{"id":11339,"date":"2013-05-05T12:10:35","date_gmt":"2013-05-05T11:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=11339"},"modified":"2013-05-14T11:20:04","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T10:20:04","slug":"the-rise-and-rise-of-ukip-and-why-it-wont-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=11339","title":{"rendered":"The rise and rise of UKIP &#8211; and why it won&#8217;t last (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>British readers will be well aware that, in last week&#8217;s local elections in England, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) led by Nigel Farage, did spectacularly well, taking 23% of the vote and winning 147 council seats. Non-British readers may find this a very odd development and wonder what is going on.<\/p>\n<p>There are some very British factors at play here:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Disillusionment with the political establishment as a result of factors like the expenses scandal and Cameron&#8217;s Eton coterie<\/li>\n<li>Despair as the impact of the banking crisis continues and Britain barely escapes a triple-dip recession<\/li>\n<li>Resentment at the number of immigrants from the new Eastern European EU member states<\/li>\n<li>The non-availability of the Liberal Democrats as a protest vehicle now that they are in an unpopular coalition government<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But we should see the rise of of UKIP in Britain as part of a much broader trend whereby, in many democratic countries facing deep economic and political challenges, new populist political parties have garnered huge numbers of votes in a short period of time. Think, for instance, of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In France, the National Front led by\u00a0Marine Le Pen<\/li>\n<li>In Italy, the Five Star Movement led by Beppe Grillo<\/li>\n<li>In Greece, SYRIZA led by\u00a0Alexis Tsipras<\/li>\n<li>In The Netherlands, the Fredoom Party led by\u00a0Geert Wilders<\/li>\n<li>In Israel,\u00a0Yesh Atid\u00a0led by\u00a0Yair Lapid<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So the rise of of a protest party like UKIP is not unprecedented &#8211; but what will happen now? I venture to suggest that, within two or three years, the party will implode for a mixture of external and internal factors.<\/p>\n<p>The external factors will include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>focus on their lack of credible politics<\/li>\n<li>examination of the record and pronouncements of their eclectic candidates<\/li>\n<li>performance on councils of their elected representatives<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The internal factors will include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>disagreements over the development of new policies<\/li>\n<li>scandals over sources of funding<\/li>\n<li>personality clashes at all levels of this chaotic organisation<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>UKIP may do very well in next year&#8217;s European elections when they will be helped by resentment against the EU, low turn-out, and a proportional representation system. But, by the time of the General Election in 2015, besides all the external and internal pressures that I have identified, the focus will be more on the economy than Europe, turn-out will be much higher diluting the UKIP vote, and the first-past-the-post system will deny them more than a few seats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>British readers will be well aware that, in last week&#8217;s local elections in England, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) led by Nigel Farage, did spectacularly well, taking 23% of the vote and winning 147 council seats. Non-British readers may find this a very odd development and wonder what is going on. There are some very [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11339"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11411,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11339\/revisions\/11411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}