Saturday 11th January
While appearing to be riding high, at least in the polls, these are worrying times for UKIP. With the Lib-Dems now in Government the ‘a plague on both your houses’ element of the electorate have turned to UKIP, but will it be enough? As the Lib-Dems and the Liberals found before them the argument is quite simple – why would you vote for a party that has no chance of ever forming the Government. 2014 is the make or break year for UKIP; either it carries on growing, hopefully attracting some real talent rather than odd-balls and rabble rousers to its ranks, winning the Euro elections well, doing well in the local elections and showing they can win council seats everywhere and building their support consistently above 20%; or they fail, and flounder around shouting foul but winning nothing. As the Greens found out, winning local concillors and even having an MP does not of itself bring success. And apart from Nigel Farage himself they don’t have any real stars.
That isn’t to say they may not upset the big two parties and cause some real chaos. Our version of democracy does not require a majority of the voters, but simply the candidate gaining the highest number of votes getting elected. When you had two big parties this was more often than not 50% anyway. When the Lib-Dems were doing well a few years back many constituencies had close three way fights, and with a few votes going to minor parties many MPs were elected with about a third of the votes cast. Now with UKIP in the ring it is quite possible that some MPs will get in being voted by only one in four voters. Which is a recipe for chaos, which may harm the other three parties but which will not necessarily help UKIP that much. Many suspect that the real reason for UKIP is to push the Tories further to the right, and that may have already happened. David Cameron’s reckless promise of an EU ‘in or out’ referendum in 2017 is the result of the threat from UKIP. The danger is that even if he is ‘successful’ and gets some valuable changes the public fired up by UKIP may well vote to leave anyway.
So, would a poor general election result, with maybe no or just a small handful of MPs gained by UKIP be worth it if they could successfully campaign in the EU referendum for us to leave. If that happened the real chaos would begin….