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Ukip - why are they gaining support?

65% of those eligible to vote stayed away from the polling booth. UKIP's "earthquake" has been exaggerated. Their over-confidence could be the source of their undoing... or at least, I hope it is.
 
frogwoman said:
The Nazis were nothing like ukip ffs.

Where are the paramilitary forces behind ukip? Where is the obsession with violence and the palingenetic mythology? Where is the irredentism?
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There's not even much similarity between the German polity prior to Nazism, and the UK polity now. They were far more loaded toward the traditional right than the UK has been for at least 80 years.
 
ViolentPanda said:
There's not even much similarity between the German polity prior to Nazism, and the UK polity now. They were far more loaded toward the traditional right than the UK has been for at least 80 years.
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I don't mean to go on about this but a lot of people who are saying that they will defriend people on fb for sharing ukip stuff are quite happy to share illuminati and conspiracy theory shit. These people wouldn't recognise a fascist movement if it emerged and appeared to agree with them.
 
It seems the SWP are hosting anti-ukip meetings nationwide, I think they will be popular, but it must be the worse group to be running them.
 
ViolentPanda said:
There's not even much similarity between the German polity prior to Nazism, and the UK polity now. They were far more loaded toward the traditional right than the UK has been for at least 80 years.
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Yes, but there is not much similarity between the UK polity and any country, is there? The UK has been vastly wealthy and is now relying on nothing but its position as a financial centre to maintain its prestige and power. Most far-right movements thrive under very different circumstances; poor countries, losing profits to the financial centres?
 
But the rest of the UK is being left to rot and its social sphere looted (council, education, health and welfare cuts & privatisations etc), while only that financial centre remains prosperous, arguably at the expense of the former (PFI, student loans etc)

Maybe not as different as all that ...
 
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Nigel Farage has declared he wants to see a grammar school in every town and cut the top rate of tax to 40p, as he set out plans to get Ukip's first MPs by "throwing the kitchen sink" at a few dozen constituencies.
The Ukip leader, whose party triumphed in the European elections, said he would personally stand in the south-east and is considering the option of South Thanet, where the party has a lot of county council seats.
Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Farage gave some indications of what would be in the party's manifesto outside of its key messages on leaving the EU and reducing immigration.
He said the party was no longer committed to a flat tax and would make it a priority to abolish tax for those on the minimum wage, as well as cutting the top rate to 40p.
Farage has previously disowned Ukip's 2010 manifesto, written during a hiatus in his leadership, saying it was hundreds of pages of rubbish that he had not even read.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/01/nigel-farage-ukip-schools-taxes
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So its tax cuts and grammar schools as the first 'new' policies for UKIP, will they be popular?
 
treelover said:
So its tax cuts and grammar schools as the first 'new' policies for UKIP, will they be popular?
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Interesting that they know they can't let themselves be cast as thatcherite and still expect to win in the North.
Asked about whether he was trying to bring back Thatcherite policies, Farage said: "That was of its time. Thatcherism was of its time 40 years ago to deal with a specific set of problems. For half the country it benefited them, for the other half the country it didn't."
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Christ, they'll be calling themselves a "one-nation" party soon.
 
DairyQueen said:
Yes, but there is not much similarity between the UK polity and any country, is there?
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I'm not comparing the UK to any current polity, I'm specifically refuting a claim by another poster that the political situation and current UK polity has much in common with the political situation and the polity of pre-Nazi Germany in the years between the foundation of the NSDAP and the Nazi seizure of power.
 
"There voter profile is now of an age where by what's left of there grey matter is probably on some Alzheimer's induced nostalgia trip for the good old days. "
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posted on CIF comments, a prime example of how not to engage UKIP supporters:facepalm:
 
frogwoman said:
I don't mean to go on about this but a lot of people who are saying that they will defriend people on fb for sharing ukip stuff are quite happy to share illuminati and conspiracy theory shit. These people wouldn't recognise a fascist movement if it emerged and appeared to agree with them.
Click to expand...

It's an old story, froggie - people get obsessed with looking at the symptoms rather than the disease.
 
treelover said:
It seems the SWP are hosting anti-ukip meetings nationwide, I think they will be popular, but it must be the worse group to be running them.
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I'm not sure they'll be as popular as is being assumed (either by the Swappies or others). While UAF etc have been merrily trying to quantify UKIP as racist/Nazi/whatever they've currently dug up about a single councillor, they're falling into the trap of not investigating what either the electoral phenomenon or the actual party is/what it exists for beyond the immediate. Mud-slinging only goes so far, as you'd have thought that the likes of the SWP would have already learned.
 
From an interview with David Graeber. Not really strictly on topic but a lot of the themes resonate with what has been discussed on this thread.

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/

Q: I wonder about the political ramifications of this. You’re talking about a situation that obviously requires labor unions, but it could also go the other way. I am reminded of a passage in your book, “The Democracy Project,” where you attribute the well-known working-class enmity against the “liberal elite” to the fact that the liberal elite have good jobs, rewarding jobs, jobs that by definition lots of average people will never be able to get. I wonder if you could expand on that.

A: Well, here we go back to the question of unpaid internships again. Some years ago I wrote a piece for Harpers called “Army of Altruists” where I tried to grapple with the power of right-wing populism, especially with the way that “we hate the liberal elite” and “support the troops” seemed to have a very similar, deep resonance, even to be a way of saying the same thing. What I ended up concluding is that working class people hate the cultural elite more than they do the economic elite—and mind you, they don’t like the economic elite very much. But they hate the cultural elite because they see them as a group of people who have grabbed all the jobs where one gets paid to do good in the world. If you want a career pursuing any form of value other than monetary value—if you want to work in journalism, and pursue truth, or in the arts, and pursue beauty, or in some charity or international NGO or the UN, and pursue social justice—well, even assuming you can acquire the requisite degrees, for the first few years they won’t even pay you. So you’re supposed to live in New York or some other expensive city on no money for a few years after graduation. Who else can do that except children of the elite? So if you’re a fork-lift operator or even a florist, you know your kid is unlikely to ever become a CEO, but you also know there’s no way in a million years they’ll ever become drama critic for the New Yorker or an international human rights lawyer. The only way they could get paid a decent salary to do something noble, something that’s not just for the money, is to join the army. So saying “support the troops” is a way of saying “fuck you” to the cultural elite who think you’re a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, but who also make sure your kid would never be able to join their club of rich do-gooders even if he or she was twice as smart as any of them.

So the right wing manipulates the resentment of the bulk of the working class from being able to dedicate their lives to anything purely noble or altruistic. But at the same time—and here’s the real evil genius of right-wing populism—they also manipulate the resentment of that portion of the middle classes trapped in bullshit jobs against the bulk of the working classes, who at least get to do productive work of obvious social benefit. Think about all the popular uproar about school teachers. There’s this endless campaign of vilification against teachers, who they say are overpaid, coddled, and are blamed for everything wrong with our education system. In fact, grade school teachers undergo really grueling conditions for much less money than they’d be paid if they’d gone into almost any other profession requiring the same level of education, and almost all the problems the right-wingers are referring to aren’t created by the teachers or teachers’ unions at all but by school administrators—the ones who are paid much more, and mostly have classic bullshit jobs that seem to multiply endlessly even as the teachers themselves are squeezed and downsized. So why does no one complain about those guys? Actually I saw something telling written by a right-wing activist on some blog—he said, well the funny thing is, when we first started our school reform campaigns, we tried to focus on the administrators. But it didn’t take. Then we shifted to the teachers and suddenly the whole thing exploded. It’s hard to explain that in any other way than to say: a lot of people resent the teachers for having genuine, meaningful jobs. You get to shape young lives. You get to make a real difference for other people. And the logic seems to be: shouldn’t that be enough for them? They want that, and middle-class salaries, and job security, and vacations, and benefits, too? You even see that with auto workers. “But you get to make cars! That’s a real job! And you also want $30 an hour?”

It’s an imperfect strategy. The anti-intellectualism for instance works on many sections of the white working class, but it doesn’t work nearly so well on immigrants or African-Americans. The resentment against those who get to do meaningful labor exists alongside a resentment for having to do meaningless labor to begin with. It’s an unstable mix. But we have to recognize that in countries like the US, it’s been pretty effective.
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Bernie Gunther said:
But the rest of the UK is being left to rot and its social sphere looted (council, education, health and welfare cuts & privatisations etc), while only that financial centre remains prosperous, arguably at the expense of the former (PFI, student loans etc)

Maybe not as different as all that ...
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Well yes. There is no serious appetite in England to change that. This is perhaps the most depressing thing about modern politics; that people do not vote in terms of their regional interest. They vote on very narrow issues that - truth be told - only impact a couple big cities at best (immigration being the most obvious). The London economy is so far detached from the rest of the country, I find it really depressing that people in the North of England in particular tend to vote for politicians that simply do not represent their interests (of course, the London working-class get shafted in all of this, but in a very different way from the rest of the country).
 
anyone?

These sort of things just didn't happen here, there was no far right presence and certainly not one which could do the above.
 
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