Ukip

Nigel Farage likes to argue he’s not a normal politician. He says what he thinks and what other people think too. He certainly didn’t do what other politicians are trying to do ahead of the European elections, which is expectation management. Instead, he set the bar pretty darn high for Ukip, telling his party’s spring conference in Torquay that ‘we can cause an earthquake on May 22nd by winning the European elections’, adding ‘if we top those polls, it will then give us the momentum to drive us forward to the general election a year after that’. He has set Ukip a big challenge there because if the party doesn’t

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on why the two party political system is dying” startat=1207] Listen [/audioplayer]Two things will make the next general election campaign quite unlike any previous election in this country. The first is that we now have four-party politics right across Britain. In Scotland and Wales, the nationalist parties have been a political force for a generation. But the big change is in England, where Ukip is emerging as a fourth force. Second, the campaign will be haunted by the spectre of another hung parliament. The question of what happens if no party wins an overall majority will be asked time and time again by

Much hilarity among those of a leftish persuasion in Westminster that the Conservatives might dare call themselves the Workers’ Party, as Grant Shapps enthusiastically did yesterday. Mind you, when Shapps gave his speech making this claim alongside Sir John Major yesterday, journalists were excluded, so he might not have said it at all. But assuming he did, there’s no reason why the Conservatives should provoke any more hilarity than any other Westminster party when they make this claim. There are, though, two warnings that if not heeded, could make this new tag seem as hilarious to voters as previous attempts at rebranding. The first comes from David Skelton, whose campaign

He asked… and Nigel said yes. The Ukip leader and his party colleagues had whipped Westminster into a state of great suspense in the 24 hours between Nick Clegg’s phone-in on LBC and Nigel Farage’s own appearance on the station. And Farage took his time to say ‘yes’ to the Lib Dem leader’s challenge to a live debate on the EU ahead of the European elections. He said: ‘I nearly choked on my bacon roll when I heard Nick Clegg say he wanted to have a debate about the big European question because this was the guy three years ago advocating an in/out referendum who now says there shouldn’t be

Who knew Nick Clegg was so scary? As James revealed this morning, the Lib Dem leader has challenged Nigel Farage, never knowingly silent, to a televised leaders’ debate for the European elections. But the Ukip response isn’t quite so enthusiastic. The party’s director of communications Patrick O’Flynn has said that ‘it would be ridiculous if Nick Clegg were to refuse to extend his invitation to David Cameron and Ed Miliband too’ and that ‘we also want to know from David Cameron and Ed Miliband that they are not running scared and will be happy to present their case on the EU to the British public as well. We can see

Before the European Elections in May, don’t expect either David Cameron or Ed MIliband to engage with Nigel Farage. Both the Tory and Labour leaders think that the best strategy for dealing with Ukip and its leader is to deny them the oxygen of publicity. Nick Clegg, by contrast, is desperate for a scrap with the Ukip leader. Clegg’s rationale is that the more fights he can pick with Farage, the more he can turn the European Elections into a fight between In—led by Clegg and the Liberal Democrats—and Out, championed by Farage and his party. Clegg hopes that this polarised contest will prevent a total wipeout of Lib Dem

So Ukip did come second in the Wythenshawe by-election (and Labour won, of course). David Cameron says the 4,301 votes (17.95% of the vote and a 14.5% swing) that John Bickley won wasn’t ‘the sort of break through that people were talking about’. The Prime Minister, who saw his own party pushed into third place with 14.5% (3,479 votes), did also say that ‘obviously messages are sent, and signals are sent and protests are made and governments should always listen to those things and I always do’. Now, the usual caveat that you can’t extrapolate very much from a by-election in one constituency applies. But Ukip can reasonably claim that

Ukip’s autumn conference made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It was supposed to be a showcase of how grown up the party is these days, but it ended up being about Godfrey Bloom calling women ‘sluts’ and hitting a journalist. In the conference hall, Nigel Farage bounded onto the stage to a strange remix of 1990s dance music and his famous ‘who are you’ diatribe at Herman van Rompuy. But while Bloom stole the headlines and Farage delivered his usual routine, the most impressive performance of the day came from Paul Nuttall MEP, the party’s deputy leader. Nuttall is quite a different Ukipper to his boss. He’s a

Ukip’s campaigning team has been working so hard to make it into second place in Wythenshawe and Sale East that when I arrived at their very purple shop in Sale town centre yesterday, the big panic was not so much a shortage of leaflets as a shortage of clean pants. One of the staffers has had to dash out to a nearby clothes shop as he’s spent so many hours working on the by-election that he hasn’t had any time to do any laundry. In the shopping street outside, a man in a fluorescent yellow tabard and a Ukip rosette hands out campaign leaflets. Round the back is a purple

Will Ukip make great gains in the Wythenshawe & Sale East by-election next week? According to the latest polling from Lord Ashcroft, the party has increased its vote share by 12 points since the last general election but are far off from winning. Labour is still very much on track to hold the seat, given a 17-point increase in their vote share: Although Ukip has increased its vote share fivefold since 2010, it looks unlikely at this stage that the party will sweep through and take the seat. Despite rumours of shipping in a team from London to run the short campaign, they don’t appear to have made much of

The Ukip candidate for Wythenshawe and Sale East has come up with a rather interesting idea: he wants to move the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to Manchester, bringing 700 jobs to the city. I imagine that a lot of Ukip supporters would be quite happy to see the department metaphorically sent to Zurich for an appointment with Dignitas, but it’s a valid point. Why shouldn’t we send more civil servants out of London, where the cost of office space and decent housing is much lower, compared to the capital with its chronic shortage of affordable homes. Lots of countries have separate political and financial centres; Italy has Rome/Milan,

The EU referendum bill has just been knocked on the head in the House of Lords. The peers, led by Labour and Liberal Democrat Lords, have denied the bill the time it needs to get through. So the appointed house has defied the elected house and denied the public a say on a matter of fundamental constitutional importance. This poses a problem for David Cameron. The bill was meant to be one of the ways that the Tories would try and halt Ukip’s advance ahead of the European Elections. The last thing Cameron wants is the Tory party getting in a bate about Europe and complaining that this should have

[audioplayer src=’http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_January_2014_v4.mp3′ title=’Douglas Carswell MP explain why he now agrees with this article’ startat=518] Listen [/audioplayer]Things could scarcely be going better for the Conservatives. Every week seems to bring more news of the recovery. High street tills are ringing, employment is at an all-time high and Britain’s economy is growing faster than that of any major country. No wonder the Labour party’s opinion poll lead has been reduced to one vulnerable point. Two years ago, the Conservatives had almost given up hope of winning the next election. Now, it looks within their grasp — if they keep it together. And therein lies the problem. Two groups of people are working

Monday’s episode of The Unbelievable Truth, in case you missed it, featured comedians Marcus Brigstocke and Rufus Hound. I did miss it, partly because I read about how Hound thinks David Cameron wants to kill your children, and I just couldn’t face the jokes about the Daily Mail and ‘hoards of Romanians!’ Even Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe has become unbearable. I gave up half-way through the last two episodes I attempted, one of which was entirely about how stupid and neanderthal Ukip are and the other which contained a slot just as big explaining how anyone hostile to further migration from eastern European was simply an idiot and that’s it.