How British populists won the Brexit battle, but lost the war
On Thursday, voters in the U.K. will decide who will the lead the country’s exit from the European Union. It almost certainly won’t be UKIP, the anti-EU party that is now ‘suffering for our success’
CLACTON-ON-SEA, ENGLAND— It was a night beyond all compare. Less than a year ago, Britain voted to get out of the European Union. And as the country’s new destiny dawned in the early hours of June 24, veteran activists of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) — an anti-EU movement long derided as extremist — felt the sweet satisfaction of having forced the referendum and steered the national debate with their anti-immigration rhetoric.
“Twenty-one years of being called a closet racist or a swiveleyed loon,” said Tony Finnegan-Butler, a party activist since UKIP was born in the mid-1990s who is now the party’s chair in Clacton-on-Sea, a pro-Brexit stronghold. “And one night you learn that more than half the population thought you were right in the first place.”
But if the vote brought vindication, it has not ushered UKIP any closer to political power. In fact, exactly the opposite.
A year after achieving its most sacred ambition, the party long led by President Donald Trump’s favourite European politician, Nigel Farage, is in disarray, scarred by prominent defections and by vicious feuding — some of it physical — among its remaining members. An election on June 8 in which the party’s share of the vote is expected to crater may be UKIP’s death blow.
The arc of UKIP’s story — years of obscurity followed by one astonishing success and now a rapid and possibly terminal decline — illustrates one way of blunting the appeal of populist movements: give them exactly what they want.
“We’re suffering for our success,” said FinneganButler, 73, who acknowledged that even he is wavering on whether to continue backing the party.
But UKIP’s sudden decline also demonstrates the degree to which right-wing populists have shifted the European policy debate toward their turf. If UKIP is losing support, it is not because the party’s ideas have lost favour. It is because mainstream parties have co-opted their causes and adopted their rhetoric.
“We’re happy that the UKIP vote is going down. But we’re not celebrating,” said Nick Lowles, chief executive of the London-based anti-extremism group Hope Not Hate. “If anything, it’s the worst of all outcomes, because we’ve seen the mainstreaming of these views that were once considered beyond the pale.”
It’s not just in Britain, where Prime Minister Theresa May, a Conservative, sounds every inch the diehard Brexiteer with her pledges to carry out a hard break with Europe.
Across the continent, mainstream politicians are attempting to beat back the far-right wave by mimicking the language and policies of the populists on hot-button issues such as immigration, cultural identity and Islam.
In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte fended off a challenge from anti-Muslim leader Geert Wilders this spring using the slogan “Act normal or go away” — a phrase widely seen as a firm line on Dutch tolerance toward newcomers.
In Austria, both major mainstream parties have sharpened their tone on immigration ahead of elections this fall that the far-right Freedom Party could win.
Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel — a favoured boogeyman of the far right because of her welcoming policies toward refugees — has endorsed a ban on burkas “wherever legally possible” as she confronts a challenge from her right flank.
But nowhere in Western Europe is the mainstream’s acceptance of the populist right’s agenda more complete than in Britain. And nowhere has the collapse of support for a populist right party been more complete.
For much of its nearly quarter-century existence, the U.K. Independence Party was the equivalent of a rounding error in British political life. With its singleminded devotion to a seemingly quixotic goal — an EU exit — UKIP struggled to capture more than a couple of percentage points in national elections.
Future prime minister David Cameron famously dismissed the party as a band of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.”
But amid a surge in immigration following the EU’s expansion into Eastern Europe, UKIP suddenly became a major player in 2014, topping British elections for the European Parliament that spring.
Later that year, UKIP gained its first seat in Britain’s Parliament after Clacton’s Conservative representative, Douglas Carswell, defected to the insurgent party and won a special election.
The bombastic, beer-swilling Farage crowed that “the UKIP fox is in the Westminster henhouse” and promised that other anti-EU Tories in Parliament would soon turn predator rather than risk becoming prey.
In the end, there was only one more defection. But Cameron had been nervous enough about UKIP’s rise to double down on promises that the country would hold a referendum on EU membership if his Conservative Party won the national election in 2015.
It did (UKIP placed third, with 13 per cent of the vote), and the referendum campaign was on.
When, against all odds, the nation opted for Brexit, it
“Unlike every other prime minister we’ve had, she’s willing to say no to Europe. The more I listen to Mrs. May, the more I trust her.” TONY FINNEGANBUTLER UKIP ACTIVIST
would have seemed that UKIP’s moment had finally arrived. But perhaps sensing it had already passed, Farage abruptly quit as party leader just days after the vote.
Since then, UKIP has cycled through leaders and would-be leaders — including one who collapsed and had to be hospitalized after a fight with a party rival at the European Parliament.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party quickly coalesced behind a successor to Cameron — May — who, despite having campaigned against Brexit, took to the cause with the zeal of a convert.
She has repeatedly promised a hard break with the EU — one that will leave the country outside the single market, the customs union and the European Court of Justice.
“Unlike every other prime minister we’ve had, she’s willing to say no to Europe,” said Finnegan-Butler, a courtly retiree who sailed the world with the British merchant marine. “The more I listen to Mrs. May, the more I trust her.”
His car is emblazoned with a placard stating in bold purple letters: “I’m voting for UKIP.”
But if he weren’t the party’s local chairman, he said, he probably wouldn’t.
In this pretty but faded seaside region of pebble beaches and long London commutes — the only area that UKIP won in the 2015 parliamentary elections — it seems that few others are backing the party, either.
Carswell, the party’s former representative here, quit UKIP in March after a spectacular falling-out with Farage. In his place, the party drafted a candidate with no ties to the area and, as UKIP support nationally drops below 5 per cent, virtually no prospects for success.
Instead, the seat is almost certain to be claimed back by the Conservatives, whose candidate reflects the party’s drift toward pro-Brexit evangelism under May.
Before last year’s referendum, Giles Watling was an ardent advocate for keep- ing Britain in the EU. But like the prime minister, he has reversed course since discovering that the country disagreed.
The candidate, a charismatic, 64-yearold actor turned politician who is known to voters for his roles on stage and screen, campaigns on the need to give May the strongest possible hand as she heads into contentious exit talks with her soon-tobe-former counterparts in the EU.
“It’s a fight that we needn’t have had,” Watling said. “But it’s there, and we can win it.”
Not everyone is convinced. On a recent warm spring day, UKIP candidate Paul Oakley — a pinstripe-suited London lawyer who was brought into Clacton to run at the last minute amid intraparty feuding over who should replace Carswell — acknowledged that he is likely to lose.
“The referendum was D-Day. It wasn’t the fall of Berlin. People can’t sit back and assume that we’ve won,” he said. “It’s all very well to sound like UKIP. But Theresa May and Giles Watling voted to remain. We can’t trust people like that to deliver a proper Brexit.”
Indeed, even as he takes a break from running for office — he has lost seven campaigns for Parliament — Farage has been singing the same tune on his radio talk show, warning of the “Brexit betrayal” to come.
Farage and UKIP may have helped sell a majority of British voters on the promise that getting out of the EU will solve the nation’s ills. But now that May and the Conservatives must deliver on those skyhigh expectations, disappointment is almost certain to follow.
“Theresa May can’t satisfy everyone,” said David Cutts, a political-science professor at the University of Birmingham. “There’s still a role there in British politics for the populist right.”