Mainstream politicians still aren’t sure how to talk about Ukip. There’s the question of whether the party’s European election and by-election successes will power them to a good result at the 2015 election, or whether this protest movement will fade a little by the time voters start thinking about the sort of government they like. There’s the question of whether Ukip is borrowing members of each mainstream party’s ‘core vote’, or whether neither the Tories nor Labour should consider voters ‘theirs’ any more anyway. And then there’s the question of how to talk about Ukip.
Most senior politicians are agreed that you can’t call people who vote for Ukip fruitcakes or closet racists. But the question still lingers of how to approach the Ukip leadership. Ed Miliband decided to take a stronger line of attack last week in his ‘make-or-break’ speech, saying ‘they’ve got away with it for too long’. Yesterday David Cameron claimed that Nigel Farage’s party would ‘all celebrate [a win in the Rochester by-election] with a pint in the pub and there will be a greater danger of insecurity and instability in our economy’. And today Sir John Major accused the party of being ‘profoundly un-British in every way’. He told the Andrew Marr Show:
‘They are anti-everything. They are anti-politics; they are anti-foreigner; they are anti-immigrant; they are anti-aid. I don’t know what they’re for. We know what they are against, and that’s the negativity of the four-ale bar. That’s not the way to get into Parliament and not the way to run a country. So they may be elected because people are frustrated.’
Over the next few months, the parties will be working out which message is best for enticing voters away from Ukip – and which will do more harm than good by offending people. Is it telling them that they’ll end up with a Miliband government when their basic values are Conservative? Is it trying to paint the party as a protest movement rather than one with a vision for Britain’s future? Or is it trying to argue that Ukip does have a vision, just not one that people should support? Of course, there’s also always the option of competing for votes by suggesting to voters that your party is the one with the excitement, vision and policies to govern the country, rather than just telling voters who not to support. And that is a much bigger challenge at a time when both main parties are wallowing in the low 30s in the polls and neither shows any signs of the Big Mo.
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