The flexible Mr Farage
UKIP can bend towards Labour and Tory voters simultaneously. Eventually, though, it will stretch too far
LIKE many in Heywood and Middleton, two former mill towns outside Manchester, John Bickley is fed up with the Labour Party. It was formed to take on the upper classes but has now joined them, complains this son of a Labour trade unionist as he denounces “Labour’s evil bankers” at Goldman Sachs. Despite appearances, however, he is no socialist. He is the local parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a self-described libertarian outfit on the right of British politics.
For years UKIP’s calls for lower immigration, less regulation and withdrawal from the meddlesome European Union have challenged the governing Conservatives. The party gained 3% of votes in the 2010 general election, but the latest YouGov poll puts it at 15% (with the support of one in five former Conservative voters). Two right-wing Tory MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, defected to the party in the past few weeks. At the Conservative Party conference, which took place in Birmingham between September 28th and October 1st, journalists pursued other outspoken MPs through bars and meeting rooms, demanding to know whether they would follow.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "The flexible Mr Farage"
From the October 4th 2014 edition
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