UKIP - The Great Realignment Of British Politics Finally Begins

It is difficult to know what to celebrate the most - Douglas Carswell's fantastic victory in Clacton or John Bickly's very close second in Heywood and Middleton.

What is now absolutely clear is that the great realignment of British politics, so long prophesised, is finally underway. 

Some quick points:

• UKIP is rapidly becoming the party of the indigenous working class, displacing working class Toryism in the south of England and challenging Labour supremacy in the north.
• Both Conservative and Labour are retreating deeper and deeper into their regional heartlands and can no longer really be called national parties. Labour's vote evaporated in Clacton, as did the Tories in Heywood and Middleton. 
• UKIP is now surely the only serious challenger to Labour in it's post-industrial heartlands.
• The Labour vote is now realigning in tune with the modern party's middle class leadership and Metropolitan obsessions. Labour has sucked up a very large proportion of the previous LibDem voting middle classes at the same time as losing large amounts of working class supporters to UKIP.
• Despite our advances deep into Labour territory, thanks to the huge public sector vested interests and the dependency culture deliberately created by Gordon Brown, the Labour vote remains very strong in their core areas and will be difficult to break down. After all, after the Rotherham revelations a party with Labour's track record should quite properly cease to exist, and yet it is still winning by-elections in the kind of places similar to those badly affected by such terrible scandals.
• The LibDems are destroyed as a national party, doomed to total humiliation except where they have strong local incumbency factors in their favour. They will lose hundreds of deposits at the next general election. However they may well still hold the balance of power afterwards because of their still strong localised concentrations in support.
• Judging by the idiotic comments and spin from the LibLabCon parties after tonight's debacle, of which the victory address by Labour's Liz McInnes was the most ridiculous, the political class (a) continues to treat the voters with contempt by insulting their intelligence and (b) still doesn't know what has hit it!

Syria: A Crushing Defeat For The Political Class

The wonderful and unexpected news that the government was defeated over military action in Syria has yielded a number of fevered interpretations by the commentariat:

A victory for parliament!
True.

A humiliation for David Cameron!
Yes, but not so grave as many think - whatever Cameron may be, he is capable of a certain class in the way he deports himself, and his courtesy in recalling parliament in the first place and subsequent graciousness in defeat commands some respect. What the defeat did indicate, however, was just how badly he has run down his own stock of political capital through dreadful mismanagement of his party.

A victory for Ed Miliband!
No.

The End of The "Special Relationship"!
You can't destroy something that never existed. However, if it brings about the end of this pathetic delusion, then so much the better.

But long term, the biggest losers of all from the vote are the political class.

As we all know, in recent years ambitious men and women have increasingly used British politics not as a means of serving their country or even as a career on the national stage, but as a stepping stone for greater things. A number of ingenuous career paths have been mapped out:

• The Warmongering Path (patent holder: Tony Blair).  Join an American-led war on the basis of lies and distortions and become a 'name' in that country as a result. Grow extremely rich on the back of exploiting your new-found international brand recognition.
• The Corporate Path (patent holder: The Tory Party). The traditional way of acquiring riches post-politics for superannuated Tory politicians, this route long predates the rise of the political class and involves attaining a clutch of directorships on company boards from the personal network you built during your time in politics. However some of the abuses have grown ever more blatant in recent years.
• The Soft Power Path (patent holder: D. Miliband). Be an ineffectual and bland office holder in a position like Foreign Secretary or foreign aid. Leave British politics for an international charity on a well-renumerated salary.
• The Euro Path (patent holders: Roy Jenkins, Leon Brittan, Neil Kinnock, Chris Patten, Peter Mandelson). Another old favourite. After a spell in national politics go to the European Commission on a very fat salary and expense account. At one time this used to be regarded as a route for those who had failed at national politics but with the every growing power of the European Union it is increasingly regarded as a first-rank prize.  A variation of this route was piloted by one T. Blair who, after trying everything to get Britain to join the doomed Euro and dodge treaty referendums, fancied the job of President of Europe, mercifully without success.
• The Spousal Path (patent holders: Tony and Cherie Blair). Marry a high-powered spouse and once in office enact legislation very helpful to their careers and therefore to family finances. The recent European imposition of gender quotas is actually designed with this in mind, but that is a story for another day.

The rejection of military action in Syria has effectively closed the warmongering career path to the political class. Sadly, as you can see above, many other highly lucrative routes still exist.

However, the political class route to fame and riches amongst the new international elite has one central point of weakness: namely, the tiresome necessity of first getting elected as an MP for a constituency you have little affinity or interest in but is a rock solid safe seat you can ignore for your entire parliamentary career.

The rise of UKIP is rapidly choking off this starting point to political careers, and this is by far the most significant event to effect the Political Class. As Donna Edmunds of this parish blogged yesterday, the concept of the safe seat is becoming a thing of the past. Sitting MPs are beginning to notice, and it would be very interesting to analyse how many Tory MPs representing East Anglian constituencies rebelled yesterday, where the UKIP threat is strongest. Ed Miliband's vacillation was similarly motivated by the piling up of UKIP votes in Labour constituencies where previously the vote for that party was weighed rather than counted.

It is not only sitting MPs who will be deeply concerned about the ominous trends: in party research departments somewhere in London, smooth young things will be noticing their careers prospects no longer seem quite so rosy. Whether or not UKIP does win any constituencies at the 2015 General Election really is a second order issue: far more significant will be the rapid decline in the number of 'red monkey' or 'blue poodle' constituencies, where quite literally you could put up a monkey or a dog up as a candidate and it would get elected as long as it was wearing the right coloured rosette. Because of this enormous shift, MP's will be absolutely forced to represent their constituents rather than their parties or careers. Politics will once again be a very risky career to enter into, increasingly left to those who really believe in public service and go into it with passion and conviction.  The hated Political Class looks to be entering decline.

It is tempting for us in UKIP to congratulate ourselves on our undoubtedly major contribution in bringing this about, but we should not so complacent. Up and down the land, those bright and calculating young things will also be noting UKIP's rise and wondering how best to hitch themselves to our wagon. Sooner or later, we will become infected by the chancers, carpet-baggers and unsavoury careerists that have collectively brought down the other parties. Indeed, the process has probably already begun.

30,000 UKIP Members Is A Great Achievement, But To Really Grow We Need To Become A Social Network

Political party organisation has been much in the news this last few days, with the Falkirk debacle leading Ed Milliband  to make radical changes to the Labour Party's relationship with the unions. However, Labour are not the only party with management issues:  we have had the news that around half of Tory activists feel undervalued and demoralised, and have given up campaigning for the party. More ominously, we have seen the resurrection of suggestions for state funding off political parties as a solution for their ever more precarious financial condition. Lastly, we have had the wonderful announcement that UKIP has reached a record high of 30,000 members. Given a fair wind, it is likely that we could overtake the LibDems (2012 membership 42,501 - and falling) by the next election.

30,000 members is a great achievement, and speaks volumes for the sheer tenacity of UKIP members, and it's energetic leader, in building the party from scratch against all the odds. Given the free fall of other party memberships and the lack of morale in the Tory party in particular, it is likely that in 2015 UKIP can launch a ground campaign that will match each wing of the LibLabCon in our target seats.

But it is not enough. The fact is that UKIP has very significantly smaller funds than the other three major parties. Granted, some City donors, disillusioned with the Conservatives, have expressed interest in funding UKIP, but we do not want to be reliant on a small number  of big donors who could pull the plug at any time: at the very least, this could lead to accusations that we are just another insiders party, our strings being pulled by City moneymen.

Realistically, in order to really challenge the other parties, UKIP must look to boost growth in a way that   would put even our recent meteoric rise in the shade,  and for that we need to embrace the concept of the diffuse network.

Diffuse Networks are neither new nor the latest irritating organisational fad. Since the advent of the internet and in particular social networking, they have become commonplace throughout industry and commerce. The central concept is that, rather than being rigid, the boundaries to organisations are essentially blurred, with many individuals having a very close, symbiotic relationship with an entity without formally belonging to it. For instance, in addition to having fully permanent staff for it's baseload functions, a large corporation may embed contractors within it, who may be easily fired or hired as circumstances arise. Many contractors will retain long term relationships with the company and come and go several times during their career. This gives the corporation both flexibility and access to a reservoir of talent who, crucially, can still give an outsider's perspective to challenges and opportunities.

Political parties are still more or less organised in a very rigid way: you are a member or you're not. Even worse, in recent years most parties have been internally restructured to become increasingly top-down organisations: ordinary members have been reduced to the status of mere envelope stuffers, while a closed elite decide everything that matters and take all the prizes. No wonder parties organised on that model are dying.

Strangely, even though politicians now heavily engage in the diffuse networks of social media, few really seem to understand why the old model is broken. One who really does is Douglas Carswell, who has long argued that membership of the Conservative Party should be spotified. This post is an absolute must read for anyone interested in the subject and UKIP should seriously study his suggestions with a view to shamelessly stealing some of them.

Organisations must not become too diffuse, of course, because that would risk undermining their core identity. For that reason, personally I am strongly against Carswell's idea of open primaries, where a party's candidate selection is thrown open to the electorate as a whole. At the end of the day, institutions need committed members who can act as the custodians of its culture and memory: the kind of candidate that is selected by the party to represent it must reflect it's values, not the values of the whole local electorate, which maybe very different and can ebb and flow with the times.

But nonetheless diffusion is the way to go, and will come sooner or later. Here, UKIP have one enormous advantage over the LibLabCon political class parties in making this significant cultural change: we actually trust and respect the electorate, rather than viewing them as a threat to our glittering careers. The political class and the metropolitan elite it is part of have prospered by silo-ing themselves away from the country as as whole, and it is very noticeable that their instinctive response to problems of funding and declining membership is to circle the wagons still closer by advocating state funding for political parties. Leaving aside it's obvious immorality, that kind of rigidity will, in time, lead to certain extinction, and UKIP should have absolutely no part of it.

Instead, let us look and see how we can embrace diffusion.

How Can UKIP Easily Embrace Diffusive Networking? By Crowd Sourcing Policy Formation

One of the most interesting areas where diffuse networking can be explored is in policy formation. Here, we could create an online dialogue with individuals who may be passionate about individual causes but not that keen on joining a political party.

Some suggestions:

• Each policy area would have it's own dedicated online forum, memberships of which would be free and fully accessible to paid up UKIP members. However, the general public would be able to read all posts and non party members could sign up and subscribe a flexible amount to the forum via Paypal, which would give them the right to contribute to the forum discussions. At each post their subscription credit would be deducted by a set amount, and once their credit reached zero posting to the forum would be denied, whereupon they would be invited to resubscribe. To attract people to become full members, we could have a process that if someone made more forum subscription payments than the value of the annual membership fee within a 12 month period, they were invited to join the party free of charge for the rest of that 12 month period.
• Members of the UKIP policy group (restricted, of course, to select party members only, as it is today) would be expected to engage with the forum on a regular basis, and have a summary of the forum posts read out to them at policy meetings and the substance of them discussed. Representatives of the policy group would then relay, at their discretion, some of the substance of their deliberations back to the forums.

The beauty of this is that it is a positive feedback model. In order to attract paid subscribers to the forums, there would be a real incentive for policy group members to meaningfully engage with their discussions and where appropriate allow them to influence their decisions: failing to do so would mean that subscriptions dry up. Subscribers, even if they opposed UKIP generally, would feel engaged with the political process, and really committed forum contributors would have an economic incentive to become full members. In return UKIP get significant subscription revenues, a potentially huge reservoir of future members and not least the crowd sourcing of suggested policy directions, long before those policies were set in stone or formally adopted. As well as avoiding institutional myopia, crowd sourcing would negate the need for expensive polling and would be vastly superior to the ghastly focus group driven politics adopted by the political class parties as a way of testing out new policy ideas.

There would be risks, of course. Enemies of UKIP may subscribe and post inflammatory material in order to discredit the party, so all forums would have to be strongly policed. To reduce the risks of this, obnoxious postings or spamming would lead to an instant ban and in extreme cases forfeiture of any remaining subscription. Nonetheless, certain sensitive subjects, such as immigration policy, may be deemed unsuitable for the crowd sourcing model for that reason. Also, single issue fanatics hostile to UKIP policy direction may attempt to swamp forums in order to skew the perception of a policy's likely popularity or workability - but at least they would be paying for the privilege of doing so!  However, on the whole the risks are worth it: if we really do trust the electorate and do not believe them to be the apathetic bunch they are often purported to be, then this model makes perfect sense.

So, those are just the suggestions. In the great tradition of crowd sourcing, the discussion is now thrown over to others!
















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State Funding of Parties: The Political Class Circle the Wagons

Matthew d'Ancona, for several years now the rectum inspector-in-chief for the Political Classes, writes

a blatantly kite-flying article in the Sunday Telegraph, preparing the ground for state funding of political parties. 

For anyone who values freedom and accountability of course, the idea is utterly appalling. Quite obviously parties funded by the state cannot fail to become agents of the state over time, leading to the Political Class conspiracy against the voting public becoming even more deeply embedded than it is now.

However, although the idea of state funding may appear at first glance to be a significant threat to UKIP, in many ways in it an encouraging development.

Firstly, that the idea is even being considered shows that the almost total detachment of the Metropolitan elite and their LibLabCon political wing from the general public remains intact. State funding will rightly be seen by voters as a blatant money grab and protection of vested interest by a corrupt cartel. It would be especially humiliating for David Cameron's Tories, running completely counter to Cameron's flagship 'Big Society' project, replacing voluntarism with state coercion of resources. To even suggest such a development after the expenses scandal and at a time of austerity shows an almost total unworldliness. 

But the very reasoning behind d'Ancona's article also shows a Political Class in complete denial: its entire thrust is that state funding is necessary because of the big donor funding scandals that have blighted political parties in the last few years. In true Metropolitan bubble fashion, he completely fails to explain or explore why sources of funding have dried up from individual donors, namely that the LibLabCon parties no longer listen to the people they purport to represent.

In this context, it is also very significant that d'Ancona's article doesn't mention UKIP at all, even though it is fair to say that the issue of funding has also caused UKIP some embarrassment in the past. To him and his kind, politics is an elite parlour game of musical chairs between the established Big Three parties. That a collapse of funding of one or more of them may lead to new players arriving on the scene and a much needed shake up of the system is completely unthinkable.

UKIP should of course refuse to participate in any state funding arrangements for reasons both of principle and low politics. Seen as a party which stands outside of the Metropolitan Elite, we are in a very strong position to capitalise on public revulsion to this measure. Secondly, state funding should prove the absolute final straw for many Tory MPs and the rapidly dwindling number of  decent Tory activists, leading to a further collapse in Tory Party membership and potentially new recruits for UKIP. Indeed, one could go further and say that state funding should be a watershed moment for UKIP's attitude to defectors generally: anyone whom remained or became a member of the LibLabCon parties after state funding is introduced plainly has political principles wholly incompatible with UKIP's, and should be banned from joining our party in a similar way that we ban members of other organisations. As we grow, defecting to UKIP will be increasingly an act of opportunism rather than principle, and we must at all costs avoid becoming infected by the moral corruption and cynicism which has so blighted our established politics for so long.

In the wider scheme of things, the introduction of state funding could also prove a watershed moment in our democracy; with the cartel operated by the political class against the people brought into a very hard focus. if we play our cards right, it will also finally crystallise the perception of UKIP as a pro common sense, pro-people, anti-Metropolitan party rather than a just an anti-European one - a transition which has, of course, been underway for some time.  

If state funding goes ahead, it may well be moment that the mould is truly broken.