hortly after former Tory MP Mark Reckless had defected to UKIP and triggered a by-election (special election) in his Rochester and Strood constituency, David Cameron vowed that the Conservatives would stop Reckless from getting “his fat arse back onto the green benches” of the House of Commons. Well, the Tories did what they could, but there was no bum’s rush for the fat arse.
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A time bomb does not have to be elegant; it just has to be lethal, primed, and in the right place when the moment comes. Britain’s next general election is set for May 7, 2015. That is likely the day when David Cameron will pay the full price for failing to have defused the revolt on his right.
Britain’s Euroskeptic U.K. Independence party (UKIP) is a poorly run protean mess, unhealthily dependent on the wit, zest, and charisma of its leader, Nigel Farage. And yet in the spirit of Farage (who has survived a plane crash, cancer, and being hit by a VW Beetle), UKIP keeps confounding those who so eagerly draft and redraft its obituary.
The run-up to the election to the European parliament in May was not the party’s most glorious stretch. Sustained battering by mainstream media and mainstream parties—much of it galvanized by UKIP’s heretical emphasis on immigration control—took a toll, and was reinforced by campaign missteps (Google “steel band,” “Croydon,” and “UKIP” for one notably ludicrous instance), including a pre-election radio interview of Farage that went so badly that his spin doctor tried—on air—to bring it to a close.
Less than a week after that interview, Britons went to the ballot box, voting both in the EU poll and, in some regions, local elections too. Results for the latter were counted first. UKIP took 16.5 percent of the popular vote, down from the remarkable 23 percent the party had scored the preceding year, but a reasonable tally considering that these elections were held in less UKIP-friendly territory than in 2013.
The election for the European parliament, however, involved the whole country, and UKIP topped the poll with 27.5 percent, well up from the 16.5 percent it secured in the 2009 EU vote. UKIP may have been assisted by a low turnout (34 percent), but it nonetheless became the first party other than Labour or Conservative to win a national election in over a century. Labour had to make do with regaining (and more) the ground it had lost in 2009 (a Labour government had been presiding over Britain’s slice of the financial crisis), boosting its score from 15.7 percent to 25.4 percent. The Conservatives slumped from first to third place with 23.9 percent. Their coalition partners, the hopelessly Europhile Liberal Democrats, saw their vote cut by roughly half and their team of EU parliament members reduced from 11 to 1, a richly deserved fate marred only by its incompleteness.
But a few days later UKIP ran into a reminder that one barrier remains unbroken. On June 5, it failed yet again to win a seat in the House of Commons. On paper, the constituency—Newark, a pleasant Conservative-voting market town unlikely to be confused with its namesake in New Jersey—looked promising. UKIP had done well there in local elections in 2013 and had headed the poll in that part of Britain in the EU vote. Helping still further, Newark’s (robustly right-wing) Tory MP had just resigned following a lobbying scandal that fit neatly into the UKIP narrative of establishment misrule. Typically, UKIP did not make the most of its opportunity. Perhaps tellingly, Farage opted not to run. Instead the party chose as its candidate a (robustly right-wing) septuagenarian member of the European parliament all too easy to caricature as UKIP at its most primitive.
The result was far from disgraceful: UKIP took over a quarter of the vote, up from the 3 percent or so its candidate managed in 2010. This was despite a concentrated Tory blitz (party workers, activists, and MPs by the hundred were shipped into Newark) that a hollowed-out Conservative party could not hope to reproduce on the national scale that a general election would require. Nevertheless UKIP’s second place (the Tory candidate romped home) meant that the party still had no MPs, a failing frequently cited as a mark of UKIP’s fundamental lack of seriousness. This was only underlined by the convivial Farage’s decision to spend the day before the Newark vote at a tourism conference in Malta. And, yes, he was photographed there in the early hours with a blonde who was not Mrs. Farage. There was a respectable explanation, but . . .
Bellowing at Brussels and, for that matter, 10 Downing Street is an unsurprising response to both EU overreach and the metropolitan liberalism of David Cameron’s government. There are numerous infuriated traditionally Conservative supporters who are prepared to “lend” a vote to UKIP in European and, increasingly, local elections, but will balk at doing anything that risks helping “Red Ed” Miliband’s unsettlingly left-wing Labour party into government.
As they fully understand, voting for UKIP could easily do just that. Under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, a protest vote can prove expensive. There’s good evidence to suggest that UKIP ballots (around 3 percent of the total) cost the Tories an absolute majority in the 2010 general election. With UKIP now attracting growing numbers of former Labour voters, the math is trickier than it was, but a higher UKIP percentage would undoubtedly do even greater damage to the Conservatives in 2015.
Making the choice sharper still, David Cameron has committed to an in/out referendum on Britain’s EU membership if he is reelected. Euroskeptics ought to remain, well, skeptical about this, not least because Cameron (a politician too unimaginative to contemplate a breach with Brussels) will try to gull Brits into the pro-EU camp with largely meaningless “concessions” allegedly wrung from the U.K.’s European partners. And he will probably succeed, meaning that Britain’s long European nightmare will continue. On the other hand, Cameron’s referendum would represent a chance, however remote, of a withdrawal, which is better than what Brussels-friendly Labour has on offer: nothing.
And right-of-center voters have another reason to be wary of voting for UKIP next year. “Europe” has evolved as an encapsulation of the broader discontent that many Tories (or former Tories) feel for Cameron’s mushy brand of conservatism, a discontent brilliantly exploited by Farage, playing Mrs. Thatcher’s finest tunes and meaning it. That has taken him a long way. The UKIP leader’s conundrum now is somewhat similar, ironically, to that faced by Cameron a little under a decade ago. Modern Britain is no longer the country that voted (often grudgingly) for the Iron Lady. Cameron tried to deal with that change by dragging the Conservative party to the center, calculating that the Tory right had nowhere else to go. Had it not been for Nigel Farage he might have gotten away with it.
The not unrelated difficulty for Farage is that he has harvested about as much of the right as he can, and thanks to the brutal math of first-past-the-post, that will not be enough to deliver the MPs to make the breakthrough he needs. So UKIP’s leader has attempted to widen his support by reaching out to what he has described as “patriotic old Labour” (put less diplomatically, the white working class), using immigration (Britain has received huge numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in the EU, immigrants that under EU law it is powerless to turn away) as the bridge to get there.
This has been a success, but it has involved downplaying UKIP’s earlier free market vim. The evolution of “red UKIP” is less of a problem for the party’s Conservative refugees than some of UKIP’s intellectual cheerleaders might imagine: Standing up for socialized medicine and generous state pensions plays pretty well with an older, often far from affluent crowd. But throw in some other leftish sub-currents, add the harsher edge to the party’s immigration rhetoric, and subtract some Thatcherite grace notes (talk of a flat tax has, for example, disappeared), and it becomes easy to suspect that a good number (especially on the upscale side of the social divide) of UKIP’s once-Conservative or libertarian-inclined voters will return to the Tory fold, particularly with Ed dread to push them there.
But neither this, nor the unappealing Miliband’s failure to click with the wider British electorate, nor the U.K.’s improving economic performance is likely to save Cameron. Britain’s embarrassingly outdated constituency boundaries favor Labour, which only has to win some 35 percent of the national vote to prevail. With the Liberal Democrats floundering, that modest target ought to be one Labour can hit despite recent stumbles in the opinion polls. UKIP meanwhile can expect to win few (if any) actual MPs once the general election comes round, but the party’s share of the poll will not sink back to that 3 percent grabbed by UKIP in 2010: UKIP—and the loyalty it can expect—is now entrenched too deep for that. And it is still the Conservative party that will miss its defectors most. At this late stage, it’s not clear what the Tories can do to entice enough of them back in time.
Take a visit to the cyber-belly of the beast, to a website run by the European Commission, the EU’s bureaucratic core, and you will be told that “the financial sector was a major cause of the [economic] crisis and received substantial government support.” Soon it will be payback time, in the form of Europe’s new Financial Transaction Tax (FTT), set to be levied at a rate of 0.1 percent on equity and debt transactions, and 0.01 percent on trades in derivatives. It will ensure that the financial sector “makes a fair and substantial contribution to public finances.”
We’ll see. This new “contribution,” potentially much more onerous than those fragments of a percent suggest, may or may not be substantial (taxes of this type have a record of backfiring), but the revenues predicted by the commission ($45 billion or so, but the math is fuzzy) could be eclipsed by the punch that the tax delivers to economic growth.
Whether the FTT is “fair” is fuzzier still. That’s because the real objectives of the tax—to be introduced by 11 eurozone countries in 2014—have little to do with that. To start with, the FTT is about—dread word—the narrative. Problems within the banks were the immediate cause of the crisis—it’s not called the financial crisis for nothing—but working out what caused those problems is a messier matter altogether. The number of plausible suspects rivals the haul on Agatha Christie’s Orient Express. Prominent among them is something for which the commission bears a great deal of responsibility—the euro, a reckless, politically driven piece of financial engineering that has outdone the worst of Wall Street’s mad science. With the single currency still the focus of potentially dangerous debate, it makes sense to keep attention focused on fat cat bankers and away from Brussels’s more discreet architects of financial destruction. Similar thinking helps explain why—when the euro’s troubles grew too big to ignore—there was so much talk of dodgy markets and dark Anglo-Saxon plotting.
Sadly, in a way, not all of this was—or is—deliberate disinformation. Much of continental Europe’s leadership class—across the political spectrum—distrusts “financial capitalism” of the Anglo-American kind, a venerable suspicion that appeared to have been vindicated by the fiascos of 2008. Why there is this distrust is a topic for another time—Roman Catholicism, socialism, and the twists of history have all played their parts—but that it exists is undeniable. The idea that free markets are the least bad way of allocating resources has limited appeal in a political culture still in thrall to the notion that some authority somewhere knows best, a belief that remains the essence of what the EU stands for. This is more than a matter of philosophical disagreement. So far as Brussels is concerned, Anglo-Saxon finance is not just objectionable, it’s in the way.
The euro was an attempt to override the market. A nation’s currency is a measure of its relative economic performance. If its value falls that’s a signal to investors and, in time, a chance to restore international competitiveness. By abandoning marks, francs, lire, and all the rest, the creators of the currency union junked a useful economic tool, replacing the collective sense of the market with crude administrative fiat. France was Germany was Portugal, and that was that.
As millions of jobless Europeans know, the market bit back. But the instinct of those managing the currency union was not to revert to market discipline, but to move farther away from it. There were bans on the short-selling of certain securities, attacks on credit ratings agencies that were at last telling some inconvenient truths, and, crucially, a vow by European Central Bank president Mario Draghi to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro, a declaration buttressed by the prospect of significant intervention in the sovereign bond market. Markets are far from perfect, and some of what has been done can be justified on pragmatic grounds, but it’s not difficult to notice the direction of a broader ideological current, one that is not good news for the City—London’s Wall Street—or, indeed, American financial firms interested in European business.
That current is sweeping an increasingly burdensome, increasingly made-in-Brussels regulatory regime, expensive and rigid, into the City and beyond. Much of it is profoundly antithetical to the intuitive, principles-based, flexible, and often self-regulatory approach that has done so much to transform Britain’s financial sector into a world-beating business. That some of these rules—such as the new Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive—will (effectively) weigh even more heavily on enterprises headquartered outside the EU is bound to damage London’s status as a global financial entrepôt, diverting business beyond the reach of Brussels.
The commission doesn’t appear to be particularly concerned where that business goes. In fact, it would probably like much of it to go away altogether. Many of Britain’s continental partners agree. And jealousy is only a part of it. The inherently unruly (markets are like that) and, to them, morally suspect financial sector is an obstacle to the ideal of a technocratic, tightly controlled Europe. Meanwhile the “island sewer” (to quote a deputy director of the supposedly serious El País, Spain’s highest-circulation newspaper) acts as a low-tax, lucrative lure for some of the continent’s best and brightest: some 300,000 to 400,000 French citizens now live in the U.K., mainly in London. Perhaps most annoyingly of all, financial services’ large contribution to the U.K.’s ramshackle economy (directly and indirectly perhaps at least 14 percent of GDP, and a badly needed export earner) helps fund Britain’s fondness for going its own way, an independent-mindedness that its European partners could do without.
But if the pie is to be smaller, that doesn’t mean that those partners don’t want a larger slice of it. National rivalries still flourish beneath that shared EU flag. The mechanism of “ever closer union” is not infrequently used by one member-state against another. It is, of course, only a coincidence that the (Frankfurt-based) European Central Bank is seeking to introduce rules that would force the relocation of clearing houses that handle euro-denominated instruments (in any significant quantity) out of London into the eurozone, to Paris, say, or, uh, Frankfurt. The U.K. is suing to prevent this, but if the currency union deepens, or banking union comes into being, there will be more of the same to come.
Taken as a whole, Europe’s financial sector will shrink further—even after the bloodletting of the last few years. London, as its hub, is bearing, and will continue to bear, the brunt. Jobs in the City have fallen by roughly a third and now stand at a 20-year low. In part this is natural, the product both of hard times and the necessary reconnection of the financial sector to economic reality. In part too it’s a matter of mathematics. Tougher capital requirements and more restrictive limitations on leverage (and, possibly, areas of business) are a reasonable response to some of the disasters of recent years, but they will make much of the banking sector less profitable than in the mirage years, and that’s before we begin to factor in the costs of Brussels’s wider regulatory onslaught.
The FTT adds both further insult and injury. The belated realization that the tax may be even more destructive than its supporters intended (the governor of the Bank of France has warned of the damage it could do to the Frenchfinancial sector) may mean that it will be diluted prior to its planned introduction, but two key features—some targeting of trading volumes and extraterritoriality—will remain, and both will hurt London disproportionately. The extraterritoriality is particularly galling. A trade will bear the tax even if only one counterparty is in the FTT-zone, and so will a transaction where both counterparties are outside the FTT-zone (in London and New York, say) but trading a security (a Peugeot share, for example) where the issuer is based within it. The U.K. and the United States will be acting as the collectors of a tax that hurts one of their key industries—and they won’t get a penny for their pains.
As if all that were not enough, the intervention of Europe’s reliably authoritarian parliament means that new caps on bonuses have recently been approved. The bonuses of bankers classified as “material risk-takers” (including anyone who earns over $660,000 a year) will be capped at one times salary, or two times with the approval of a supermajority of shareholders—an arbitrary diktat at odds with more subtly designed measures preferred by the U.K. The possibility that similar limits may be imposed on asset management firms (a group that received no bailouts from the European taxpayer) gave the lie to the never convincing argument that these changes are about risk control. Rather, like the Swiss referendum in March that also imposed restrictions on executive pay, they are both an exercise in collective punishment and a manifestation of the neo-egalitarianism growing on either side of the Atlantic. There is something else at play. Members of the European parliament see themselves as the continent’s elite (check out the deeply discounted tax rates that most of them pay), the vanguard of a new Europe. Earning so much less than those arrogant, unnecessary bankers maddens them: The chance to put a brake on financial sector pay is difficult to resist.
That’s more bad news for the City. The cap will—surprise—hit London hardest (that’s where most of the EU’s “material risk-takers” are to be found) and will make it a less hospitable place for the type of international business that could just as easily be located in New York, Hong Kong, or Zurich. Not only that, mandating less flexible wage structures will discourage hiring, the last thing that London needs now. And if these changes do end up crimping total compensation, that will be a blow to Britain’s cash-strapped treasury, long accustomed to raking in a good bit of that income, among other large “contributions” (to use that fashionable word) from the financial sector.
And so British prime minister David Cameron finds himself in another European swamp. All he can do about the FTT’s extraterritorial reach is protest (the United States is also objecting) and maintain a fingers-crossed legal challenge. He could (very) arguably have vetoed the bonus cap under the Luxembourg compromise, a severely eroded understanding dating to 1966, which might still permit a veto in defense of a vital national interest even where no veto power formally exists. That would have been a long shot, but Cameron didn’t even attempt it. Going to the mat “against Brussels” in defense of bankers’ bonuses would have played no better in euroskeptic Britain than anywhere else.
But one important, and generally Conservative, section of the electorate might have supported him. Traditionally nervous about political uncertainty and understandably wary about being cut off from European markets, the City’s grandees have long endorsed—if on occasion through gritted teeth—British membership in the EU. That’s not going to change quite yet, but some of them must be beginning to see that staying in an EU fixed on its current course could well be riskier than taking their chances outside. Whatever he is now claiming, Cameron is not going to be able to nudge the EU in a different direction, and he does not have the imagination to see that Britain would be better off out. Sooner or later, the City will have to confront the fact that if the EU is the problem, Cameron is not the answer.
A sign that it may be starting to was a high-profile event hosted last month by London hedge funder Crispin Odey and designed to introduce Nigel Farage, the leader of the uncompromisingly Euroskeptic U.K. Independence party, and a former City trader himself, to financial types. A long-term and generous, if sometimes critical, member of the Conservative party, Odey has not switched his support to UKIP, but this looked a lot like a warning shot.
Cameron would do well to pay attention. The 3 percent scored by UKIP (which up until now has principally drawn its support from the right) in the 2010 general election cost his Tories their chance of an absolute majority. UKIP is now polling in the mid-teens or higher, a feat it has managed on a shoestring. If UKIP can begin to attract City money, and the credibility that can come with it . . .
It’s not easy being David Cameron.
UKIP Conference, Birmingham, September 2012 © Andrew Stuttaford
They are still there, the English of an older England, frequently overlooked, frequently looked down upon, stubbornly hitched to an unruly history too grand just to be packed away.
On May 2, in local elections in a large swath of England (and a small slice of Wales), a good number of them did what the English — a less genteel lot than Masterpiece Theatre might suggest — do when provoked too far: They pushed back hard, casting their votes for the United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP), an eccentric homebrew of euroskepticism, “commonsense” conservatism, and anti-establishment mutiny.
Let’s get some caveats out of the way. Local elections halfway through the life of a parliament (the next general election is due in 2015) have long been used to protest against whoever’s in charge, and the scale of that protest is generally exaggerated by a low turnout. The angry vote. The turnout this time was some 31 percent, not so different from the tally (35 percent) for Britain’s last elections to the EU parliament in 2009, another contest in which UKIP, not so coincidentally, scored very well.
On May 2, this understaffed (a dozen paid employees in the U.K.), underspent, under-organized party won 147 of the roughly 2,300 seats that were up for grabs, compared with, um, eight in 2009, and took in around 23 percent of the vote, up from, well, no one was really counting last time round. It was (very) arguably the most sizeable surge by an outsider party since the Normans unexpectedly entered government in 1066. Labour topped the popular vote with 29 percent, the Conservatives followed with 25 percent, and their Liberal Democratic coalition partners trailed with 14 percent.
Now some more caveats: There were no elections in either Scotland — where voters dance to a very different tune — or the greater part of Labour-dominated Wales, or in most of England’s larger cities. This was an electorate that skewed right, something that helps explain the discrepancy between national polls (where UKIP has been scoring, not unimpressively, in the low-to-middle double digits) and the result of the May 2 vote.
And yet, something is going on.
The turbulent years that followed UKIP’s founding in 1993 are simple enough to decode: There’s the crankiness of obsessives at odds with conventional wisdom, and the infighting (long a UKIP trademark) that marks countless clusters of the opinionated. All the same, it is a measure of British unhappiness with Brussels that this odd little group took 7 percent of the poll in the 1999 elections to the EU parliament, when it was little more than the flag for an idea that no “respectable” party would embrace: Britain’s exit from the EU.
Five years on, UKIP had made little progress on the domestic front, but its share of the British vote in the 2004 elections for the EU parliament rose to 16 percent. Glory was followed by farce, a regular presence in the UKIP story, when one of its new MEPs and easily its most prominent face, a former Labour MP turned talk-show host, attempted to take over the leadership in a putsch that ultimately failed. He then quit the party. The voters were more loyal. In the next EU elections (in 2009), the 16 percent stuck with the only party willing to respond fully to the discontent that the supposedly euroskeptic Tories were too nervous to harness.
Much-derided Conservative “splits” over the EU (in reality a genuinely principled debate) had left the Tories with a reputation for feuding that proved to be electoral poison for the better part of two decades. This was made all the more deadly by the way that Tory unease over the EU was used by the Conservative party’s opponents to reinforce its reputation as an asylum for reactionaries with no place in the bright new Britain that Tony Blair was building. David Cameron had to do away with that caricature if he was to have a chance of returning the Tories to power. With little subtlety and some success, that’s just what he did. Climate change was in; “banging on about Europe” was out. As for UKIP, they were “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly,” a dishonest and condescending jibe that played well — as it was designed to — with Britain’s metropolitan opinion-formers, but came to symbolize Tory carelessness with a right wing that, Cameron calculated, had nowhere else to go.
But that was before prolonged economic crisis drained the public’s confidence in a political class long known to be out of touch, but now seen to be out of its depth. The euro’s long agony and the EU’s increasingly overt evolution into a nascent superstate have only helped reinforce the idea that those fruitcakes might have a few things right after all.
Britain has never been a hotbed of enthusiasm for the Brussels project, but it is striking to see some recent polls showing a majority in favor of U.K. withdrawal from the EU, a finding almost unthinkable just a few years ago. Tough times can force voters to confront reality, however uncomfortable. And in modern Britain there may be less to keep them reined in than in the past. Many Brits have become alienated from their country’s political process (a process that has, of course, been drained of much of its meaning by the intrusions of Brussels), an alienation bolstered by their all-too-justified suspicion of elite consensus, most strikingly, perhaps, in the area of immigration. UKIP’s much tougher line on immigration is a major element in its support.
Immigration has been a contentious topic in the U.K., as elsewhere in Europe, for over 50 years, but there is now a real sense that Britain has lost control of its borders, not least as a result of EU rules. With very little in the way of genuine popular consent, an island nation marked by only gentle shifts in its ethnic balance for centuries is being radically and rapidly transformed by an influx that accelerated dramatically during the Blair years. For a long time, to express much more than the faintest concern over this was to risk being dubbed, well, to recycle an insult, a “closet racist” or worse. An academic study splashed across the British press shortly before the May elections predicted that the “white British” would become a minority of the population in the second half of this century, a status that they have lately achieved in London. Extrapolation can be an extremely unreliable tool, but data such as this help explain why many Britons believe that there has been too much change too soon.
The U.K. is not a country familiar with populist revolt. Both the Labour and Conservative parties have traditionally been broad enough churches to accommodate within their ranks populist strains of Left and Right respectively. Since the Blair and Cameron modernizations, that may no longer be so true as it was. Even so, any insurgent party in Britain still has to contend with another formidable obstacle: the electoral system. It’s not by chance that, until now, UKIP had notched up real success only in EU elections, which operate under a system of proportional representation. Domestically, elections are first-past-the-post, a set-up that squeezes smaller parties, and one that presented euroskeptics with a very specific problem. Voting for UKIP rather than the mildly euroskeptic Tories risks handing victory to the Conservatives’ far more europhile rivals on the left. UKIP took only 3 percent of the vote in the 2010 general election, but even that was enough to cost the Conservatives some 20 seats and a clear majority. An even better UKIP result in 2015 will almost certainly hand the keys of 10 Downing Street to Labour, with consequences that many potential UKIP sympathizers would detest.
Persuading them to risk voting for UKIP nonetheless is going to take more than the accumulated discontents of recent years, but if anyone can pull that off, it will be Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader, who has emerged as one of the most effective politicians Britain has seen for a long time, and without whom the result of May 2 would have been an impossibility.
Comes the hour, crumbles the euro, crashes the economy, comes the man. A smoker who enjoys a drink or three, Farage is a charmer and a chancer, an ebullient and eloquent speaker with a quick wit, a nice line in self-deprecatory humor, and a public persona that is the jaunty, Jack-the-Lad antithesis of Britain’s increasingly pharisaical political class. Farage can do anger when he has to, but he is a revolutionary who does not take himself too seriously. A clever operator, perhaps, but a back-of-the-envelope administrator, reassuringly contradictory qualities that have only added to his subversive appeal. As the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley put it, people voted for UKIP “partly out of anger and partly for a laugh.” It was, he concluded, “a very British revolution.”
More a warning shot than a revolution, I reckon, and distinctly more English than British. But, whatever the future holds, the next few months are likely to be tricky for UKIP, which will now find itself subject to closer scrutiny than ever before. That may prove an uncomfortable experience for some of its newly elected councilors, political novices who may find themselves hopelessly out of their depth or burdened with résumés that won’t look so good under the media microscope. Even in the run-up to the election, it was evident that UKIP did not have the resources to properly screen its candidates. There will be more embarrassments to come.
Meanwhile the party will keep working on building its support from the bottom up, local election by local election, trying to establish the grassroots networks without which it has little chance of winning many (or any) seats in the Westminster parliament, playing the retail politics — opposition to a contentious high-speed railway here or an unwanted wind farm there — that is already contributing to UKIP’s appeal. And the outreach to what Farage often refers to as “patriotic old Labour” will continue. That’s an effort that is already coloring the agenda of a self-described libertarian party that has always had its (to return to that lazy adjective) populist elements (the emphasis on immigration control and law and order, say, and, more recently, opposition to same-sex marriage) and has now dropped its earlier commitment to a flat tax that allowed it to be smeared as too soft on the rich. There will be further nods in a leftward, statist direction, as UKIP’s mood music — that’s the best way to describe its program — shifts. It may be less of stretch than might be assumed. Even some of the former Tory voters who now support UKIP are perhaps better understood here in the U.S. as being (very) roughly equivalent to the Reagan Democrats of old, with all that that entails.
In May 2014, there will be new EU parliament elections, a contest in which on current form UKIP could possibly come top, boosting its momentum still further. But for now attention will revert to the impact that the party’s surge will have on the Tories. The results of the May 2 vote contained scraps of bad news for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but it’s the Conservatives who are looking at catastrophe in the 2015 general election. David Cameron’s earlier attempts to head off the UKIP challenge — most notably his implausible promise of an improbable referendum on EU membership — have failed. Now the Tories have to try something else. It may be a far tougher line toward the EU (good luck with getting that taken seriously), and, although this comes with considerable electoral risks of its own, it may be a lurch to the right.
Who knows? What it will be is desperate.
David Cameron leaves things late. Leadership by essay crisis, it has been called, a nod to procrastination by generations of students. But his belated response to the mounting political turmoil over Britain’s membership in the EU—a speech proposing an in/out referendum—won’t save him from disaster in the 2015 general election.
Some early responses were encouraging—outrage from EU parliamentarians, a disapproving Obama administration, cries of good riddance in France, and, according to one grandee, “shock” in Davos—but British voters were not so easily taken in. Polls showed the Conservatives trailing Labour by a little less, mainly on the back of a few percentage points grabbed from the euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party, but Cameron’s speech was no game-changer. UKIP still stood at around 10 percent. UKIP, which largely draws its support from the right, took just 3 percent of the vote in 2010, but that was enough to cost the Tories some 20 seats—and an overall majority.
That’s the math forcing Cameron to call for a referendum he had always opposed. With his own (largely euroskeptic) Conservatives mutinous, UKIP polling in the teens, the economy faltering, and 2015 drawing closer, something had to be done. Cameron’s calculation was straightforward. With no other establishment party (for now) backing a referendum, and with UKIP (thanks to Britain’s first-past-the-post system) having little prospect of winning a parliamentary seat, let alone forming a government, the Tories are tempting euroskeptics with the only chance of the in-or-out showdown for which they have been pining. By contrast, voting UKIP in 2015 would divide the euroskeptic vote, help (europhile) Labour and the (euromaniacal) Liberal Democrats, and risk throwing that opportunity away.
The referendum timetable has been organized to underline that point. Nothing much will happen for now. Instead, Cameron will go to the polls in 2015 with a request for a mandate “to negotiate a new settlement with our European partners.” Once those negotiations have been concluded there will be a “referendum [in 2017, most likely] with a very simple in or out choice.” The referendum is thus dependent on Cameron’s reelection: Vote for him, or the nation-state gets it.
That so many UKIP supporters have yet to be won over is, to a degree, a reflection of the way the party has become an expression of broader popular discontent with the liberal status quo. UKIP is “about” more than the EU. But there’s something else: On closer inspection Cameron’s proposal looks less than convincing, and that’s even if we ignore the fact that his chances of victory in 2015 are on the order of a snowball in hell, or Romney in California.
There is a credible way for the U.K. to exit the EU (it involves Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty; I’ll spare you the technicalities), but Cameron’s “negotiations” are not it. Anything involving the repatriation of enough powers to impress enough euroskeptics would need a new treaty to be agreed on by each EU country, a tall order for reasons that are both practical (there are currently 27 member states) and philosophical. The EU is driven by the idea of “ever closer union,” a process that only moves in one direction. Once a competence has been transferred from the national level to the EU it cannot—must not—be handed back. Were Britain to win an exception to this principle, it would make a shambles of what the EU is meant to be. “Europe,” warned the EU’s prominenti, is not “à la carte.” Britain was either in or, well, the rest was left unsaid by just about everyone other than the French.
Cameron understands this. He has framed his proposed negotiations—they should be part of a wider effort to create “a leaner, less bureaucratic union”—in a way designed to address this concern. If the broader Brussels menu could be made more attractive, Britain would need fewer special orders. Given the rhetoric in Berlin (sometimes), Stockholm, Prague, and elsewhere in the EU’s north and east in favor of Britain’s more free market tack, this is an approach that ought to make sense.
But talk is cheap. When it comes to actually doing something to reduce the Brussels deadweight, the EU’s more economically liberal governments typically fall silent, still in thrall to the European dream to which most Britons—who were told they were joining a “common market”—have never subscribed. And when Cameron asks for support for a less dirigiste treaty, that dream (or nightmare) will stand in his way. For once negotiations start, where will they end? After all, the EU’s electorates are restless, and profoundly divided about what they want from “Europe.”
Within hours of Cameron’s speech, a leading member of Angela Merkel’s party was talking darkly about the dangers of opening “Pandora’s box,” a comment then echoed across the continent by a cast of characters that included the finance minister of the crumbling Hellenic Republic, Pandora’s repeatedly bailed-out basket case, sternly warning of the dangers of renegotiations, a performance that would suggest that chutzpah as well as cynic is a word with roots in ancient Greek.
Cameron may be gambling that the euro’s problems will force that box open regardless. National politicians sucked into the eurozone’s drama will keep trying to bypass the need for treaty revision and its awkward requirement of unanimity (as they did with the 2012 Fiscal Compact, which is formally a side-agreement) in their efforts to fix the currency union. But the far deeper integration that this repair work must eventually entail (and for which the Brussels bureaucracy is pushing) cannot be achieved without it. Amending the treaty would require British consent, and that could be Cameron’s moment. The U.K. would never be expected to opt into any EU “core,” but the price of doing nothing to impede its formation ought to be agreement to the sort of looser association that most Brits would anyway prefer over a clean divorce.
That’s how this story could work out, but it relies on improbable contingencies, stretched assumptions, and tightly crossed fingers. Many euroskeptics—even if they could be persuaded that Cameron has a shot at victory in 2015—would not regard that conclusion as a happy ending. What they want is a clean break. What they fear is that even the half-decent second-best solution—a looser association—will not be what it could be thanks to David Cameron. He may be frustrated by the EU, but he doesn’t have the imagination to risk anything approaching separation.
What, I suspect, they anticipate is that he won’t even get that chance, that the eurozone will struggle on as is, and that Cameron will be thrown a few scraps at the end of pantomime negotiations, which he will then declare to have been a triumph. This will set the stage for a referendum in which a misled, there-is-no-alternative British public will vote for the “yes” for which Cameron has already declared—an odd thing to do ahead of any negotiations—that he will campaign “heart and soul.” That is not the language, and these are not the scenarios, designed to reassure euroskeptic hearts, minds, or even souls in time for 2015.
Nigel Farage, UKIP Conference, Birmingham, September 2012 © Andrew Stuttaford
For people once described by David Cameron as “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly” (I’ve always savored that sly “mostly”), the members of UKIP—the euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party—gathered in Birmingham last month for their annual conference were a bright, friendly, and refreshingly normal bunch.
They were also surprisingly upbeat. The euro—that Freddy Krueger of currencies—remains as indestructible as it is destructive, and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, is openly using the once-taboo F-word, pressing for transformation of the EU into a “federation of nation-states.” But never mind all that, the cheerfully determined folk at the conference reckoned that events were moving their way. UKIP, said its leader, the indispensable, charismatic, and hugely entertaining Nigel Farage, is “a party in a very good mood.”
Indeed it is, and why not? Nearly two decades after its founding in 1993, UKIP has come a very long way, despite bouts of internecine strife, a series of scandals, serial eccentricity, and a collection of electoral disasters that would have made even Harold Stassen pause. As Farage explained to the conference, things had been a “bit shambolic” in the past, a confession that was no revelation.
Thanks to the EU, and in more ways than one, this dismal state of affairs has been changing. The relentless intrusions of Brussels into everyday British life have sustained a market for UKIP’s ideas in a nation that was never europhile to start with. And one shocking continental innovatio—proportional representation—has given UKIP a position unimaginable under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system.
The mathematics of first-past-the-post are brutal for upstart political parties, except in areas where they can find concentrated support such as that enjoyed by nationalists in Scotland and Wales. The Liberal Democrats took 23 percent of the vote in the 2010 election, but only 57 seats in the 650-member House of Commons. UKIP fared even worse, winning 3 percent of the popular vote and taking no seats at all.
Such results feed upon themselves. The electorate shies away from casting votes that will be wasted—or worse. Much of UKIP’s support comes from formerly die-hard Tories, and many more of that growing tribe would follow their lead were it not for their (justifiable) fear of splitting the right-wing vote and letting the left slip in through the middle. As it is, defections to UKIP probably cost the Conservatives some 20 seats—and an absolute majority—in the 2010 election. The Tories thus ended up in a coalition government with the euromaniacal Liberal Democrats, an irony lost on few and a strong disincentive for many potential UKIP voters to slip the Tory leash. And UKIP hasn’t done much better in local elections. It has just a handful of councilors and supreme power only in the Cambridgeshire town of Ramsey (population 6,000).
Thanks to proportional representation, worries about wasted or counter-productive votes have not been such an issue in elections to the EU’s Potemkin parliament. The few concerns have been further diluted by the suspicion—not quite as justified as in the past—that the world’s only commuting legislature (as a result of some ancient compromise, it sits in both Brussels and Strasbourg) counts for very little. UKIP celebrated the election of its first three members of the European parliament in 1999. Five years later, UKIP came third with 16.1 percent of the vote and 12 MEPs. In 2009 it overtook the governing Labour party, grabbing 16.5 percent of the poll and a haul of 13 seats out of a British total of 72. UKIP’s leadership is convinced the party has a good chance of coming out on top in the 2014 EU elections.
The very nature of a European election makes it an obvious vehicle for a protest against the Brussels oligarchy. That fact, combined with a typically low turnout (in 2009 an unimpressive 34 percent of the British electorate), means that those percentages overstate UKIP’s real backing. Nevertheless the prospect of UKIP topping the euro-poll in 2014—and the momentum that would come with it—must worry David Cameron, facing a national election the following year.
UKIP already stands at some 7-10 percent in national opinion polls, something that cannot just be put down to midterm disillusion with the Tories. There is a wide and growing disconnect between the pedantically centrist, tiresomely PC prime minister and a good number of his party’s natural supporters. Many of these are euroskeptic, and so this breach is only worsened by Cameron’s refusal to respond with anything other than curiously arrogant disdain to mounting British disgust with an EU that displays an ambition only exceeded—hanks to the flailing euro—by its troubles. One recent poll showed almost half of all Britons wanted out of the EU, while only under a third preferred to stay in. Making matters worse still for Cameron, however unfairly, is the U.K.’s failure to emerge from the economic mess his government inherited. Put all these circumstances together and UKIP’s allure is not hard to understand. Nor is the fact that the party’s appeal is reinforced by its plague-on-all-your-houses outsider status.
And that’s no act: The Birmingham conference was a long way in thinking and in feel from Britain’s political establishment. From the endearingly self-deprecatory remarks that accompanied so many speeches, to the occasional organizational glitches, to the misfiring microphone at the conference’s Friday night “gala dinner” (tickets cost all of $55), this was a gathering that featured little of the bombast and none the slickness of the larger parties’ shindigs. The auction that accompanied the gala included some cheaper items—tea bags in a fancy box, a woven silk portrait of the queen, and a painting that would have been unforgivable even had the artist been blind—that only underlined the distance between UKIP’s grassroots essence and the political establishment some UKIP members refer to as the Lib-Lab-Con.
At a desk near the entrance to the conference, some volunteers—including Mrs. Farage (a German, as it happens)—could be spotted selling Ukitsch: umbrellas, pens, mugs (“The EU is NOT my cup of tea”), tote bags (“The EU is NOT my bag”). Then there was the moment when Mr. Farage—no velvet ropes here—started hawking “Belgian damp rags” to a delighted crowd at five pounds each. (Full disclosure: I bought two.)
Autographed by Farage, these, uh, striking kitchen towels are decorated with the dispiriting features of Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the EU’s European Council. They are an allusion to the one event, more than any other, that made Farage the YouTube star that he is today, a status he cemented with a series of speeches that did much to ensure his recognition by Der Spiegel as the “seventh most dangerous politician” in Europe, no small honor. In 2010 Farage, an MEP since 1999, greeted Van Rompuy—world famous in Belgium, if nowhere else—to the European parliament shortly after the former Belgian prime minister had been appointed the quasi-head of the EU’s quasi-state. After asking who Van Rompuy was, and how he had been picked for this job, Farage compared the new potentate’s charisma to that of a “damp rag” and his appearance to that of “a low-grade bank clerk” (Farage apologized later to bank clerks). It was a virtuoso, deftly theatrical performance, but, as so often with Farage, there was a knife concealed within the knockabout. After the laughs there was this, delivered more quietly:
I sense though that you are competent and capable and dangerous and I have no doubt that it is your intention to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of the European nation-states.
This display of unruly parliamentary vigor was too much for the EU’s mausoleum of democracy. Farage was fined $4,400 for his lèse-Rompuy, not a bad price for the publicity it brought.
Farage, 48, a smoker (despite a bout of cancer in his 20s) who enjoys a drink or two, is well aware of his naughty, none-of-the-above appeal. The Belgian damp rags were also decorated with a small, impish photograph of UKIP’s leader roaring with bad-boy laughter. UKIP’s anti-establishment message was a familiar refrain from the conference floor. The term “political class” was a frequent punch line, repeated with more resignation than anger, the exasperated lament of passengers who have found themselves on a peculiarly poorly run vessel but are still debating how violent the mutiny should be.
One thing that does seem certain, however, is that the Conservative party is in danger of being shoved over the side. It’s not just the EU, or the economy, or the drift to a witless center, although it is all those things. There’s something else. UKIP’s activists are a smart lot, and they understand but do not appreciate the contempt in which they have for too long been held by Cameron’s metropolitan clique. There’s recently been talk of some sort of UKIP-Conservative nonaggression pact for the 2015 general election. In his keynote speech, Farage appeared to leave a door slightly ajar “to consider it,” but only in exchange for a promise “written in blood” of an in/out referendum on the EU. A later speaker wanted something else: an apology. The applause that followed ought to be a reminder to Cameron to be careful in the future about whom he chooses to demonize.
As always in Britain, resentment comes wrapped in the country’s class sensitivities. The accents at the conference were provincial. Toffs were scarce on the ground. As I listened to the talk, time went into reverse, to Conservative constituency meetings of 30 years ago. These were Thatcher’s people; many of them had come of age under the Iron Lady’s reign. They were no-nonsense, often self-employed, and not the sort invited to the dinner parties that had dreamt up the rainbow coalition of politically correct gestures that, in the end, failed to carry Cameron to clear victory in 2010 against one of the most incompetent governments in British history.
To date the border between UKIP and the Conservative party has been ill-defined and rarely policed. That may be changing. If UKIP is to anchor itself at home as well as in the European parliament—essential if it is to increase its clout—it cannot just be about Brussels (the conference’s slogan was “Beyond the EU”). That will mean staking out a position more clearly distinct from the Tories than hitherto. Farage (who quit the Conservative party in 1992 over the EU’s Maastricht Treaty) has been successful in excluding racists and the jackbooted from his party, and describes himself as libertarian. But it is easy to see that the search for vote—particularly from what Farage terms “patriotic old Labour”—may be easing the party in the direction of the harder-edged, bigger-spending populism of euroskeptic parties on the continent, such as the Finns party (also known as the True Finns) and the Danish People’s party.
That could cause trouble in time, but for now Brussels remains the bogeyman around which UKIP can rally, a piñata for all, bashed in Birmingham by Farage in top form, clever, incisive, and witty. Later, “with greetings from the eurozone,” came Timo Soini (Der Spiegel’s “fifth most dangerous”), the leader of the Finns party and the politician responsible for forcing the previously supine Helsinki establishment to do something to protect its taxpayers from the ravages of a dysfunctional monetary union. Soini was hammer to Farage’s saber, but he was amusing and touching, too—proud of his country but also of de Gaulle’s grand vision of a Europe des Patries. If this conference was a celebration of xenophobia it was taking a very strange form. The single currency itself was, of course, singled out for rough treatment and rougher prophecies, not least from the distinguished City of London economist (and former Treasury adviser), UKIP co-belligerent Roger Bootle: “When did things go wrong with the euro? Right at the beginning.”
That was the fun stuff. It’s when discussing the next stage in this saga that the usually ebullient Farage began to look a little anxious. He has long been skeptical, for good reason, about the terms of any referendum that Cameron might offer the British electorate. His new concern is that Barroso’s attempt to push for federation will provide an extremely convenient escape hatch for Cameron, by providing him the opportunity to offer the British to vote on joining a closer union or remaining “as is.” The problem with that choice is that, unless the position of those EU member states who choose to remain outside the deeper union is fundamentally renegotiated, “as is” is not good enough. It might seem attractive to a country easily bored by the technical complexity of the EU debate, but Britain would remain subject, in practice, to the heavy burden of EU regulation, not to mention the exorbitant costs, direct and indirect, of membership. In short, it would be a very limited victory. The electorate’s fear of the unknown will make an in/out referendum a risky proposition for UKIP and its sympathizers, whatever the current opinion polls may predict, but for now it remains the last best hope.
Making matters worse is the gradual approach of 2015 and the likely election of a europhile Labour government and, with it, the closing of the exit door, quite possibly, forever.
And writing those words makes me think of a scene in the final Lord of the Rings film. As Gimli, the martial dwarf, contemplates the perils ahead, he turns to his companions, and remarks, “Certain death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” Gimli, I feel, would have been a member of UKIP.
He’s a tolerant man, Nigel Farage, a devotee of John Stuart Mill, a cricket-loving happy warrior, an “accidental politician.” The leader of the Euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP), and, since 1999, a member of the EU’s Potemkin parliament, he is standing expectantly at the bar of his local, the George & Dragon (of course) in Downe, a friendly low-ceilinged Kentish pub as English as its name. I’m ordering the beers. There’s a traditional, brewed-by-two-yokels county bitter for him (of course) and for me an industrial, vaguely Teutonic lager, bitte. “Euro-piss, I see.” Mock shock: Live and let live. Later on we share a bottle of good red wine. French.
We met up earlier at a railway station in a spot where the countryside emerges from London’s shadow. As we drove past tall hedgerows and stark winter trees, the late-fortysomething Farage proudly played guide: “I’ve always lived around here.” There’s landscape, history, old graveyards to inspect, English Shinto. Up there (he gestures) are the remnants of the oak where William Wilberforce resolved to launch his great anti-slavery campaign, and over here is the splendid pile where Pitt the Younger once lived. I point out Biggin Hill, an RAF redoubt during the Battle of Britain. Replicas of a Hurricane and a Spitfire stand guard. “They had real ones when I was a boy.”
Farage feels the past in this place. He’s a history buff, a battlefield maven, just finishing reading a book on Allenby of Great War fame. We stopped off at the small town of Westerham to inspect a statue of its most famous son, General Wolfe, conqueror of Quebec. Nearby, a restless-looking Churchill seems ready to leap out off the chair on which his sculptor sat him. The last lion’s last den — Chartwell — is nearby. Then on to the George & Dragon, just past the house of another Farage hero, Charles Darwin: The woods where the great scientist wandered are “just as they were . . . almost.”
But to believe, as many critics like to suggest, that Farage and his party are golf-club xenophobes wanting their country back as it was (. . . almost) is to subscribe to a very partial version (in both senses) of the truth. To be sure, there is a trace of the 19th hole about them; oh, what a horror. And is the idea that the country has gone to the dogs imprinted in UKIP’s DNA? Maybe, but the country has gone to the dogs. Claims of xenophobia, however, are difficult to reconcile with reality, in ways both small (Farage’s second wife is German; their two young children are being brought up to speak the language) and large: UKIP is a defender of de Gaulle’s Europe des patries, fighting the bureaucratic drive to remold the continent into a homogenized administrative unit in which history has been sanitized, tradition reduced to decoration, and difference regulated away.
If there is an era for which Farage is nostalgic, it’s more likely to be the 1980s, a time when big government was in retreat and big opportunity was round the corner. Not the most diligent of students, he skipped university and went straight into the City, London’s financial center, just as Mrs. Thatcher’s reforms were transforming it from an entertainingly seedy, mildly run-down club into today’s chilly international hub. It was “like a gold rush,” as we both recall. And there’s still the hint of an Eighties trading desk about Farage, an engaging, quick-witted risk-taker (a survivor of testicular cancer, he still enjoys his Rothmans) with a taste for a good time that has sometimes got him into trouble. Rick Santorum he’s not. Smart, direct, and impressively fluent, he speaks in paragraphs, punctuated with one-liners: He has a way with words, and he knows it.
If you doubt that, just check out the way he welcomed Herman Van Rompuy to the European Parliament shortly after that discreetly sinister Belgian had taken the EU’s top job at the beginning of 2010. Farage’s speech was brutally iconoclastic, rudely funny, and, in its warning of the threat that this official with “the charisma of a damp rag” posed to European democracy, deadly serious. It created uproar across the EU and made UKIP’s leader a YouTube star. Check it out, and you will see why.
“You’re a bit of actor, aren’t you?”
Farage grins his confession. His only regret — a very English regret — is that he may sometimes appear “too shrill.” In fact he doesn’t, but, endearingly, he insists on explaining that the microphones in the EU parliament’s chamber are set up in a way that makes it difficult for viewers to hear the barracking to which he is, not infrequently, reacting. But if it’s not always possible to make out the jeers, you can, I tell him, occasionally see the faces of his critics twisted into something that looks a lot like hatred.
“Oh, it’s hatred.” He names a couple of names. “They have their dream. It’s their religion. These are dangerous people.” They cannot accept dissent, especially when they know they’ve been rumbled: They just don’t want to be told how anti-democratic they really are. Wouldn’t they be happier if bolshie John Bull just quit the EU? “Some of the Euronuts,” maybe, but not the Merkels and Sarkozys: They’d be too nervous about which country would be next.
But is UKIP the right vehicle to extricate Britain from this mess? Since its founding in 1993 as a party set on taking the country out of the EU, it has woven an unsteady path, marked by scandal, factionalism, sporadic incursions by the far right, PR disasters, leadership crises, damaging outbreaks of eccentricity, and, above all, the pervasive, persistent sense that it was not ready for prime time. This was probably inevitable, and not just because small parties tend to be a lot like that. There was also the matter of UKIP’s great cause.
Euroskepticism was hardly unknown in Britain at the time — particularly amongst Conservatives — but it was house-trained. Withdrawal from the EU was widely considered a step too far even amongst those who loved Brussels least. “Banging on” about Europe (to borrow David Cameron’s notorious phrase from a decade or so later) was portrayed by media and political grandees alike as obsessional, retrograde, and profoundly damaging to the governing Tories’ unity, the last a development that, in a paradox understood by just about everyone, could only help sweep the slavishly Europhile Tony Blair into power. And, it turned out, keep him there.
Smears can be self-fulfilling prophecies: The nascent UKIP attracted more than its fair share of cranks, outsiders, and the hopelessly adrift. And it continued to do so, creating the image of the party to which David Cameron played when, in 2006, he referred to UKIP as a bunch of “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly.” The feigned reasonability of that “mostly” was a clever touch.
Farage is no fan of Cameron. Is the prime minister a Christian Democrat on Rhineland lines? Not really. “Dave” (“an affable chap,” he adds, kindly) is more of a social democrat, a paternalist, a statist, and he’s not going to do much about Brussels: nothing that counts, anyway. Farage, a staunch Thatcherite back in the day, doesn’t have much time for the way in which the Conservative party has evolved. To read what UKIP would stand for, at least in theory (once Britain was out of the EU), is to be presented with an attractive mix of the hard-nosed and the libertarian, including deregulation, flat taxes, strict immigration controls, proper schools, tough policing, an aversion to multiculturalism, and a reversal of the kamikaze greenery of the Cameron years. Compared with the Tories, what’s not to like?
The problem is that Britain’s “first past the post” electoral system guarantees that, in most elections, a vote for UKIP is wasted — or worse. It’s “difficult,” Farage admits, an understatement. In the 2010 general election, UKIP scored some 3 percent of the vote, but took no seats, and, by nibbling away at Tory support, cost the Conservatives an absolute majority, thus (more or less) forcing them into coalition with the Eurofanatic Liberal Democrats. UKIP hoped that the Lib Dems would use their new position to push for the adoption of a voting system friendlier to small parties. They did, but they failed: A switch to the Alternative Vote was rejected in a referendum in May 2011.
Farage still wants electoral reform (AV+, since you asked). A glance at Britain’s elections for the European parliament (where a type of proportional representation is used) in 2009 explains why. Led by Farage since 2006, UKIP came in second (slightly ahead of Labour) with 16.5 percent of the vote and, like Labour, won 13 seats out of the UK’s total of 72. Even allowing for the low turnout and the fact that European elections are an excellent opportunity for Britons to register a protest against the EU, the result was a triumph.
Stymied at home, however, by the uncooperative electoral system, UKIP continues to struggle domestically, even as it stands at about 6 percent in the polls, not so far behind the Liberal Democrats. But Farage is determined, stubborn, and resilient (he has survived a plane crash as well as cancer). He’s not giving up. And he’s going to do it his way. Deals with the Conservatives, such as (one suggestion) an agreement not to challenge the party’s many genuinely Euroskeptic MPs, seem out of the question for now. Farage clearly wants UKIP to be seen as more than a Tory offshoot (he takes pains to tell me that its membership also includes “patriotic old Labour and classical liberals”). Those Euroskeptic Tory MPs? Useful camouflage for a Conservative party unserious about the only thing that really counts: prising Brussels out of Britain. “Unless we sort this out, we can’t do the rest.” The financial cost of EU membership is enormous (in direct payments alone, a net £10.3 billion in 2010, UKIP estimates). The democratic toll is still higher: About half of all “British” laws are now passed at the EU level. True enough, bad enough, but by splitting the right-of-center vote, Farage risks helping the Europhile left, which is always pressing to make matters even worse.
So there he stands athwart a political conundrum, Captain Sparrow at the head of UKIP’s motley crew, but something of a one-man band too, harrying the Eurocrats, embarrassing Britain’s establishment, deftly playing new media and old, deftly playing politics, new style and old. He crisscrosses the country, addressing meetings (he truly is a terrific speaker), talking to schools, retail stuff, good stuff. He’d like UKIP to take first place in the next European elections (2014), but what Farage, the gambler, wants most is a referendum — in or out — a high-stakes, binary game (a vote, however reluctant, to remain in the EU is every Euroskeptic’s nightmare). It would bypass that domestic impasse. And he believes it is winnable: His much-disdained UKIP has, “like Stalin’s [Red Army] punishment battalions, softened the ground up.”
The polls suggest that Farage might be right, but he understands that fear of what lies outside (possibly exaggerated further, and ironically, by the instability that the battered euro is leaving in its wake) could make voters pause. To calm that, he’s looking for business support to rally behind his idea of a country that sees its future in a world far wider, and freer, than the EU’s inward-looking, closed, and highly regulated customs union. That’s a vision that ought to be made all the more sellable to clearer-headed voters by the damage that the euro-zone crisis has done to the whole notion of Brussels’s “ever closer union.” And that crisis is unlikely to end soon or well. Farage doesn’t know what’s coming next. If he did, he’d be “in the betting shop.” He guesses that Greece will exit sometime in 2012, followed by Portugal, and believes that the “ultimate question” is France. But he’s not waiting to find out. To him, the issue is this: If Britain does not quit now, then when? Remaining in the EU is death “by a thousand cuts.”
I ask Farage whether he’d like Pitt the Younger’s old job. No thanks, he’s not interested in rank. He’d rather be remembered like a Wilberforce, for having changed things for the better.
Put another way, he will damn the torpedoes and steam on ahead.