UKIP not ready for an election
- Posted by Matt Sandy
- 05 October 2007
Matt Sandy reports from the UKIP conference where he finds a party unready for electoral battle
You can tell a UKIP member (that's UK Independence Party) from 20 paces, the un-reconstituted Right marching towards their encampment in this un-reconstituted corner of Docklands for their annual conference.
With their shiny white hair and rolled up copies of the Daily Telegraph; with their tweed suits and self-righteously upright posture. Four rosetted pensioners edge out of Limehouse station in a strict formation. The two couples ignore the handmade sign pointing right towards the ‘UKIP Conference’ and head left. So far, so predictable.
The PR lady ushers me into the hall. “A lot of old men!” she says. “But they’re alright - just don’t tell them you’re from the BBC, they have a thing about that.” The 800-odd delegates are almost universally white and overwhelmingly over 60. I spot one Asian gentleman and three black men. Two of them are servicing the toilets, however.
But UKIP has heard all of this before. To pack hunt their particularities from the security of the mainstream, as is so often done, seems weak and cowardly when you are sitting amongst them. For in this age of spin, spin about spin, and spin about substance, what actually strikes you most here is the sincerity of the activists. Perhaps Gordon Brown would admire their “conviction”.
And they are angry. Angry about the “tyrannical nightmare” of the EU, to which it seems almost every evil in the world can be traced. And apocalyptic about the “Westminster hen-coup” to whom they attribute not only continued EU membership, but also the silencing of debate on the subject.
Sure, these people were Thatcher’s cheerleaders and it is hard to sympathise now their nationalistic stance has fallen on hard times. But on the EU and immigration, it is hard to dispute that they have a point about the denial of debate, even if their fervour is bombastic and their solutions extreme. Its other policies are simply Old Tory – a complete freeze on immigration, doubling the number of prisons, the reintroduction of corporeal punishment and so on.
But there’s something about UKIP which you simply can’t take too seriously. Following their surprise success in the 2004 European Elections, their support has declined and leader Nigel Farage admits that it has been “a tough year” and says his party is not in a state to fight a snap general election. The party has faced a “debilitating” investigation by the Electoral Commission and is rumoured to be in dire financial stakes. Certainly it seems that way, with speaking after speaker appealing for delegates to offer the party financial support to an, at best, lukewarm response.
And given the sheer age of the delegates, it seems hard to see too much of a future. As they squeeze into a cramped bathroom during a break in the proceedings, one man hits his head whilst entering a low toilet cubicle. An old, grey man tuts knowingly. “That’s modernisation,” he tells anyone who’ll listen. “There’s no need for that to be there. That’s modernisation, that is.”
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