Oxfordshire
NO LONGER A MINOR PARTY ?
Sunday, 21st June 2009
Now that the dust has settled over the European election campaign its reasonable to take a look at the results and see where UKIP is now and where it might go in the future.
Well, whichever way one cuts it, it has to be counted a great success : 13 seats won (one more than last time), 16.5% of the turnout, 2.5 million votes, and second place pushing Labour into third.
And that extra seat was won against a backdrop of a reduction in the number of of UK MEPs from 78 to 72, so the barriers were higher this time.
All those newspaper articles about the "almost dead" UK Independence Party, that had "imploded", all the predictions by professors of political science that the party would perhaps drop back to five seats, all now shown to be propaganda or misunderstanding.
The actual result will do very nicely, thank you.
And it was nice to hear Andrew Pierce of the Daily Telegraph, speaking on the radio, wonder whether they should still be referring to UKIP as a minor party.
Looking more closely at the results, there are some pluses and some minuses, notwithstanding the overall success.
In Wales, UKIP gained a seat for the first time. John Bufton, a long-time party activist who stood as the party's candidate in a by-election in Ceredigion (Cardigan) many years ago and who is Chairman of UKIP Wales, gained over 87000 votes (12.8%).
Conversely, in the East Midlands, the party's vote share dropped by almost 10% and a seat was lost. This was the region in which Robert Kilroy-Silk stood in 2004 and there may be a certain amount of disillusion there that contributed to that loss.
In the Eastern region, the party gained 19.6% of the vote, the same as last time, and retained its two MEPs. This region was of concern during the campaign as its the region where Tom Wise was an MEP and there was much bad local publicity resulting from the allegations against him. Additionally in this region, there was publicity about the breakaway United Kingdom First party. In the event they gained 2.4% of the vote. That sounds like not very much but, in PR systems, that can be enough to lose one a seat.
The London region is tough territory for UKIP yet we still kept an MEP there, with Gerard Batten being re-elected on 10.8% of the vote. The defection of the two elected UKIP members of the London Assembly to Veritas in 2004/2005 could not have helped.
The North East is very difficult for any party as there are only three seats. But just an additional 2.2% would have brought UKIP its first MEP in the region : the Liberal Democrats took the third seat with 17.6% of the vote while UKIP were fourth on 15.4%. That was 3.2% up on 2004 and 90,700 votes.
In the North West, Paul Nuttall, Chairman of UKIP, retained the seat previously held by John Whittaker. As has been said elsewhere, will the European parliament know what has hit it when Paul gets there ! Not least, how will the interpreters cope with his accent. Paul took 261,740 votes and 15.8%.
Scotland has always been especially difficult for UKIP - of course, there are unique factors there : Scottish nationalism and a seemingly unmovable attachment to Labour and the welfare state. What a sad state for the country of Adam Smith and David Hulme. And what a deception for the SNP to promise "independence" within the European Union.
In Scotland, UKIP got 5.2% and 57,788 votes. There are six seats in Scotland and the sixth seat was won with 11.5% of the vote - so its within striking distance. But we need to convince the Scottish voters that we care about them too, as well as those of the affluent South East of England.
And in the South East, our winning duo were Nigel Farage and Marta Andreasen. I am told also that Steve Harris was within 15,790 votes of being elected - we very nearly took a third seat in this region. The party took 440,000 votes, 18.8% (a slight fall in votes). I look forward to much irritation on the part of EU officials when Marta takes up a place on the Budgetary Control Committee. She knows where the bodies are buried !
In the South West, UKIP retained the two seats it had last time. Roger Knapman has stepped down after an honourable time with UKIP, including his time as party leader, and been replaced by William, Earl of Dartmouth. The party tok 341,845 votes, 22.1 %.
In the West Midlands, its good to see that Nikki Sinclaire, another long-time UKIP campaigner, won a seat, along with Mike Nattrass who was re-elected. The 300,471 votes there represented a 21.3% vote (an increase of 3.8%).
Godfrey Bloom, UKIP's antidote to the PC brigade (though I felt his remark about women cleaning behind the fridge was spectacularly unhelpful), was re-elected in Yorkshire and the Humber with 213,750 votes, 17.4% (up by 2.9%).
What are the party's prospects for the future ? Its impossible to know, of course. But, despite the success of those 13 seats and 2.5 million votes, we still need to make that leap forward into Westminster and to gain a toe-hold there : just one MP would be enough to start with - enough to start to break the dam. To do that, there needs to be a step change in how UKIP is perceived by the electorate.
It needs to be seen as a mainstream party with a solid set of policies and a coherent political philosophy underpinning those policies. Well, we have those things already, but the message needs to be spread wider and wider among the electorate. We have been helped by the expenses scandal, no doubt, if only in the sense that the electors are now willing to look at other parties.
At the next Europen elections in 2014 we can only guess what the circumstances will be. There may be pan-European political parties if the European Commission gets its way, with a certain percentage of the seats reserved to those parties.
Somehow, though, I don't think that would work. How many voters would recognise and vote for the European Social Democrats or the Alianza Popular Europeo ?
And in the UK will we still have Libertas, No2EU, United Kingdom First, the English Democrats and the Jury Team ? Well, Libertas has gone already, having received a mere 0.5% of the national vote. I don't expect the Jury Team to be there in 2014 and probably not United Kingdom First.
The English Democrats will probably still be there.
The case of No2EU is interesting. They gained 1.0% of the national vote and could perhaps represent a viable long-term strand of politics : a left-wing eurosceptic party. The trouble is, they are not just left but hard left, with members from the various socialist parties and even the Communist party. It would be nice to think that we could persuade them over to UKIP but that's not very likely.
So the party lives to fight again. But with the proviso that Westminster is our real target. If, by some miracle, a motion came before the European parliament to close itself down and go home, the UKIP MEPs would enthusiastically vote "yes".
Only through Westminster can we achieve our ambition of returning Britain to self-governance.
Let's hope for that first MP in the next year or so.
Who knows, could it be from Norwich North ?
Full election results : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/elections/euro/09/html/ukregion_999999.stm
Comment on IndependenceHome : http://www.indhome.com/2009/06/12/adam-smith-on-ukip
