Why UKIP Lost

UKIP lost Oldham West and Royton by mentioning Jeremy Corbyn a lot. Mentioning the other side, if at all avoidable, is a schoolboy error, and the mark of an amateur. If you are going to have to do it, then you are going to have to be on absolutely solid ground. UKIP was not.

Does Corbyn want to abolish the monarchy? Who cares? He has no intention of attempting to do so. No one has. Precisely because, in day-to-day political terms, no one cares tuppence about the monarchy. Certainly, no one ever lost votes by being against it. Or gained them by being for it. Evidently.

Have you any evidence-based idea what almost any politician thinks of the monarchy? I haven't, although I do know for a fact that there is at least one republican sitting as a Conservative MP.

Does Corbyn wish to disband the Armed Forces? No, but he could hardly improve on the record of the present Government if he did.

Unlike that Government, and unlike UKIP's only MP, he does not wish to send our remnant Armed Forces off on an expedition of which John McCain has just noted that, "We will have some token aircraft over there from the British, and they'll drop a few bombs, and we'll say thank you very much."

Thus speaks the man whose Presidential candidacy was warmly applauded by the Conservative Party Conference.

Is Corbyn an IRA supporter? These days, officially, no one is. In any case, he has nothing approaching the day-to-day contact with Provisional Army Council members, now also filling other positions besides, that is enjoyed by at least one member of the Cabinet. Nor have they ever stayed overnight at his house, as they have at the Queen's.

The kind of historical questions asked only in the right-wing London media, and never by anyone in Northern Ireland these days, sound like they are from another world, as in many ways they are.

Even the DUP is now in permanent coalition with Sinn Féin, and would long ago have faced electoral oblivion if it had stuck to its previous line.

The city that bore the brunt of the IRA's mainland bombing campaign elected Ken Livingstone a mere two years after the Good Friday Agreement. His prescience on these matters was one of the selling points of his hugely successful Mayoral candidacy.

Home Counties hacks expect the price of their purity to be paid by someone else. Not only with regard to Northern Ireland.

Sinn Féin, like the DUP, has been poor and has been rich, and it has worked out that rich is better, both materially and politically. Anything that looked like a serious threat to that double affluence, by presaging a return to bombing in Great Britain, would be nipped in the bud with utter ruthlessness, and no doubt already has been from time to time.

Simply as a matter of fact, any such resumption would almost certainly result in a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, regardless of whether or not the Republic was prepared to take it, and regardless of which party was in office at the time.

If anything, Labour would find it more difficult to leave the SDLP without the NHS than the Conservatives would find it to give up somewhere that the absence of almost any private sector made enormously expensive to maintain, and which had not returned an MP in receipt of the Conservative Whip in decades.

(Many of them would gladly be rid of Scotland and the North of England, never mind Northern Ireland. They have barely heard of Wales.)

In either event, having been bombed out of plenty of other places in our time, we would just quit rather than return to the past, or to anything remotely resembling it. That is sheer political reality. The popular chorus would be deafening: "Anyone who wants Northern Ireland that much can bloody well have it!"

The level of public support for Northern Ireland in Great Britain has always been assumed rather than demonstrated.

The ferocious Unionism of the Callaghan Government did it no electoral good. The huge concessions made by Thatcher and Blair did neither of them any electoral harm.

When Major lost office, then it was not for that reason, and it was to someone who was if anything even more signed up to those agenda than he was, but who did not win for that reason, either.

There is every cause to believe that, to the predominant part of the population of Great Britain, Northern Ireland used to be an ungrateful nuisance, and ought to be cut loose if it ever threatened to become one again.

But both Sinn Féin and the DUP have too much investment, in every sense, in stopping that situation from ever arising. Still, if it ever did.

And does Corbyn want to hand over the Falkland Islands to Argentina? The last Prime Minister who wanted to do that tried to arrange a transfer of sovereignty, to be followed by a leaseback. Can you guess her name?

All of the above meet at and on this point.

No more people think about the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands politically than think about the monarchy politically. It is questionable that we could still defend them, thanks to the present Government, although Argentina's preferred method of acquiring them, should it attempt to do so, would not now be military.

And there would be a pronounced lack of political will to do so, whichever party were led by the Prime Minister.

An Argentine invasion would elicit a mass response of, "What, again? So, a second war for this heavily subsidised place at the other end of the earth, then? What do we get out this? The entire population could be rehoused in one purpose-built village on Dartmoor or in the Highlands, and no one would even notice. If they want so badly to stay British, then why do they want so badly not to live in Britain? Couldn't be the taxes, could it? You know, the ones that would pay for any military action?"

But such an invasion would not be very likely. Rather, this would be about the rising global economic clout of Latin America and of its rapidly lengthening list of allies.

Properly harnessed, that could easily force something like, oh, a transfer of sovereignty, to be followed by a leaseback.

The cost of any failure to play ball would be paid in jobs right here in the United Kingdom. No Government, of whatever hue, would pay that cost, first economically, and then electorally.

If the Falkland Islanders, who would of course retain their British passports, could not bear to live with this changed reality, then their entire population could be rehoused in one purpose-built village on Dartmoor or in the Highlands, and no one would even notice.

As to who was on that rapidly lengthening list of Latin America's allies, not only do several of them already own great tracts of our economy, not only are they looking to buy up even more of it, and not only do they fund the Conservatives to a considerable and increasing extent, but we are already at war alongside quite a few of them. Opposed by Jeremy Corbyn. But supported by UKIP's only MP.

So much, then, for Corbyn as a "terrorist sympathiser".

He is not the one funded by Russian oligarchs and Gulf princelings. He is not the one bombing Iraq for Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He is not the one bombing Syria for Iran and Hezbollah.

He is not the one who favours the continued existence of a Cold War military alliance with Turkey in it. He is not the one who rolls out the red carpet for Narendra Modi.

This list is not exhaustive.

UKIP assumed, as pub bores do (and they are not a peculiarly right-wing phenomenon), that their hobby-horses were ridden by everyone. We have just seen the result.

Not for the first time.

But, in terms of events of any importance, probably for the last.