[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/06/ukip.jpg)After an earthquake, we gather the pieces hurled and scattered all over the place by the magnitude of the event, put them together and reconstruct. This is precisely the situation Britain finds itself in after last week’s momentous elections.
The big question in British politics now is who is going to win the 2015 General Elections for the British Parliament, which will produce the majority to form the new government.
The local and European elections were much anticipated and the outcome has been analyzed at length. The elections are supposed to give an idea of the next occupant of 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister’s residence.
But the new four-main-party-system that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has introduced by storm makes these predictions much more complicated. UKIP has been the nightmare of pollsters and number crunchers, who admit defeat in appraising the current situation – and more importantly, admit that predicting the future will be much more difficult.
Without UKIP, it would be relatively easy to forecast next year’s results. If, as is often the case, on May 22 the incumbent party in government had fared badly and the opposition well, it would be seen as a sign that it’s time for the usual reversal of roles between them.
But now the Labour Party in opposition, although electorally performing better than the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in the government coalition, has also hemorrhaged a stream of votes to UKIP. Therefore its percentage in the polls is not much higher than the Tories, which does not indicate a safe Labour victory in 2015.
On the other hand, most votes for UKIP have come from the Conservatives (Prime Minister David Cameron’s party). This means that these two parties of the Right will be forced to share votes in the General Elections as well, thus reducing the Tories’ chances to win. But by how much we don’t know, because a certain number of people who voted for UKIP at the European Elections won’t do so when it comes to electing the UK Parliament and deciding the next Prime Minister.
It may seem appropriate to choose UKIP, a party that is largely one-issue (leaving the European Union) at the Euro polls, but from the national government many voters, albeit sympathetic to party Leader Nigel Farage’s views, want something more. These voters are interested in a wide range of issues that affect their lives, such as the economy, education, health, crime, welfare, housing, employment, and so on. It’s difficult to know how many will desert UKIP for the Tories next year.
The three main parties, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats – often placed in the same bracket and derisively called “LibLabCon” to indicate that what they have in common is much more significant than their differences, giving the electorate no real choice – likely do not understand the message of the recent election.
In order to do so they would have to change what they are to become something completely different. All their aims and policies are predicated on carrying on as usual, offering the country more of the same, the only difference being in degree. Yesterday it was recognition of same-sex civil unions, today the law on same-sex marriage. Today it’s racist to quote Churchill’s anti-Islam words, tomorrow it will be racist to describe a pet as “a black cat with a bit of white.”
Incidentally, many votes were lost by the Conservatives to UKIP because of the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron’s insistence on making homosexual marriage legal.
All the three main parties are egalitarian and strict followers of political correctness. They vilify people for legitimate concerns over where the country is headed, explicitly or implicitly calling them names. They never stop to wonder whether people might be right; at most they express sympathy, understanding and “concern” for how people feel, not so subtly implying that those feelings are irrational and based on false perceptions, whereas reality is what the business of politics is all about so those feelings should be disregarded.
The following voter account sums up the reasons why many voted UKIP:
Despite all of this, I will vote UKIP at the Euro-elections, and there are two main reasons for this: first, that I wish to carry the message, very strongly, to the LibLabCon alliance that they do not have a right to be in government, they do not have a right to power—something that Labour and Conservatives have, I think, utterly forgotten (leading inexorably to a corruption almost as total as the Republicans and Democrats in Washington).
Some pundits frequently note that UKIP’s voters are mostly men, over 50 and blue collar. Implicit in this announcement is the view that such demographics should say a lot about UKIP, specifically how bad it must be if it attracts predominantly people of this despicable sort.
It’s reminiscent of the media in the US and elsewhere, which at the time of the presidential elections were highlighting how Mitt Romney was disproportionately preferred by men, with the same ominous implications of backwardness and “uncoolness.”
That London is not part of the UK any more, due to its strong immigrant and Muslim presence, and is becoming increasingly so, was confirmed once again by the last vote pattern.
London is the only region where UKIP is still struggling, whereas Labour is doing fine. Immigrants in general and Muslims in particular tend to vote for the Labour Party, which has opened wide the doors of the country to them when in government, is overgenerous in its welfare policies for everyone, and is favorable to Islam to the point of distraction.
This is only one of several cases in which the Muslim vote has shaped European politics in recent times. In some cases it’s proved decisive: the analysis of various groups’ votes showed that, without Muslims in France, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy would have won – the election of socialist Francois Hollande as President was determined by the followers of Islam.
What does the future hold for UKIP and for Britain?
The UKIP will try to get its first Member of the British House of Commons elected this June 5 to fill the seat of MP Patrick Mercer, who recently resigned.
European UKIP representatives, including Farage, have said that at the General Elections of 2015 they’ll target and concentrate their efforts particularly on those constituencies where they already have councillors or have done well in the local elections. They say that this has been the successful strategy of the Lib Dems, who have been in a similar position of being outsiders in the past.
In the long term, Farage aims to repeat the destruction of Canada’s Conservative Party two decades ago, when the rebel Right-wing Reform Party, that many compare to UKIP itself, caused another political earthquake.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Farage said that a Canadian-style Tory meltdown “could happen” in Britain. Canada’s century-old ruling Conservative Party was destroyed overnight in the country’s 1993 election by the populist, low-tax Reform Party, which had been called “racist, sexist and homophobic,” some of the epithets thrown at UKIP, along with the “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” that PM Cameron used for UKIP supporters. According to Farage:
The split in Canada’s Centre Right enabled the Liberals, Canada’s equivalent of our Labour Party, to take power.
But after ten years of infighting, the Reform revolution succeeded. The Canadian Alliance, a merger of Reform with the ruins of Canada’s old-style Tories, led to former Reform official Stephen Harper becoming Prime Minister in 2006.
Farage compared attacks on himself to those on Reform Party leader:
‘They called him a Right-wing extremist, a nutter, away with the fairies, he’ll never get anywhere and what happens? They won one by-election, a schoolmistress way out West, who resisted every bribe and temptation to rejoin the Conservative Party.
‘Now you have a Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who was first elected on a Reform ticket, as were half the Cabinet.
‘Don’t think this can’t happen here. The public want something different. We are catalysing a big change in British politics on fundamental issues that have been brushed under the carpet and ignored by a completely out-of-touch career political class for too long.’
In all this euphoria, we mustn’t forget UKIP’s limitation, first of all that the party’s not opposed to Islam. In fact, it even has British parliamentary candidates who openly advocate Sharia law, like Dean Perks:
“Sharia law, in my opinion, works as a prevention. And prevention is better than cure. If you think you’re going to get your hands chopped off for pinching something, you won’t pinch it.”
A UKIP council candidate who tweeted that Islam is “evil” was suspended from the party. Farage distanced himself from his own immigration spokesman, Gerard Batten, who had proposed a special code of conduct in the form of a charter calling on Muslims to accept equality, reject violence and accept the need to modify the Quran, which Muslims had to sign. And in public speeches the UKIP leader is careful to limit his comments on Islam to politically correct ones.
Even more tellingly, membership of UKIP is forbidden to current or even previous members of the English Defense League and other groups who are outspoken on the Islamisation of Britain and dare hinder it.
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