UKIP: having a kip - or in a coma?
Tuesday 2 July 2013
Not I, but Witterings from Witney notes the curious absence of UKIP from the debate on leaving the EU, even more curious now that the debate has been kick-started by a House of Commons Research Paper.
Explore Google News today and you will find an item on Mr Farage refusing to use Oyster Cards, and the anger of UKIP members about Channel 4 broadcasting Muslim prayers during Ramadan. You will also see several pieces, including this one on the observations of Nick Clegg about UKIP, with the not inaccurate view that UKIP and Mr Farage appeal to people who "want a better yesterday" who don't like what they see in the modern world.
Even if that is not entirely fair, there is a germ of truth in that claim, but only as much as there is truth in declaring that the Lib-Dems attract torfu-munching yogurt knitters, obsessed with proportional representation and European integration. Then, politics has never been fair.
Interestingly, the Clegg intervention gets a mention on UKIP chaotic website, which has Mr Farage tell us that, "the future lies with those who can reform fast and react to in a changing world". The European Union", he adds, "is an economic dinosaur surrounded by a world of mammals. It's (sic) time has past (sic)".
Here, we have evidence that UKIP does not aspire to the good old days when writers knew that the possessive "its" does not have an apostrophe, and could tell when "passed" rather "past" is needed.
Of far more substance, though. is the absence on the website of any mention of the House of Commons Research Paper – or indeed any reference to UKIP's views on how we should leave the EU.
In fact, UKIP simply isn't in the debate. And in the vacuum so created by its absence, the most recent offering comes from its economic advisor Tim Congdon, with his unaccommodating insistence that Article 50 is "irrelevant, and that discussions on it are "a waste of time".
Separately, we have Autonomous Mind note that, from the heady days of early June when UKIP had soared to 16 percent in the polls (YouGov), it had fallen back to ten percent – and is currently at 11 percent.
AM will have it that the UKIP bubble seems to be deflating. It is all well and good, he says, "for Nigel Farage to engage in vanity exercises in the media that pump up his personal profile – even if they make him look like a fool". But "it is doing nothing to educate people or advance UKIP's vision for a UK outside of the EU".
On this, the House of Commons Paper addresses the issue of whether UK citizens would benefit from leaving the EU, venturing that "this would depend on how the UK Government of the day filled the policy gaps left by withdrawal from the EU". In those policy gaps is where UKIP needs to be, yet it is strangely silent.
If AM is correct, the downturn in the polls is reflecting this lack of substance. "If you are not talking about the issues", he says, "people will drift off elsewhere". And that effect cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Very recently, we have seen strenuous attempts by the media to get a scare going on TB in meat. In December 1988, all it took was one media appearance by then Junior Health Minister, Edwina Currie, to get the egg scare going. Yet, despite banner, front-page headlines, the TB story has died within days – there simply is no substance to it.
Short term notoriety, and even fame, can be gained from a personality-hungry media. Anything is grist to the mill in an industry which lacks sense and discrimination in its choice of subject, and is only interested in filling space and creating advertising revenue. But, for a lasting effect, there must be something more.
In this, UKIP's self-exclusion from the "exit plan" debate is now creating a yawning chasm. But it refuses to remain unfilled, waiting for Mr Farage to make up his mind which way to jump. Not only do we have the House of Commons Paper endorsing the use of Article 50, we have a recent Foreign Affairs Committee Report doing likewise.
Article 50, it says, obliges the EU (defined as the remaining Member States) to negotiate with the departing state an agreement governing its withdrawal, "taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union". During the negotiation, it then adds, "the withdrawing Member State could continue to participate in EU business as normal on all other matters, but it would not participate in Council discussions or decisions on its own withdrawal".
And you can add to that some high-level endorsement. In the event of the majority of British voters deciding that the United Kingdom should leave the EU in a referendum the terms of the UK's trade with the EU would be resolved under the process set out in Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union, says Foreign Secretary William Hague to the Committee.
Yet even that much, many UKIP members have not conceded. Far too many remain locked into their mantra that Article 50 is a "trap" and refuse to accept it as the only logical procedure.
AM is pitiless in his analysis, arguing that Farage shows no sign of adjusting his behaviour or approach and UKIP will suffer for it. The reality, he says, is that showing blind loyalty to the captain of the ship may be a jolly decent thing to do, but it doesn't make any difference to the outcome if the ship is holed below the water line and sinking. Ultimately the journey for that vessel is over.
There are many who would wish to dispute this – and even more UKIP members determined to ignore it, favouring the "ostrich" mode. The fact is, though, that the debate on leaving the EU is going on without UKIP. The party is not so much sleeping as in a coma. Unless it awakens, ten percent in the polls may, by the time of the general election, seem like the good old days.
COMMENT THREAD
Posts
