UKIP for Labour

Here's an interesting opinion piece from The Telegraph written by Peter Oborne, from an avowedly Conservative point of view, which puts its finger on the real political aim of UKIP - that the Labour Party should win the next general election.

Now I have to admit I hadn't seen the politics quite as 'black and white' as that before now, but when you think about such a result it makes perfect sense because UKIP's best hope is a weak Westminster Government which is too timid to put the UK's continued membership of the European Union (EU) to a popular vote.

Certainly, the more I hear from south of the border, the more I'm convinced that a majority of English voters would choose to come out of the EU, no matter how crazy that appears from a Scottish perspective, because anti-European sentiment has been allowed to fester and grow for years.

But it also means that the Conservative strategy for going into the 2015 general election is crystal clear - they will argue that a vote for UKIP is a vote for a weak Labour Government with a weak Labour leader in Ed Miliband as Prime Minister.       

Now that is a very clear and powerful political message, and one that tilts the balance back in favour of the Conservatives in a close run election campaign.  

David Cameron can chart a course past Nigel Farage the revolutionary

Ukip wants Labour in power to see it fail, but the Conservatives are the only serious option

David Cameron answers his critics during Prime Minister's Question Time



By Peter Oborne 0 The Telegraph

MPs returned from their summer recess this week to a new political landscape. At the start of this summer, conventional thinking at Westminster held that David Cameron would still be Prime Minister after May 7 2015, the date of the general election.

This opinion, however, was never grounded in the opinion polls. These have consistently showed a Labour lead between 2 and 6 per cent. When put together with Labour’s grossly unfair advantage in the electoral system, the ingredients have long been in place to secure Labour a comfortable outright majority.

But expert wisdom at Westminster held that Ed Miliband was distrusted and even despised by the voters and that he would simply be incapable of mounting an effective challenge to the Conservative Party in the heat of a general election campaign.

During the summer, a dose of reality has crept in. This is partly because of the churlish and irrational refusal by ordinary voters to be persuaded by the Tory message. It is partly because Mr Miliband has annoyingly refused to collapse, as some wrongly predicted, and a significant minority of Labour earnestly hoped.

The Labour leader has enjoyed a goodish summer, thus confounding the fashionable notion that leaders of the opposition should behave like perpetual motion machines, supplying the outside world with an endless barrage of public appearances, interviews, press statements and other pseudo-events.

To the great relief of everybody, Mr Miliband has hardly been seen since July. He took his family on an unreported holiday somewhere in the seclusion of the French countryside, from which he emerged once to denounce the Israeli invasion of Gaza. This lonely intervention showed, however, that Labour was much more closely in touch with the majority of British public opinion than the Conservatives.

Mr Miliband suddenly finds himself favourite to be the next British prime minister, most likely with a solid majority. At Westminster his reputation is enhanced. He has greater authority in his own party and is less likely to be mocked in the media. This time next year, on current trends, Mr Cameron will no longer be Tory leader. Aged 49 he will be contemplating forging a new career for himself out of the public eye, while the Conservative Party will be choosing a new man, or woman, at the top.

The country at large will not be much interested in the goings on involving May, Osborne, Boris, Hammond and doubtless others because Mr Miliband and his cabinet will be running the nation. To put it another way, Mr Cameron has eight months to save his political career from ending in failure and the Conservative Party from oblivion.

This is an especially demanding task because the Conservatives are obliged to be active simultaneously on two fronts. On the centre-Left they are facing a conventional Labour opposition, but on the Right Ukip has emerged as a dynamic force.

As a result, Mr Cameron faces a strategic dilemma. He can shift his party to the centre ground in order to attract Labour voters, only to confirm the (unfair) Ukip assertion that he is fundamentally an empty vessel with no real beliefs beyond an unprincipled determination to hang on to power at any cost. Alternatively he can adopt policies designed to appeal to the many Conservative voters who have fled to Ukip. By taking this course of action he opens himself up to the damaging Labour charge that the Tories are at the mercy of a rabidly populist Right-wing group. This dilemma recalls the appalling challenge facing John Major in 1997 when he was menaced simultaneously by Tony Blair on the Left and his own Maastricht rebels on the Right, a two-pronged assault with which he was palpably ill-equipped to deal.

There are some who believe that it is all up with the Tories, and that the defection of Douglas Carswell to Ukip will come to be part of a historic and inevitable split on the political Right. They may be right. But I believe that Mr Cameron can extract some freedom of manoeuvre from his inauspicious political predicament. He can do this by taking advantage of the fatal contradiction at the heart of Nigel Farage’s politics.

Bear in mind that Ukip marks a revolt against regulation, taxation and the power of the state. Ukip celebrates liberty and national independence. It rightly sees that the European Union has become a source of much of this bureaucracy and state control. Nevertheless it has now embarked on a course of action which, if successful, all but guarantees that Mr Miliband will be the next prime minister. Yet Mr Miliband is the exact antithesis of everything that Nigel Farage, Douglas Carswell and Ukip voters believe in.

Mr Miliband celebrates the European Union, and sees state regulation and control as the answer to almost everything. His effective partnership with Ukip is one of the most curious political alliances since the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that sought to unite the fortunes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

So what explains Ukip’s urgent desire to throw the Conservatives out of office and install a Labour government? Farage is adopting a revolutionary position, very reminiscent of the Left-wing militants of the early Eighties who put Margaret Thatcher into power because they felt that moderate social democracy was a sell-out.

Farage wants to put Miliband in power, only to see him fail, enabling a renewed Tory party captured by the militant Right to win an election with a radical manifesto determined to take Britain out of Europe.

The Tory party shares most of these political instincts of Ukip. It is, however, a governing party. Tory statecraft is all about compromise and pragmatism. Conservatives move forward slowly and cautiously. They are wary of lurches in the dark. They are boringly sensible – and this boring good sense infuriates Ukip.

So there is a way forward for the Prime Minister. He can chart a course between Labour’s statism and Ukip’s magnificent but doomed refusal to accept reality. The economy is still strong, unemployment is falling very fast, the Conservatives can boast historic reforms in the fields of welfare and education.

The Tories are far from perfect. They nevertheless offer a far better prospect than a Labour Party that tried to oppose economic austerity, welfare reform and high standards in schools. In addition, Conservatives offer a promise of a referendum on British membership of the European Union – something that Ed Miliband (and therefore his improbable ally Nigel Farage) is set dead against.

Meanwhile I hear from Tory MPs who met the Prime Minister in the Boothroyd room in the Commons on Tuesday night that Mr Cameron’s policy on Europe is on the move. Hitherto, he has made it plain that whatever the result of negotiations with Brussels, he is determined to campaign in favour for British membership of the EU. Though nothing was said explicitly two nights ago, I am told that his language is now changing.

Close allies of the Prime Minister tell me that the European policy set out in the Bloomberg speech in January 2013 is now a “work in progress”. Mr Cameron is moving towards a recognition that there may be circumstances where he could be the man to lead the country out of Europe.