Douglas Carswell

Red UKIP? We are not Poujadiste

UKIP will, I fervently hope, displace Labour. We could do to Labour south of the border what the Scottish Nationalist have done to the north.

Impossible?  If the recent election results are anything to go by the signs are pretty encouraging.

UKIP polled almost four million votes to Labour's nine. Before the last election, dozens of Conservative MPs feared losing their slender majorities. Today they are back in Westminster with bigger majorities. Why? Because their local Labour vote went UKIP. That's where UKIP's future lies.

Does displacing Labour mean some sort of "red UKIP" strategy?  Not at all - and here's why.

Labour today is a party of statism. The shape of the blue print envisaged for society might vary. To what ends the levers of state control should be tugged will be debated by different Labour leadership contenders. But Labour is hooked on the idea of top down control.

Labour might have abandoned socialism, but Labour is a corporatist party, on the side of vested interests; PFI, which gives big business a guaranteed slice of future tax revenues. Energy targets, which mean subsidies for big energy companies paid for by ordinary householders. Bailouts for bankers, tax breaks for a favoured few.  Look at the lobbyists who hover around the party like files ....

Labour once stood up for ordinary people against the interests of the powerful. Today Labour sides with remote EU functionaries and well-renumerated Human Rights lawyers.

Keir Hardie's party today shows a patronising distain for the very folk the party is supposed to represent.

UKIP can offer an alternative to Labour not by apeing the left, but by offering something radically different.

UKIP believes in dispersing power. We want political reform to make government accountable to Parliament and Parliament answerable to the people. We don't merely seek to return power from Brussels to Westminster, but to push control from Whitehall to the town hall.

We want to disperse economic power, too. The way to do that is not through corporatism, but via honest markets.  Real markets that work for customers, as well as producers.

What would dispersing economic power look like?

From education to health care, digital technology allows us to have public services provided to the public with a degree of personalisation that was once the preserve of the private sector.

It would mean real bank reform. Instead of reining in the worst excesses of fractional reserve banking with top down regulation, and bail outs, we need to make the case for comprehensive bank reform.

Osbrown monetary policy has transferred wealth from those with savings to those with assets. Hosing cheap credit at the housing market has inflated house prices, putting homeownership beyond the reach of many in their twenties and thirties. Sooner or later we will need a different approach. (See: https://www.douglascarswell.com/downloads/after-osbrown.pdf )

We need an energy market that encourages innovation and pushes down energy prices. At some point the PFI taps will need to be turned off.

Instead of spending the defence budget in the interests of contractors, we need to see it spent in the best interests of our armed forces.

Here is the outline of an agenda for UKIP that is both free market, and popular – not Poujadiste.

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