Douglas Carswell

UKIP's chance

"Labour is ... running off to the Left" suggests Fraser Nelson in today's Telegraph, and "the Tories must now run towards them."

Anyone else spot the gap in the political market? 

If Fraser is right and the two main Westminster parties canter off to the left, there is a massive opportunity for a politicial upstart - or start up - rooted on the center right, with a radical reformist agenda based on choice and competition.

"Impossible!" scoff many Westminster insiders.  Traditional Labour voters can only be scooped up with traditional leftwing policies, they presume.  

Really?  Over in the US, Donald Trump's stuborn success in the primary contest suggests that many traditional Republican voters might not actually be that into the political philosophy that guided many Republican leaders.  Digital disintermediates politics in all sorts of weird and wonderful way, including in some cases by separating insular leadership from the base.  

I just don't believe that traditional Labour voters are animated by Fabianism idealism anymore. (See Ed Miliband for details).  They are up for something fundamentally different.

About half of Labour's traditional vote may be up for grabs, Fraser informs us. And he is right.

But does anyone seriously think that many of those votes will migrate to David Cameron's Conservative party over the next five years? In whole swathes of the north of England, one thing that has helped keep an atrophied Labour party office has been the repellant power of the Tory brand.

Yes, those Labour votes are up for grabs, but they are unlikely to go to the Conservatives. The story of the last election was of Labour voters moving to UKIP. Not unlike the 1920's, I believe a process of realignment is underway.

The same research Fraser refers to suggests that Labour switchers to the Conservatives are uneasy with their new choice. Those that switch to UKIP don't look back.

The Conservatives must, according to Fraser, be the opposition to their own government. Given the extent to which many ministers in this administration are run by their mandarins, that will indeed be the case.

David Cameron has "long been fusing the best of New Labour with the best of Conservatism", according to Fraser. The Cameroons, he tells us, have picked up where Blair left off.

I don't disagree. Soft right Tory governments are almost indistinguishable from soft left Labour one's. Its what voters means when they say "all you politicians are the same".

Like New Labour, the Conservatives are pursuing the same corporatist economic agenda, with credit rationing and massive stimulus spending. And like the Blairites, they are fond of the same sort of patrician social improvement programmes. (See Kids Company for details.)

There a growing market for a radical alternative, based on breaking open the political and economic cartels that run this country in their own interests.

If Cameron chases Corbyn to the left, there'll be plenty of space on the stage for UKIP.

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