UKIP Is Here To Stay

After the Marr show last weekend, ConHome's Tim Montgomerie tweeted, bizarrely, that if an In/Out Referendum on the EU was granted, then UKIP should disband and put all their resources into campaigning for an out vote. He seemed dispirited that this was "now not going to happen."

No, it's not.

The persistent delusions concerning UKIP held by the Metropolitan classes are truly remarkable: namely that we are simply a single issue pressure group / protest vote / angry white men / reactionary Tories / turbo-Thatcherites / Thatcherite tribute band / < insert your prejudice here >.

Plainly there are - or more correctly were - elements of truth  to some of these accusations, but less and less so with every passing today. Obviously UKIP did start life as a single issue party, and it's adherence to classical Liberal economics and strands of Libertarian thought could, albeit somewhat simplistically, be defined as turbo-Thatcherite.

If that was all there was to us,  then both labels would confine UKIP to permanent fringe party status. But these days it is quite clear that what UKIP represents more than anything else is the return of honesty and conviction in British politics and a rejection of the deceits and vanities of the MetroLib political and media classes.

More and more people now perceive that we live in effectively a neo-Medieval society. Power is concentrated in the hands of a small and highly concentrated elite whose internationalist outlook and values have far more in common with their counterparts in other lands than the great mass of people within their own realm. This elite view the common people in a not disimilar way from the way the old Medieval elites did - namely as an uneducated mob whose prejudices must be occasionally pandered to but otherwise be locked out of power and influence. Hitherto, the old class-based Tory-Labour duopoly has proved extremely useful to the elite in this regard, locking in unthinking tribal voting patterns for generation after generation. True, the heavy religious component of Medieval life seems at first glance to be absent, but the Roman Catholic Church has been replaced by the new internationalist organisations whose goals have been raised to a quasi -religious status - for instance the European Court of Human Right and, of course, the European Union.

Before the financial crash, it seemed that this elite hegemony was set fair to go on forever. However, the current depression has concentrated all our minds and show the Emperor really has no clothes. People increasingly see through the trickery and illusion, and as such UKIP's appeal is broadening substantially. Every television performance by a passionate UKIP representative shines a bright light onto the blandness, mendacity and cowardice of the political class parties, slowly but surely crystallising opposition to them. It is often argued that UKIP is a threat merely to the Tories, risking permanently splitting the right-wing vote in a way that the Labour - Liberal split so damaged the Left in the 20th Century. However, long term UKIP are arguably as great a threat to the Labour party. Bereft of class baggage, the party can appeal to the social conservatism and level-headedness of many Northern working class voters who would never consider voting Tory in a million years.

We all tend to ignore and discount trends we find uncomfortable, and the dismissal of UKIP's rise by the Political Class is part of that phenomenon. Although plainly they are beginning to see us as some form of threat, the magnitude of that threat is still not properly perceived.

The truth is that UKIP have a moral mission well beyond it's founding issue of the European Union. In fact, Britain's original entry into what has become the European Union could be regarded as a symptom of a disease, rather than the disease itself. Namely that even 40 years substantial elements within the old political elites had nothing but contempt for the country and the people they governed, and were ready to betray them when they calculated it was to their own advantage. It is UKIP's task to advance the cause of liberty not merely by reversing many of the acts of treachery over the past decades, but by leveraging the technological possibilities of the digital age to give people powers of self-government that they have never truly had.

Power to the People!