Douglas Carswell

Good reasons for UKIP to be cheerful

The delight I felt in the early hours of Friday morning having won my Clacton seat soon turned to dismay. First came news that my good friend Mark Reckless had lost in Rochester. That was followed by despondence at the news of Nigel's defeat in Thanet.

In seat after seat, so much effort had been made by so many people – and all for so little.

So what next for UKIP?

We should not despair. In terms of seats won, election night might not have gone well. Looked at another way, it was an amazing result. Almost four million people voted for us, making UKIP Britain's third party.

As many people voted UKIP on Thursday as voted for both the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party combined. The shocking failure to convert votes into seats is less a failure of UKIP's campaign strategy than it is a failure of our dysfunctional political system.

However infuriating we might find the Commons arithmetic in this new Parliament, take heart. David Cameron, with his slender majority, is likely to find it even more annoying.

Over the next five years, Parliament is going to really matter. Ministers will really need to make their case every time - and cannot automatically assume that they will get their way.

Beyond Westminster, UKIP – and the factors that explain our rise - are not going away.

As long as Britain remains bound by the European Union, politicians might be able to win votes by promising things. They won't be able to deliver when so many of the decisions that affect our lives are made for us by Brussels.

Far from abating, the mood of anti-politics that fuels UKIP will only grow. We need to become a champion for change; giving voters the power of recall, so that local constituents can sack wayward MPs, open primary candidate selection and electoral reform.

UKIP might have only finished first in a single seat, but we finished second – often a tantalisingly close second – in 120 seats. That bodes well for our future.

Our candidates, often standing for the first time, have gained valuable experience. This means we now have a cadre of campaigner's right across the country.

With David Cameron in Number 10 and Labour in turmoil, the opportunities for UKIP to present a credible alternative are going to be enormous. To do so, Ukip needs to reach out beyond the four million people who voted for us last week.

Many of the seats where UKIP finished second are in the north of England. Far from being a party of Tory ultras, UKIP's future lies in extending our appeal, and not simply geographically.

While the Scottish National Party can only stand candidates north of the border, the disaffection with the Labour party that has fuelled their rise reaches right down towards Manchester and the midlands.

Study a map of support of UKIP, and you will see deep purple patches in the old Labour heartlands. Like much of Scotland, these are often constituencies where the Conservative party has only existed on paper for at least a generation. At the same time, voters in such seats have begun to tire of a Labour party that regards them as their private fiefdoms.

The idea of displacing the Labour party is not fantasy. Ed Miliband's party got slightly over 9 million votes. At almost 4 million, the UKIP tally is not impossibly far behind even now.

Positioning ourselves as an alternative to Labour does not mean that we should imitate Labour. Ed Miliband has neatly demonstrated the folly of offering the voters retro 1970s socialism. Not even Ed Balls former constituents were convinced about the would-be chancellor's high tax and regulation approach.

Years of bank bailouts and cosy deal making between big government and big business has started to give capitalism a bad name. First under Blair-Brown, then under Cameron, Britain has shifted away from the free market towards a form of crony corporatism. There is a massive gap in the political market space for a new popular, democratic capitalism, which works of ordinary people.

In the age of Amazon, the case for free trade has never been easier to make. Ukip should be making it. In a world where in work benefits are subsidising low wages – and thus keeping wages low – we need to be prepared to advocate alternatives. Poor productivity growth is not just something that should concern policy wonks. It is harming people on every high street.

Nigel Farage has been an inspirational leader. Like hundreds of thousands of other people, he inspired me to leave the comfort of by previous party, and join him. I was prepared to resign from Parliament and fight a by election in order to do so. I feel gutted that he is no longer our leader.

But I will not stand to be leader of UKIP. Why? Because I can think of half a dozen figures in UKIP who could do the job better; Suzanne Evans, Patrick O'Flynn, Stephen Woolfe, Paul Nuttall or Diane James.

Every anti-establishment movement in history suffered set backs. But the successful one's were those that united, regrouped and carried on. UKIP's next leader will do so, too.

Ukip's next leader needs to be someone that recognises our party exists first and foremost to get Britain out of the European Union. We should take heart from the fact that there now appears to be, for the first time in a generation, a Commons majority in favour of holding an In Out referendum.

We could be two or three years away from achieving the very thing our party was founded to achieve all those years ago.

Everything that our new leader does over the coming months needs to be directed at securing a majority in favour of leaving the EU. Given than 87 percent of people did not vote Ukip at the last general election, Ukip needs to campaign in the coming referendum as part of a wider movement. Yes, we might be passionate about the need to leave the EU. We should recognise that we might not always be the best people to make the case to undecided voters.

We need to recognise that the case against our continued EU membership is not simply a matter of immigration, but of a better kind of Britain for the future.

Ukip must not make the mistake made by the SNP in their recent referendum. We should not equate support for leaving the EU with support for our own party. Do that, and the European Commission in Brussels would be delighted.

Between now and 2020, UKIP needs to focus on selecting good local candidates in key seats – and selecting them early on. Our candidates need to be local champions, as passionate about safeguarding the local maternity unit or police station as they might be about immigration or defence.

UKIP used to worry about getting noticed. What matters now is that we are listened to - and that means speaking more softly. And when we do speak, we speak to all Britain - and all Britons. Politics is about bringing people together – literally, in order that as many as possible each place their cross on the same part of the ballot paper.

Cheer up UKIP!  Ultimately in politics optimism works. From Clement Attlee to Ronald Reagan, presenting a brighter ideal for the future is an essential ingredient for electoral success. Ed Miliband today probably wishes he spent a little more time outlining not what was wrong with Britain, but what he would do about it to make things better.

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