UKIP, they pick: the meaning of a conservative party's recent strong showing.

PRIME MINISTER Tony Blair, Tory politicians, and political pundits were all "reeling," as the tabloids say, from the British results of the European elections and, in particular, from the almost vertical rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP had won only 1.5 percent of the national vote in the 2001 general election. Even under the proportional representation used in the European elections, small parties usually poll in the low single digits. And UKIP had been caricatured by its opponents as a kind of Ealing-comedy political party--all squires, vicars, tarts, and assorted eccentrics fighting the election as a jolly good lark.

As it happened, the joke was on the Big Battalions. UKIP scored 17 percent of the popular vote and won twelve seats in the European Assembly. That put it ahead of the Liberal Democrats, Britain's long-established third party, and only five points behind Labour, which, with 22 percent of the total vote, delivered the party's worst electoral performance since the 1920s. It was the Tories, however, who were most damaged by UKIP's rise, even though they came out on top of the poll with 27 percent of the vote and won the largest number of seats. That was a decline of over 10 percent in votes and a loss of seats at a time when the Tories, uniting under an effective new leader in Michael Howard and facing an increasingly unpopular government, should be gaining ground. What gives?

Maybe the Tories should have read an article in the September 2002 British monthly magazine Prospect, in which this very possibility was forecast, together with an explanation, as follows:

   In 2001, the United Kingdom Independence
   Party won only 1.5 per cent of
   the national vote--and 2.5 per cent on
   average of the votes in the seats they contested
   in the Tory heartland. But that was
   a high percentage for a fourth party in
   Britain and the UKIP vote will rise if the
   Tories prove half-hearted in defending
   British identity and institutions.

      And there are some signs of this. As
   well as shrinking from a fight over
   Europe, the Tories have also been reluctant
   since the election to raise such
   issues as crime, immigration and asylum
   seekers. This seems to be part of their
   attempt to shed an image that is alleged
   to be racist and intolerant. But they may
   also believe these to be issues of the past
   when, in reality, they are the issues of
   the future.

Why were such warnings--and let me admit to being this particular Cassandra--not taken seriously or acted upon? The answer will be familiar to conservative Republicans. Party strategists argued that those voters who were concerned about such issues had "nowhere else to go." To emphasize them too strongly would risk driving away moderate voters by making the Tory party seem extreme, eccentric, wild-eyed, loony--take your choice. Best to let sleeping Dobermans lie.

Such arguments did not always deter the party from adopting policies that sensibly addressed these issues. Until recently it had allowed itself to be outflanked on the right over immigration and "National Question" issues by Labour's home secretary, David Blunkett. On Europe, however, the Tories have opposed the draft European constitution, British entry into the euro, and indeed any further integration into a federal European state. Even when they adopted such policies, however, they tended to play them down, to concentrate on other topics such as the state of public services, and to refrain from exploiting scandals resulting from EU regulations. One journalist--Christopher Booker, in the Sunday Telegraph--has done more than the entire Tory party to demonstrate the extent to which EU regulations have destroyed small local businesses in Britain.

In effect, Tories positioned themselves politically as the Middle Ground between Euro-federalists and those who were bitterly hostile to the European Union. That seemed shrewd in Westminster. It enabled the Tories to sedate their small but noisy Europhile minority in Parliament and prevent the party from dividing in public--conventional wisdom holds that divided parties never win. What they had not noticed was that a growing number of grassroots Tory supporters were bitterly hostile to the EU as it became increasingly centralized, bureaucratic, interventionist, and--as it sought to extend its reach into foreign and defense policy--overweening. In order to prevent the party from dividing in Parliament, the Tories were risking its division at the grass roots.

Like conservative parties elsewhere, the Tory party is a broad coalition that brings together three electoral blocs: free-market conservatives, moral traditionalists, and patriots. Parties that obtain support from all three groups generally win elections; if they lose even one group, the Left slips into power. And on several issues, Tories were quietly but firmly dissing their nationalist supporters.

It is hard to imagine they hadn't noticed the fate of other parties abroad that had adopted the same approach. To quote my Prospect article again:

   In recent years, mainstream conservative
   parties have lost the support of nationalist
   voters throughout the West. Indeed, very
   often they have rejected such support in
   order to reassure "modernising" elites that
   they were untainted by xenophobia. As a
   result, in a large number of countries, new
   parties have sprung up to appeal to these
   scorned groups on such issues as crime,
   immigration and loss of sovereignty to
   supra-national bodies. A brief list of these
   parties illuminates the danger to mainstream
   parties: the Reform party in
   Canada, the Progress party in Denmark,
   Pim Fortuyn's party in the Netherlands,
   the National Front in France, the New
   Zealand First party, the One Nation party
   in Australia, the Freedom party in Austria,
   the National Alliance in Italy, and on and
   on. Their votes range from about 8 per
   cent (Australia) to almost 30 per cent
   (Austria).

Most likely they assumed that they were immune to this contagion, that there was no credible nationalist challenger in the wings, and that therefore their traditional supporters had "nowhere else to go." But the constellations were aligning against the Tories. UKIP was in the wings, exactly the kind of party that might appeal to nationalist voters in Britain--that is, one untainted by neo-fascism and with a very British (actually very English) flavor of good-natured eccentricity. It had a simple slogan--No to Europe--that appealed to the central grievance of the discontented Tories. It had attracted a wide range of public figures as candidates and supporters--Joan Collins, several Tory peers, and Robert Kilroy-Silk, a former Labour MP who had left Parliament to become Britain's own Phil Donahue--who ensured it massive and generally favorable publicity. The European elections were a secondary occasion when even very committed Tories might feel that a little mild rebellion would be good for the country. And then UKIP's leader met Dick Morris on a Mediterranean cruise and persuaded him to craft UKIP's simple but highly effective election strategy.

UKIP has now gained critical mass. Those Tory activists who decided to switch to it for this one election--and Tory MPs report that their local officials deserted to it en masse--will now be having second thoughts about rejoining their old loyalty. Yet if it gains even 4 percent in the British general election, it will probably disable the Tories and keep victory from their grasp for several elections to come. Britain would then have a divided Right, along similar lines to those countries listed above.

That is not, of course, a permanent condition. Several astute political leaders have overcome such divisions and shaped a broad-based conservative church that has gone on to win elections. In recent years, Gianfranco Fini has transformed the National Alliance in Italy from a neo-fascist clique into a broad social-conservative party and a member of the governing coalition. Aznar in Spain made the Popular party, which had been held back by its Franco-ist connections, into a respectable (and highly successful) party of government. In Hungary Viktor Orban consolidated a conservative coalition around his own Fidesz party and, having already had one successful period in government, is poised to regain power in the next election. And to our north, Stephen Harper of the Canadian Alliance forged a merger with the Progressive Conservatives to form the Conservative party that may well emerge from the June 28 election as the largest party. All four leaders achieved this by, among other means, winning back those patriotic and nationalist voters other conservatives had disdained.

It is better to avoid divisions, however, than to solve them afterward. In Britain the Tories must now set out to persuade their discontented members before the next election that they are the only real and effective independence party for Britain. Given that the Tories are firmly opposed to the euro and the proposed constitution on grounds of national sovereignty--and since they were the largest party even in the Euro-elections--that claim is a fair one. But if it is to be heard, it will have to be presented boldly and perhaps at some cost in party unity at Westminster. As for the U.S., the Republicans have ignored the same patriotic voters in recent years. They were won back by President Bush's bold leadership after September 11, which partly explains the GOP surge in November 2002. But no effort was made to consolidate that passing mood into a permanent political commitment. And such voters have been deeply angered since then by the president's proposed immigration reforms that amount to an open door with a welcome mat outside it.

If Republicans think that they are immune to voter rebellions and third-party challenges on such issues--remember, that is exactly what the Tories thought until June 13.