Urbane Londoners: UKIP welcomes your sneering

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mong urbane Londoners, admitting to a fondness for UKIP and its man of the moment* Nigel Farage is about as bad as confessing never to have watched Mad Men and The Killing. Maybe that’s a touch extreme; perhaps a better analogy would be about as distasteful as drinking blue top milk or serving up a Dairylea Dunker as a canapé?

Despite making inroads across much of the UK in the Local and European elections last week – Nigel was particularly excited** by UKIP’s gains in Wales – UKIP failed to convince a large chunk of London voters of its merits. And why was this? Well, one reason for UKIP’s London failure, as acceded by Suzanne Evans, UKIP’s communities spokesperson, when interviewed on Radio 4 last week, was UKIP’s difficulty in appealing to the ‘cultured, educated, and young’, of which it would seem London is absolutely packed to the rafters.

What Suzanne didn’t say is that there is a link between UKIP’s lack of appeal in London and its popularity in places like Boston and Grimsby. Indeed, UKIP’s unpopularity in London fits its anti-establishment narrative to a tee. UKIP is marketed as the party of the ignored; the party outside of the elite, giving a voice to the individuals who have not reaped the fruits of globalisation; the party of the embarrassing Grandad whose opinion is no longer respected and has to be shushed.

Unlike Cameron – toff; Miliband (Ed) – weird; and Clegg – spineless; with their uniform elite background and zero non-political experience, Nigel is cut from a different cloth (though not radically different, having received a not-particularly-feral education at Dulwich College) with no university background and to paraphrase his favourite soundbite: ‘unlike them [Cameron, Miliband and Clegg] I’ve had a real job; I was in business for 20 years’. Also, Nigel, like other ‘real people’, drags on a fag and has a beer, although not the cat’s piss industrial lager brands that plenty of ‘real people’ drink, sticking to real ale. Of course, he and UKIP, as the UKIP website heralds, have ‘common sense solutions’. And Nigel is definitely not an intellectual (a bad quality as far as the UK electorate is concerned). If urbane Londoners and the political classes are not that keen on UKIP that is just tickety-boo with Nigel. In fact in his frequent media appearances he never forgets to stress just how much UKIP is despised by the political classes.

The outpourings of criticism, bordering on sneering, from bright young, urbane, London things only adds to UKIP’s appeal. Certainly, statements that the only people who vote for UKIP are ‘thickos’, ‘closet Nazis’ and ‘bigots’, are unlikely to convince those with UKIP sympathies to undergo a Damascene conversion. Instead, such opprobrium will probably entrench their views. To me, anyway, some of the sneering statements about UKIP voters that I have read on Facebook might as well be proclaiming: ‘I am Guy Rendell (that’s me): I am intelligent, sophisticated and cultured. If you vote for UKIP then I am afraid you are not’ (you might very well suggest that my deep seated motive for writing this piece is along the same lines). A more productive form of criticism might be to focus on UKIP’s actual policies. In case you don’t know, some of these include: pulling the UK out of the EU; an Australian points-based immigration system, which presumably means that all Australians are thickos, closet Nazis and bigots (I jest); their previous opposition to gay marriage; their scepticism on man-made climate change and the cost of investing/spending (delete as you think fit) in renewable energy; lower taxes; de-regulation; and cuts to/reduced public spending. Another critique might be to scrutinise UKIP’s relationship in Europe with some of the far right European parties.

Having said all of this, perhaps I am no better than the UKIP sneerers, sneering on the sneerers. After all, as my father once said to me (yawn), when someone is a shit, there are occasions when you should let them know that they are a shit. Okay, Nigel Farage you are a…

* This assertion might be a little late as according to the Financial Times we hit ‘Peak Farage’ on Monday 26 May – the day after the results of the European elections.

** This excitement bordered on bewilderment as Nigel seemed to have difficulty understanding why anyone in Wales voted for UKIP (see YouTube clip below).