way of sticking two fingers at the lot of them - from the Tories and Murdoch Press to the BBC, Guardian and whatever fits into the category known as the left.
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