Rotherham Rules

With UKIP already starting to fall apart, just as we all knew that it would well before the next General Election, what to make of the strange fantasy that a supposedly anti-EU party which does not in fact object to anything in particular that the EU actually does is picking up votes from Labour by objecting to the Coalition only on the grounds that its policies do not go far enough in a hardline New Right direction?

To no one's surprise, there is absolutely no evidence that this is happening. Consider, for example, UKIP's much-trumpeted, but exceptionally narrow, capture of a council seat from Labour in Rotherham a few days ago. UKIP, 1143. Labour, 1039. Conservative, 107. In other words, UKIP and Labour pretty much tied, Conservative vote collapsed in UKIP's favour. Very low turnout. Labour candidate married to the former councillor, who is now the Police and Crime Commissioner, leading to a certain amount of ill will on the ground.

No story there at all. No such story anywhere at all.

As for the delusion that UKIP is uniting social conservatives across traditional partisan dividing lines, a party which believes that whatever "the market" wants, "the market" must have, is ever going to do that how, exactly? It is no surprise that there is no previously Labour ballot box where that can be shown to have happened, and that UKIP barely exists in the North, or increasingly even in the Midlands, where it lost its one seat to Labour even in the supposed fortress of Nottinghamshire.

UKIP is in favour of the legalisation of drugs, in favour of the legalisation of prostitution, and no more opposed to same-sex "marriage", which Nigel Farage himself supports, than are two thirds of the Conservative MPs who voted against it under pressure from within their local parties, but who are really Thatcher's Children, anarcho-capitalist libertarians.

Likewise, around a third of Labour MPs who voted in favour of it, especially at Third Reading, are at least less than fully enthusiastic, but are under pressure from within their local parties. This is being used as a wedge issue by neo-Blairite activists with a view to removing MPs of whom they had wanted rid in any case. Just look at the names of the opponents, of the abstainers, and of those known to have grave doubts but who nevertheless went into the Aye lobby.

The second and third camps are full of people who have gambled on this Bill's never making it through the Lords, and who have therefore forced themselves to make a gesture in order to try and head off those who would stop them from doing everything else that they are doing as legislators, scrutineers and campaigners, by removing them from the House of Commons for other reasons entirely.