Elitist hand-wringing: why did people vote Ukip?

Our partners in the european project are of course free to join in if they'd like to discuss their alarming/interesting election results.

Both the people who admitted to having voted UKIP in my FB feed made it meticulously clear they were doing it for the top reason (or so they claimed).

Oh with a dash of 'all politicians are shit'.

Farage love, the love that up until recently dared not speak its name

agápe, éros, faráge.

i'd say a finely balanced combo of the life is shit categories plus psephological fluke.

went for 'several: shit + legitimate grievances' myself – don't think the grim little englander backbone of it is separable from contempt for the current oxbridge ruling elite + not-just-immigration worries about the pan-european superstate experiment, which seem fair to me.

A lot to be said for the fluke tho'.

How about something along the lines of "people are shit, they might have legitimate grievances, but the fake racist grievances that UKIP address are a smokescreen for any real or genuine grievances"?

i don't know the right answer to this but i'm very curious about it. seems like some hate the EU option tho, right? it's not like UK is super enthusiastic about the EU to begin w/

maybe I'm sheltered or stupid but 'hate the EU' category A seems the most outlandish one (even if it's one of the more common claims), I find it hard to get my head around why anyone but aristocrats would care that much about the kind of sovereignty the EU is apparently robbing us of.

Scotland's UKIP MEP has some insights into the hatred/mistrust of the EU. No, wait, he doesn't (about two minutes in)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-27575199

Judging by all the people that talked at me about this - its definitely A. I dont understand it either, but a lot of people seem hugely fixated just on that. It doesnt make any sense to me that A could be the answer except, somehow, it is

is it really strange that ppl might still be hung up on nationalism and sovereignty? like this stuff comes up in the US all the time and we are under no threat of losing our sovereignty.

xps/branwell

right - I probably generally haven't given Ukip (& their soft media support) enough agency in the options here - that muddying of legit grievances and fake racist ones seemed a major tactic.

life is shit + blaming immigrants for life being shit + blaming Lab/Lib/Con for letting it happen

life is shit a-c all current politicians are shit

does eu/sovereignty really feel that weird as a reason? I can sympathise with that end of things - suspicion of the neo-liberal, imposed austerity, technocratic etc etc bit of the EU would fit there. I know that a) no-one wants to be bedfellows with I WILL NOT SELL MY APPLES IN KILOS farmers and b) national-level democratic politics is a farce, but if we need to hang the cabinet at least we can march on Westminster w/o taking a ferry.

Suspicion of imposed austerity is definitely a factor across Europe but idk whether it is a major issue in the UK. Our austerity was coming anyway, it's not like they had to be strong-armed into it.

why wouldn't you want to take the ferry

yeah, I think I'm muddling my own general objections to the EU with why people voted Ukip there – agree that concerns about neo-liberal/anti-democratic trends on the continent weren't really a local factor (though a parochial version – "I don't like Brussels telling us what to do" – is near the heart of long-standing anti-EU sentiment afaict).

xp
I don't think I could keep up my righteous anger hanging around a port in the rain waiting for a ferry

like if you wanted some help burning down the dail I would volunteer, but I know myself that I'd lose momentum round holyhead.

you'd be well fuckin rekindled by the traffic coming up the n11 tbph

like this stuff comes up in the US all the time and we are under no threat of losing our sovereignty.

Neither are we, actually.

the idea that there is one thing, "sovereignty", which resides in a single nation and is pure and undiluted seems ridiculous to me, particularly in the UK/Great Britain/England/Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland/the British parts of the British & Irish Isles or wherever the fuck we are

sovereignty is a complex issue but it's not totally ridiculous. different countries have different interests - both bc of facts of geography/resources and bc of nationalist/cultural/linguistic sentiments. greece doesn't want the same things that germany or belgium want, but they have certainly lost some of their ability to express those needs effectively - thus the turn to fascism? obv i understand the UK has done a thorough job keeping itself separate from the EU so maybe there these concerns are overblown, but i think they're also understandable?

Greece lost all their money is what Greece lost

or cyprus or italy or whatever i mean the ideal behind the EU is admirable - stop the europeans from invading + killing each other every few years. but it obv results in some countries becoming less able to express their national interest - right? that's not inexplicable.

The UK is not separate from the EU- but it is separate from the Eurozone. And I don't think the concept of sovereignty itself is ridiculous, just that it can be, or ever was, absoulte, even in the days of absolute monarchy. UKIP and the like want to go back to an imagined golden period when individual sovereign nation states looked after their own interests.

absolutism was only absolute in theory (see Bodin's "Six Livres")- even at it most intense it was subject to an exterior "divine law" which could outweigh it, but my main / obvious point here is that the theorization of absolute sovereignty was theoretical rather than descriptive, i.e. even the theorists who promulgated the most elaborate and extensive definitions of sovereignty as such would admit that it rarely if ever corresponded to the political realities. The later intellectual inheritors of Bodin such as Schmitt also were willing to admit that real govts. almost never embodied these definitive assertions about absolute and perpetual sovereignty (and succession is always a big problem even in monarchies that approached this very ideal)

here's a way broad qn, but: to what extent did these rightist parties campaign as anti-austerity? my drive-by impression is that they took an increasing share of what were traditionally leftist voters

UKIP would be pro-austerity if they were silly enough to say anything about economics

too depressed to pick at this carcass properly tho, most of the credible answers involve some combo of gullibility, ignorance and mean-spiritedness which i wd prefer not to attribute to vast swathes of humanity

ah you do rly tho

to what extent do these votes function as protest votes and aren't sincere results vis-a-vis domestic elections?

the long-ass perry anderson article on italy that i've half read seems to hint at a general picture that the social democratic parties have all cut their own bases out from under them by playing me-too neoliberal through the crisis years. y/n?

again my driveby sense is that the whole continent's problems come down to being run on german monetary policy via ECB and it's amazing to me parties haven't been saying so. how could you lose?

xp

i dunno, the bulk of the UKIP voters are right-leaning in general i think - if voting UKIP is a protest it is mostly a protest in favour of policies they wd like the bigger parties to adopt

goole in the UK the "social democratic" parties have been playing neoliberal since the mid 1990s, dunno how far this sickness has spread on the mainland

ah yeah, i was speaking vaguely continentally i guess

so NV, you think if current trends hold UKIP is going to be running the country in 2015?

the long-ass perry anderson article on italy that i've half read seems to hint at a general picture that the social democratic parties have all cut their own bases out from under them by playing me-too neoliberal through the crisis years. y/n?

Y

no, i still think it unlikely they'll gain a single parliamentary seat. when the general election comes around people fall back on their old certainties, or don't vote. what i'm saying is that the people who vote UKIP wd like their chosen mainstream party to be more like UKIP - they are voting for something

Outside of Scandinavia and Greece, I can not think of many centre-left parties with a shot at power who aren't fairly neo-liberal in outlook. It's a question of degrees. Everyone is playing the same game but some are trying harder than others to mitigate the damage.

the economist thinks that the only reason UKIP won is bc low turnout:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2014/05/2015-election

statistically probably true but inadequate as an answer - they won because more people went out to vote for them than the other parties. the turnout at the general election will be higher, and they're unlikely to significantly increase their numbers. but general election turnouts have been steadily falling for a long time, and the fact that people revert to Conservative or Labour at a general election doesn't imply that they're not bothered about the EU - they're just bothered in a peculiarly myopic way that doesn't factor into their thinking about the government of the UK

yeah, okay. that's what i meant by asking if it was a protest vote. "we don't really want them in charge, but we like them on this particular issue"

I really doubt that UKIP will do much winning in the general election, but they will do better than they have before (which may or may not be enough to get them a seat in parliament).

i'm resisting the urge to cite my father's thinking on this, he's pretty much an archetypal UKIP voter as identified in that article, he's also a largely inarticulate bundle of prejudice and anger nowadays

I don't know why people voted UKIP, I don't know anyone who voted UKIP (I think), most of my friends here are foreign anyway. There is certainly a strong protest element, and there's a general feeling that European elections aren't important, but the fact that they had reasonable support in the local elections suggests that there's more to it than that.

From Mordy's link:

Meanwhile, the pollsters had some fascinating insights into the mind of the UKIP voters. It is not just that they are older, whiter, less educated and poorer than mainstream party supporters; they are more pessimistic and less trusting. Only 4% of UKIP voters think politicians will tell the truth (compared with an already depressing 20% for all adults). Around 82% of UKIP voters thought the country was a worse place to grow up than 30-40 years ago (in 1974, there was a three-day week, power cuts, endless strikes and stagflation). And most remarkably, on a non-political issue, almost five times as many UKIP voters were inclined to think the MMR jab (for mumps, measles and rubella) was unsafe (28% versus 6% for all adults), and a staggering 13% thought it was dangerous; a view not shared by any measurable proportion of voters for other parties.

Change-averse voters will be happy that despite all the political earthquakes, some things stay the same: Newly elected Ukip councillor sacked for racism and homophobia

i dunno that there's much sense of local elections being important either. what do councillors do anyway? i'd guess not very much that was being discussed at a national level, which makes ukip success there even more puzzling.

yeah the plotting of "national" politics onto local government just shows what a big sorry mess the whole system is, an arena for empty gestures

Dunno, I assumed that people might have a general idea of what they do/don't like about their local council? Or which people they do/don't like in their area?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

too late

absolutism was only absolute in theory (see Bodin's "Six Livres")- even at it most intense it was subject to an exterior "divine law" which could outweigh it, but my main / obvious point here is that the theorization of absolute sovereignty was theoretical rather than descriptive, i.e. even the theorists who promulgated the most elaborate and extensive definitions of sovereignty as such would admit that it rarely if ever corresponded to the political realities. The later intellectual inheritors of Bodin such as Schmitt also were willing to admit that real govts. almost never embodied these definitive assertions about absolute and perpetual sovereignty (and succession is always a big problem even in monarchies that approached this very ideal)

― the tune was space, Wednesday, May 28, 2014 8:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Good post. I suppose the point is for UKIP that we no longer live in the late middle ages, much as they would like to go back to some John Major-esque version of Merrie England. In fact they are everything that Amis was railing against in lucky Jim.

Lucky Jim was published 60 years ago this year. UKIP are nostalgic for 50s nostalgia :-(

I suspect it's a weakly theorised notion of Britain as 'sovereign power', with its roots in high-Victorian Imperial practice, ie no-one tells Britain what to do, we tell the red bits of the map exactly what to do or else gunboats.

make that "imagined high-Victorian Imperial practice", I'm sure everything was actually more complicated than that.

People voted for them because they need a scapegoat, someone else to blame for their own failure in life, and are under the delusion that if they can pass the blame and hatred onto a large and convenient target – immigrants, say – it will make them feel better about their own lives.

Because nobody’s going to admit to themselves “I’m lazy” or “I’m incompetent” or “I’m a useless pile of doodah who deserves everything I’ve got.” Much easier to blame immigration, or the EU.

These are the people who thought, when Cameron or Blair or even Thatcher got in, this was their chance for a new start, whether they voted for these people or not. It may even be the main reason why these people won their elections (even if Cameron, really, didn’t). But it was a chance they didn’t take, or were unable or unwilling to take. And so they hate the established parties and vote UK*P because, fundamentally, their lives aren’t as good as they thought they were going to be when Cameron or Blair or Thatcher came to power.

It’s not immigrants or the EU that they really hate, but themselves, because they didn’t come through.

It’s easy to condemn UK*P voters outright, but I would offer this advice instead: stop doing yourself down and regarding yourself as a failure. If you say “well, I’m voting UK*P because these people are coming in from Europe and taking my job and undercutting my wages,” if you say that you hate immigrants, the EU and political correctness, you need to be honest with yourself and say that, in truth, you are voting UK*P because, deep down, you are disappointed in yourself.

If that’s the case, go for some self-awareness, and try to find out whether you really are unhappy with yourself. And if you ARE unhappy with yourself, the first way out of it is to ask: are you being too hard on yourself? OK. You are not David Beckham. You are not a multi-millionaire who has hundreds of friends, is known all over the world and is in charge of things. That was never going to happen. Provided you’re doing reasonably OK, then forget those disparaging voices at the back of your head which come from your parents, or your teachers, or your bosses.

Be nicer to yourself. You deserve better than this, and so does Britain.

I'm not aware of UKIP having said anything about austerity at all - they're almost certainly in favour of it but won't say anything about it because they're benefiting from the rage and despair that comes from austerity. A significant proportion of the electorate feel that the government is doing everything for anyone *except* them - immigrants, bankers, EU bureaucrats, any convenient scapegoat. Immigration issues are usually employment issues, housing issues, wage issues in disguise. This works even as the pro-UKIP agenda is being pushed to them by pro-austerity ideologues like Murdoch and Dacre.

The low turnout issue is almost certainly a big factor - most people just don't vote in European elections and those that do are more likely to be either heavily pro- or anti-EU. The pro-EU vote splits several different ways, the anti-EU voting bloc is by-and-large united and contains a lot of people who would vote Tory in any General Election but can vote UKIP safe in the knowledge that Farage stands no chance of actually becoming Prime Minister.

Has this appeared on ilx yet?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27543012

I voted for the Greens in Europe (who have one more MP than UK*P and did reasonably well, considering the media pretended that they didn’t exist) and Labour locally – just because I disagree with the Milibandisation of things doesn’t mean that I don’t think our local council is doing a bloody good job (and are a lot closer to the core of what Labour is supposed to be about than Miliband & Co).

ah i haven't seen Walsall market in so long, that was painfully nostalgic.

also everything you're selling on your stall was made abroad you frickin dork

this is what i love about UKIP/anti-immigration guys - almost everything they own originates from foreign labour but i don't think they've noticed

like, Buy British or stfu

need to stop buying all those Swans and Tune-Yards records and listen to the Wave Pictures instead

If that’s the case, go for some self-awareness, and try to find out whether you really are unhappy with yourself. And if you ARE unhappy with yourself, the first way out of it is to ask: are you being too hard on yourself? OK. You are not David Beckham. You are not a multi-millionaire who has hundreds of friends, is known all over the world and is in charge of things. That was never going to happen. Provided you’re doing reasonably OK, then forget those disparaging voices at the back of your head which come from your parents, or your teachers, or your bosses.

idk, idk. If you're on a zero-hours contract, you're finding it increasingly hard to buy groceries as well as pay the gas bill and your kids can't afford to move out, there's a degree of anger that no amount of looking inward is going to solve. People are suffering. Believe the Tories and Labour created the problem, believe the evidence in front of you and the Tories are making it worse. In the absence of an apolitical Beppe Grillo figure or a genuine leftist alternative, how are people expected to register their disapproval of the hegemony? Farage has pulled a neat trick of presenting himself as the politician you can vote for if you hate politicians. The policies are likely to be incidental for some of their voters.

would be interesting to see how much overlap there is between people who voted UKIP and people hit hardest by austerity. i suspect a lot of the UKIP voters are not the people who've suffered most.

and tho austerity has definitely been a real, crushing thing, we shd remember that there was a big chunk of the population who never really benefited from the 13 years of RIP Labour government that preceded it

(xp) The thing is that their politics are identical to what the Tories and Labour are proposing, but their voters are too blinkered or, as I argued, too consumed by suppressed self-hatred, to see that.

They won't win a seat in the General Election so why are we tearing our hair out over these cunts?

It's going to be fun watching what happens when Farage actually has to reveal some policies.

They won't win a seat in the General Election so why are we tearing our hair out over these cunts?

a non-negligible chunk of the population likes them enough to vote for them. if you wanna restrict political discussion to general elections we could move this thread to I Love Games maybe

would be interesting to see how much overlap there is between people who voted UKIP and people hit hardest by austerity. i suspect a lot of the UKIP voters are not the people who've suffered most.

Yes, this is what i had always assumed. I imagined the UKIP audience as middle-class, middle-income, middle-England mini-Farages but the data apparently shows that their supporters are worse off, on average, than any other party.

25% of 36%? I think it's 10% overall? OK not insignificant but it won't be that come 2015.

I think a little less hysteria is needed - not here but in the media

The people tacking banners to their fences 'round these parts are typical middle englanders and farmers FWIW.

Isn't part of the media at least party responsible for the whole anti-europe, anti-foreigner thing?

Yes, they probably bear most responsibility.

how many pals has Farage got in the media? is there a Koch bros -> tea party equivalence going on here?

"Why oh why doesn't anyone believe in personal responsibility anymore?" (cont. Daily Mail, p. 5, col. 3)

A: LOL, who cares?

I like to think the British media are in the process of building someone up, just so they can knock him down again. Because that never happens, right? In about nine months, when Farage is emboldened enough to say something offensive that he won't be able to wriggle out of, the latter part of the process might start. *hopes fervently*

'Cleggmania' 2010, never forget

news media is a generally distorting mechanism for all aspects of "real life" - it exists to report situations that are by definition abnormal, for a start

rolling fucked-up view of the world 24/7 that people continue to believe is something other than an entertainment product

poor bastard only had four years of deputy prime ministering and £130k+ pa and all the expenses he could eat before they knocked him down

xxp

The Times is avowedly anti-UKIP for obvious reasons (has there ever been a paper closer to government?) but the rest are a mixture of wanting to boost UKIP to try to force the Tories to tack to the right and wanting to boost UKIP to split the right-wing vote. It's a dangerous game - i'm not sure many expected them to do quite so well and will roll back a bit.

The Rothermeres and Barclays are our closest thing to the Kochs, i supposed, but far too traditional to stray far from the Conservatives.

In about nine months, when Farage is emboldened enough to say something offensive that he won't be able to wriggle out of, the latter part of the process might start.

I'd also reckon that once all the Ukip MEPs get to the trough, they won't behave like an army of saints. And that all sides of the press will report on this as part of the knock-down.

All I see on the front pages now is Clegg 4 The Chop-type banner headlines. Despite everything this Westminster soap opera that interests nobody is propagated. 6Music news this morning was Asperger’s “news”: “Cable made NO CLEAR SPECIFIC REFERENCE about Clegg being GREAT.” FFS, enough of the House of Archers. Nobody bloody cares.

category c: people are shit, but they have legitimate grievances

would also vote for this for board description

What parliamental group is the UKIP joining? If they are typical loonies, they will get into the fringe groups, which never gets anything done.

(xp) No, I went for "none of the above." People, by and large, aren't shit and their grievances are largely towards/caused by themselves. Their main grievance being that they thought Blair or Thatcher would sprinkle them with magic millionaire dust when they came to power, and they're affronted by the knowledge that if they wanted to make their fortune, they'd have had to get up off their backsides and do something about it themselves, rather than waiting for their fortune to come knocking on their door like they'd won the pools.

people aren't shit they're just stupid and lazy?

where'd I put my FP button

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoGofvVhKTo

steady on imo

http://www.edstephan.org/Sociology/302/weber/weber-5.gif

I want to know which people expected Thatcher and/or Blair to make them millionaires.

they expected Thatcher to give them a bike to get on to go find a £million

Farage now hanging with Beppe Grillo. What's his deal? Got the impression that he was OK from the longlonglong Perry Anderson LRB article on Italy.

the q. of whether this is about austerity is sort of interesting

(xxp) Yes. Because they were sold the idea that capitalism was good because it gave everybody an equal chance, rather than rewarding only those it wanted to. I think the fallacy in that argument has long since been exposed.

But if people now are struggling, or think they're struggling, will they blame the people - the politicians, the bosses, the multinational companies, the banks - who put them in that situation? No, that would be too difficult and awkward and Not A Good Story. Far, far easier to have a go at people who come from abroad and work harder, longer and for less at all the crap jobs which British people feel are "beneath" them because they can't get rid of this stupid post-Empire sense of entitlement.

I'd research Grillo for myself but I'm busy looking into gerry anderson/perry anderson display names.

Bebe Grillo is a clown. Like, literally. Or at least a comedian. Trying to destroy the political system, basically, which in Italy isn't really such a nefarious idea. Though, obviously, bad historical precedent.

Grillo doesn't see Five Star as being left or right but there's virtually nothing in their platform that matches up with UKIP, other than Euroscepticism. It's a good idea for Farage, in the sense that most of the other parties they could organise with are transparently racist and would tank their UK respectability.

p sure ppl blame banks, politicians, etc

no party currently standing on a platform of doing fuck all abt those guys tho tbf

Anderson gave Grillo a free pass in that LRB article, it seemed to me, perhaps because he was so busy castigating every other Italian politician, and with good cause too.

SPECIOUS CHAIN OF REASONING ABOUT AUSTERITY FOLLOWS

-- for the majority of people voting UKIP it isn't, at least at first hand, "about austerity"

-- but if we accept the 'immigration is a scapegoat for their concerns about housing, jobs, benefits' it can be, sure

-- it would be nice if our next parliament at least made it a part of the conversation that we have our own currency and our own lender of last resort and we have no need to take fiscal cues from the eurozone

-- but the existence of farage-broad anti-EU stance drowns out any more nuanced euroskeptic view

-- and perhaps on this account is a convenient thing for the other parties: corrals off something that would be a helpful and necessary critique of our current govt. into something on the face of it wacko and not worthy of addressing

-- and so, being convenient, is permitted to exist, not combated in particularly meaningful or effective ways

Ok, just read my weekly newspaper's long article on Grillo. He seems frightening. Apparantly, he expected his party to become the biggest party in Italy, after which he'd stage a coup and get rid of the politicians. He has also written on his blog, that if the socialdemocratic leader destroyed his plan, he would be dissapeard. Working with him should not be the respectable option, but really, don't think there are a lot of options for UKIP.

I hear Marine Le Pen is looking for chums.

Not with UKIP though - Farage accused the FN of being anti-Semitic.

"We've got to find a group of people that we think are part of our political family with views that are consistent with classical liberal democracy."

^What Farage thinks UKIP represent and why they won't align themselves with FN.

it was the beer wot won it. Farage made sure, more than anything, that he was portrayed as "the bloke in the pub". That's quite a powerful archetype for the majority of Brits who have been raised in and around pub culture.

I mean, just look https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=farage+beer&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=0kyHU8DNEcSVPen8gLgE&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1600&bih=775

foaming pint of nut-brown ale

Yeah he's kind of the non-crazy-haired Boris Johnson in that respect. Johnson always comes across as the bully boy whom everyone crowds behind in the playground and sniggers at his unfunny jokes for fear of getting rounded on themselves. Farage is more the office joker - the guy who whispers pithy things in your ear whenever Sunita walks past the photocopy desk and then laughs off your incredulous reaction with a wink and a smile, because of course it's all just a little joke. A joke between friends. And who doesn't want to be friends with a joker?

you're saying Farage is a total Colin Hunt

i'm saying he's a cunt, yes.

I mean, just look https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=farage+beer&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=0kyHU8DNEcSVPen8gLgE&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1600&bih=775

― thomasintrouble, Thursday, 29 May 2014 16:08 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was googling farage+champagne and stumbled across this

http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/f38931d4-86d5-11e2-b907-00144feabdc0.img

I totally forgot he survived a plane crash!

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00388/TMM02FARAGE1_a_388432c.jpg

worst speed date ever

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Legitimate grievances perhaps, but he's still a cunt.