UKIP is up in arms about the new working peers (or at least it’s pretending to be). The Greens get a peer and the Lib Dems get many peers; but UKIP gets none, despite its healthy polling.
There are very good reasons for this. The Greens and the Lib Dems are powers in certain parts of the land, while UKIP only has what Nigel Farage recently described as ‘clusters’ of councillors here and there. In other words, the Lib Dems and Greens wield some legislative power; UKIP doesn’t. The upper house ought to reflect that.
But, these facts suit UKIP. The party’s shtick is that it is an insurgency of outsiders and the disenfranchised against ‘The Establishment’. Guido Fawkes quotes a UKIP spokesman saying this snappy phrase:
“This is the establishment rewarding the establishment for being the establishment.”
— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) August 1, 2013
There’s too much relish in those words to take the complaint at all seriously. You can picture the spokesman’s smile as he said it, scarcely able to believe his luck. A few hours of media coverage is vital sustenance at this stage of UKIP’s development.
Tags: greens, House of Lords, Liberal Democrats, Nigel Farage, UKIP