Alex Salmond’s success is just a symptom of our age of rage

In his short and infrequent visits to Scotland this year, the Prime Minister should have found time to speak to those supporting the ‘yes’ campaign. He would have seen and heard precisely the same complaints and exasperation that are driving his other great foe, Ukip.

For years, politicians have laughed about voters who are ‘mad as hell, and not going to take it any more’. That joke is no longer funny. People have derided, lamented or lampooned the death of the Tory party’s grass roots. But the independence debate revealed that in Scotland the Labour party has suffered the same fate. The Better Together campaign against Scottish independence was meant to be largely powered by Labour party operatives. But the closer it came to the vote, the clearer it became that the Labour party did not have any troops to call out.

The ‘yes’ activists in Scotland and Ukip supporters in England both have a point. The Westminster system is broken, because it has been taken over by professional politicians who focus on their opposite numbers rather than on the people they’re supposed to represent. That this led to mass apathy and resentment did not trouble them at first: to a professional politician, those who don’t vote might as well not exist. But now the abstainers have found new champions in the insurgent parties. People are turning up to vote for the first time in years. A grumble has grown into a war cry, as we saw in Scotland.

It’s happening abroad, too. As Johan Norberg says on page 16, the populist Sweden Democrats were the real winners of that country’s general election last weekend. They have emerged as the third force in Swedish politics. Similar stories can be seen across the continent.