Britain’s Pauline Hanson moment

 

In a by-election last week in the run-down, seaside constituency of Clacton, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won its first-ever seat in the UK Parliament.  The town's Conservative MP switched parties, resigned his seat, then fought and won the ensuing by-election under his new colours, gaining a stupendous 60% of the vote.  Perhaps even more remarkable, in a by-election held on the same day in the northern seat of Haywood & Middleton, triggered by the death of the sitting MP, UKIP came within a whisker of winning what had been a safe Labour seat.
 
This was no flash in the pan.  In May, UKIP won 24 of the UK's 73 seats in the European Parliament.  And about 1 in 6 voters say they intend to support the party at next year's general election – enough, say the pundits, to take a dozen or more seats (Conservative and Labour) under Britain's First-Past-The-Post electoral system.  UKIP itself believes it could win as many as 25 seats next year, ousting the Liberal Democrats as the third-largest party at Westminster, and possibly holding the balance of power in a hung parliament.
 
Founded by an London School of Economics academic in 1993 as a "democratic, libertarian party", UKIP's core objective has always been British withdrawal from the EU, but this has traditionally been linked to a raft of policies likely to appeal to classical liberals.  Its 2010 general election manifesto, for example, emphasised tax cuts and limited government.  Rather like the CIS's 'Target 30' campaign, it demanded a return to 1997 levels of state spending with a flat rate income tax of 31% and abolition of inheritance tax.  Free trade deals would replace Britain's existing EU treaty obligations.
 
Other policies also reflected key libertarian ideas.  All parents would be offered education vouchers to be redeemed in state, independent, or faith schools, and 'health credit vouchers' would allow patients to opt out of the National Health Service in favour of private treatment if they so wished.  There would be a single, flat-rate welfare benefit, limited to people who have lived in the country for at least five years, and public sector pensions would be frozen to bring them back into line with the private sector.  The Climate Change Act would be repealed, voters would have the right to call referenda and recall MPs, an Australian-style points system would be introduced for awarding work visas, and there would be an increase in prison places as part of a tightening of law-and-order.
 
So is Britain approaching next year's election with a classical liberal party in serious contention to take a significant number of seats and possibly help form a coalition government?  Unfortunately not, for UKIP leader Nigel Farage has now disowned the entire 2010 party manifesto.  While withdrawal from the EU remains central to the party's program, the one policy which is now being pushed to the exclusion of almost everything else – and which is cited by most voters as their sole reason for supporting UKIP – is an immigration clamp-down.
 
UKIP has morphed from a libertarian party attracting very little support (just 3% of the votes in 2010) into a populist, nationalist party with the potential to attract very substantial support.  Gone are the radical ideas about health vouchers – at the next election, UKIP will feed the NHS sacred cow as generously as all the other parties.  The flat tax and swingeing spending cuts seem unlikely to survive either.  Instead, Farage seems set to offer millions of disaffected, marginalised, and alienated voters protection against foreign workers competing for their jobs, plus bucket-loads of government patronage to cosset and comfort them.
 
Support for classical liberal ideas remains depressingly small in Britain.  It is not Hayek the country is starting to embrace with its flirtation with UKIP – it is Hansonism.

 

Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.