Memo to Ed: We’ve got to stop treating UKIP like Swivel-eyed lepers
IF LABOUR wants to win back the traditional supporters who voted in frighteningly large numbers for UKIP in time for next year’s General Election, there is one simple thing it can do right now.
Stop treating UKIP voters as though they have some kind of unmentionable medical condition.
Walking past a building site in Rochdale recently, I stopped to chat with three labourers who’d downed tools to have a cup of tea.
It became apparent they were unhappy with the Government.
‘Will you be voting Labour?’ I asked. ‘No chance,’ came the reply. ‘It’s because of you lot that I’m earning less than I was ten years ago. Eastern Europeans have screwed us. We’re voting UKIP.’
Later that day I was speaking to a nurse who told me she was taking on another job as a cleaner so she could pay for extra lessons for her son. He was falling behind in English at school, she said, because the teachers spent all their time with Polish children who couldn’t speak English. She too was going to vote UKIP.
This is the human face of the UKIP voter. Working people who have given up on the mainstream political parties are witnessing the quality of their life deteriorate and are worried about the prospects for their children.
Nearly 200 miles away, though, there are plenty of people in Westminster who view UKIP voters as though they are ill.
David Cameron famously said UKIP were just fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists. While some in the Labour Party see them as swivel-eyed nutters who belong in a leper colony.
It’s this attitude that’s helped UKIP grow into the monster that has broken up three-party politics. The more scorn has been poured their way, the more voters have been driven into the arms of Nigel Farage.
On the BBC’s Question Time this week, a UKIP voter typified how the haughty disdain of the political classes towards UKIP only acted to firm up its vote. ‘I get very tired of being painted as a member of society who’s frustrated, vulnerable and fearful,’ said the man.
‘Some of the issues that UKIP hit upon transpire into local problems,’ he continued. ‘I live in Bishop’s Stortford and there are people who have lived in the town for 20 to 30 years who cannot get their children into a school. Immigration is not entirely to blame but it has a net effect.’
For far too long concerns like all
of the above have fallen on deaf ears. It’s as if they were labelled ‘too difficult’ or ‘incompatible with the project’ that all three parties were blindly aligned to.
Politics has become less like a conversation with people, and more an exercise in talking at them. The UKIP vote is soft and Labour can win it back, but only if it breaks out of its liberal Metropolitan comfort zone.
The Labour Party doesn’t belong to guacamole-dipping, skinny latte-sipping effete types. It belongs to working people and it has to reflect their concerns. All political parties are now waking up to the danger UKIP poses. The Farage threat is like rising damp that’s penetrated the political foundations. It’s seeped into the structure and now the house needs major work.
The way to fix it is to stop talking at people and begin listening. Only when Labour fully understands the issues on the factory floor, the worries shared by mums at the school gate and, yes, those felt by the UKIP voter, will they be able to win the kind of Commons majority in 2015 that’s needed to defeat the Coalition.