Saturday 10 December 2016

So Long, And Thanks For All The Kippers?

While Nigel Farage was being shown on Question Time for what thus became more times than anyone else apart from David Dimbleby, the votes were being counted in that fairly rare thing, a safe Conservative seat that had voted heavily Leave.

UKIP's candidate entirely failed to defeat the Theresa May soundalike that the Conservatives had put up. 

People who care that much about Brexit, such that it would affect their vote at a parliamentary election, have already been voting UKIP throughout the present decade, at least.

How numerous are they?

Well, UKIP has never won a seat from the Conservatives except with the sitting MP as its candidate, it has only ever done that twice, it has lost one of those seats back to the Conservatives, and it has never won a seat from anyone else at all.

UKIP now has fewer members than Momentum.

The only UKIP politician whom any normal person could name has instead become a Stateside superstar who fancies himself as a Middle East Peace Envoy.

Today, he takes to the pages of The Guardian in order to deride UKIP's members and supporters as "low-grade people".

Peter Whittle is allowed on the airwaves more often than his supposed boss, Paul Nuttall, a figure perfectly designed to antagonise Northerners and Southerners alike, the working classes and the middle classes alike, left-wing and right-wing voters alike, Labourites and Tories alike.

At least Whittle might keep on board those Southern, middle-class, right-wing, basically Tory voters whose support has hitherto provided UKIP with such momentum, so to speak, as it has ever had.

They have no desire for a party that wants to appeal to traditional Labour voters in the North, and they have no understanding of the consolidation of the anti-Labour minority vote in Labour areas, something that in any case would rarely or never translate into parliamentary seats.

Arron Banks is about to offer those existing UKIP supporters something far more to their taste, and vastly better resourced. Although that might not be a political party.

Having been laughed out of the South last year, UKIP's last hope is that it will make inroads in the North, about which it believes everything that it is told by resident right-wing pub bores and by their transplanted children in the London media.

Either by declining to contest the Leigh by-election, or by doing so and losing it, Nuttall will destroy both his own political career and his party.

We are living in the last months of UKIP. How many months it has left is now wholly a matter for Andy Burnham.

2 comments:

  1. How numerous are they? 4 million people voted UKIP at the last election so they're fairly numerous.

    ReplyDelete