Protest Too Much?

Half of this month's UKIP voters intend to vote UKIP next year.

In that case, half do not. But what of those who do? They therefore comprise between 15 and somewhere well under 20 per cent of the European Election turnout.

That is an extremely small proportion of the General Election turnout, and it will certainly not add up to being the First Past The Post in any individual constituency.

The people in question never did add up to that.

Those who felt any need to acknowledge their existence sort of captured control of the central apparatus of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher (a long time ago now), and then sort of captured control of the central apparatus of the Labour Party under Tony Blair.

But even those capturers were not that tendency itself. They merely saw it as useful strategically.

And now, the trade union and municipal barons and baronets are well and truly back in charge of the Labour Party, 50 per cent of the members of which, moreover, are teachers. Meanwhile the actual barons and baronets are well and truly back in charge of the Conservative Party.

Those agree on quite a bit, but on nothing more strongly than on the vileness and the utter inadmissibility of the people who waved wads of cash while shouting "Loadasmoney! Loadsamoney!" before transferring to Tony Blair on the instructions of The Sun.

After all, all that that kind ever did was make a small addition to any given constituency's permanent Conservative vote four times, and then make a small addition to any given constituency's permanent Labour vote three times.

In view of the other factors during that period, such as the rise and fall of the SDP, and such as the complete collapse of trust in the Major Government in the autumn of 1992, it is possible that those votes never affected the outcome of any single seat.

If they did, then they never did so in remotely enough places to affect the outcome of a General Election itself.

Each of the Labour and Conservative Parties will always have at least 200 MPs, and the Leader of one or other of them will always be the Prime Minister.

Them's the rules, and they are never going to change. Unless you control one or other of those parties, then politically you do not exist.

With the toffs back in firm control of one party, and with the industrial and municipal machines back in firm control of the other, the people who define themselves, and that very virulently, against both of them are in precisely that position: politically, they do not exist.

Boy, do they know it. A very long way indeed from the ethos either of Thatcherism or of Blairism, they now recognise themselves as "The Left Behind", and have withdrawn so completely from the political process that they have effectively created their own Pitiables' Party.

Yet they have not become poor. Many of them grew up poor, and therefore understand very profoundly how poor they are not. What they resent is their lack of social cachet, of cultural prestige or of political clout.

With Labour and the Conservatives statistically tied, which translates into a comfortable Labour overall majority, they had better get used to it.