Last week residents of the British realms picked 650 members of parliament. While the polls predicted a close race between the marginally center-right Conservatives (Tories) and the left-lurching Labor Party, hopes were high that the libertarian-leaning United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) would break through and maybe even become the kingmaker in a hung legislature.
None of these things happened.
In the end the polls were completely wrong. The Conservatives made road kill of Labor while UKIP crashed and burned, actually managing to lose one of the two members of parliament (MPs) that they already had while failing to gain a single new seat. That includes losing the constituency of South Thanet where UKIP’s charismatic and savvy leader Nigal Farage fell 1800 votes short of entering parliament.
Ultimately UKIP did earn four million votes and over 12% of the total but due to the quirks of the British system, they procured fewer seats than smaller regional parties such as the Scottish Nationalists (SNP) who won 56 seats with just 5% of the national vote.
There are five theories of UKIP’s failure. All of them likely true to some degree. They provide some lessons to election-oriented libertarians everywhere.
Victims of their own success
Over the past two years UKIP has enjoyed a popular surge. They won European parliamentary elections handily and then smoked the Conservatives and Labor in a pair of high stakes bi-elections. UKIP was ascendant. Pollsters inside and outside the major parties warned that UKIP could take 30 seats in parliament. The Tories panicked.
Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to move in UKIP’s direction to cover his flank. He triangulated on their number one issue, European Union membership. Despite being pro-Europe, Cameron promised a renegotiation on EU membership to include a reduction in immigration and greater autonomy within the EU. If these negotiations failed, the British people would be able to decide via a 2017 national plebiscite whether to remain in the Union at all.
Just like that Cameron took UKIP’s two biggest issues – the EU and immigration – off the table, undermining the primary reason to vote for UKIP.
Victims of their own failures
UKIP had staked their fortunes largely on those two issues, with these effectively out of play, the party found itself in a messaging drift that persisted to Election Day. They tried to fill the void with an economic message, but with the economy improving and the debt evaporating under Conservative leadership, there was little traction to be had.
In the absence of an agenda, the stories turned to the personalities of UKIP candidates. Message discipline went out the window. Poor vetting dogged the small and under-funded party. Racists, cranks and kooks slipped through and stood as UKIP candidates, leading to the third reason for their failure.
Victims of the media
The British media is dominated by the left just as are most national media establishments. The distaste for UKIP turned to fear and loathing when their stock started to rise. The media began to look for any reason to write negative stories and UKIP gave them plenty of fodder.
From racism to xenophobia to gay-baiting to threatening the exasperatingly beloved National Health Service, UKIP candidates for parliament and county councils fed the media a constant stream of outrages that undermined the effort to position the party in the mainstream. The media gleefully reported it all. Farage and the leadership found themselves playing whack-a-mole as they purged, defended and deflected in equal measure. To the extent that they had a national governing message, it was drowned out in the deluge.
Victims of the system
UKIP had the misfortune of being equally popular across the country. The British system is like 650 congressional elections in the US where the party that wins the most seats gets to pick the president. As in the US, this system is dominated by two major parties. Unlike the US, smaller parties do occasionally win a seat or fifty. These tend to mostly be regional parties such as the Scottish Nationalists (SNP), the Welsh Nationalist (Plaid Cymru) and the Northern Ireland Unionists (DUP). The Greens and the Liberal Democrats (LDP) are national parties with limited geographic strongholds and they therefore tend to win seats in those areas.
UKIP had no natural strongholds. The areas where they perform best tend to be traditional Tory seats in the south as well as poorer, whiter, Labor domains in the north. That set them up to finish second in a lot of places, but unable to overcome the geography of British politics. Essentially UKIP support was a mile wide and an inch deep. Despite finishing second in a number of seats and coming out third overall, the effort has nonetheless left UKIP almost entirely shut out of national power.
Victims of leftist wackadoodiry
Labor won two national elections under the centrist Tony Blair. The labor leader for this cycle, Ed Milibrand, was cut from a decidedly redder cloth. He took the party in the direction of the progressive left promising to end the very successful economic reforms of the Tories and returning the country to the high tax, generous benefits past that created the mess in the first place. All while framing Britain in the class struggle language of Marx.
Add to that the fact that polls showed the insane far left Scottish Nationalists winning dozens of seats and it just scared the crap out of everyone with a job or a bank account. Possibly as much as 5% of the electorate voted strategically switching from UKIP to Tory to prevent the country from becoming the People’s Republic of Northern Cuba or France with worse food and uglier women.
Is the party over?
As it stands, UKIP is far from dead, but their best opportunity so far has slipped away. Where they have been effective is in pushing the Tories towards their positions, just as Ron Paul has moved the GOP towards more libertarian ideas despite failing to win the presidency. Change tends to come from the fringe and is then adopted by the mainstream. This has been the legacy of libertarian parties in the modern era, excluding the United States Libertarian Party (the coccyx of the American body politic).
Whether UKIP can use this experience to learn from their mistakes, retool their message for the EU referendum i.e. lay out a simple, coherent, compelling and populist economic case for leaving Europe; and become a more professional political organization remains to be seen. History is not on their side. Most movement parties tend to flame out, but the in-out Europe vote offers UKIP another bite of the apple if they can get their act together and lead.
