UKIP turns serious

POOR Hairy Knorm. There were few takers for the bananas the veteran Loony Party candidate was handing out in Rochester on November 20th. The fun-seekers had gathered elsewhere, outside the office of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), where hundreds of “Kippers” were celebrating Mark Reckless’s anticipated, and duly delivered, victory with an all-day knees-up.

With cheery salutations—“Eh up, we’re the Midlands lot!”—they hailed one another as old friends. A man wearing a sandwich board marched by—along the pretty high street where Charles Dickens once strolled—bearing the legend “The end is Nige!” No question, UKIP and its bibulous leader, Nigel Farage, are where the fun is now in British politics. Yet the party’s winning campaign for the Rochester and Strood by-election, which gave it a second elected MP, was also unprecedentedly serious.

Making use of its eager manpower, and Mr Reckless’s notoriety as the standing—formerly Conservative—MP, the party canvassed hard. This allowed it, for only the second time, to build a database of its supporters. Street by street, it could thereby select the relevant local issue to push, including hostility to a proposed local airport in affluent places and worries about the NHS in poorer ones, as well as the blunderbuss national issues—antipathy to the European Union and immigration—that it owns.

As a blueprint for electoral success, this professionalisation has got UKIP strategists even more cock-a-hoop than the uncharismatic Mr Reckless’s victory. In Rochester, they claim, UKIP emerged as a serious political party, with now a decent chance of retaining most of its current double-digit support at next year’s general election. That could win it a dozen or more seats and, in a fractured field, influence on whatever coalition administration emerges. So this is a good moment to ask what, apart from quitting the European Union and slashing immigration, it wants.

It has been giving serious thought to that, too. Ahead of the 2005 general election, Mr Farage, then merely an MEP, confessed to an adviser that he didn’t know if UKIP had an economic policy. In the run-up to the last general election, his predecessor, Lord Pearson, admitted that he could not recall the details of his party’s 15-page manifesto. To make it easier for Mr Farage, UKIP is considering publishing a briefer, New Labour-style pledge card. But it has already published a useful policy paper, “Policies for People”, reflecting a range of views—and an ideological gulf.

Unusually among European right-wing populists, most of UKIP’s founders, including Mr Farage, are socially and economically liberal. In its constitution the party describes itself as “democratic” and “libertarian”, and some of its policies reflect that. It promises to give more tax-raising powers to the devolved Scottish and Welsh governments. It supports the coalition government’s free schools, which improve accountability and parent choice. This is good liberal stuff—but other of the party’s proposals are illiberal or Quixotic.

UKIP loves the Green Belt, which stifles house-building, hates plain packaging on cigarettes, which saves lives, and abhors the export of live animals. It would charge immigrants to use the NHS for five years and use some of the savings for free hospital car parking. It hates charging anyone for road use—except foreigners, whom it would fleece. Despite its former liberal instincts, UKIP seems to dislike immigrants more all the time—as suggested, during the Rochester campaign, when Mr Reckless aired a plan, subsequently aborted, to repatriate a yet-to-be-determined number of them. It also now dislikes things, such as high-speed rail lines and business-like reform to the NHS, that it recently supported.

The disjuncture partly reflects its growth. Less than a decade ago UKIP was a Eurosceptic pressure group run by disenchanted Thatcherites, such as Mr Farage, and EU-obsessed academics. Now it is hoovering up support from disgruntled elderly and blue-collar voters. Yet the fact that it is also hoovering up their prejudices reflects how populist, not serious, the party is.

That deserves a slight qualification. Enthusing voters sick-to-the-teeth of Westminster politics is UKIP’s most attractive quality. Standing outside the party’s Rochester office, it was impossible not to be exhilarated by the general air of fun and mucking-in. By contrast, the moribund Tory and Labour Party offices were hard to find. Some Kippers claim that, in its blundering first stabs at policymaking, the party is simply listening to its new members too well. Yet there is no sense that, when it matures, it will reassert liberal principles—as Douglas Carswell, the party’s first elected MP, clearly wants. The truth is Mr Farage is more opportunist (he would say pragmatic) than liberal. He probably still doesn’t much care what UKIP’s economic policy is, so long as it hastens Britain’s departure from the EU. The result is that libertarian UKIP is likely to end up much like its nativist, authoritarian European cousins.

Liberal, my foot

This matters because its hot streak will probably continue. The anti-politics mood is rising, and its rivals’ countermeasures have been contemptible. Thus David Cameron’s effort to outgun UKIP on immigration, including in a speech anticipated shortly, as The Economist went to press. The Tory leader planned to curb immigrant benefits, which may be a good idea, but does not come close to matching UKIP’s prescriptions. And if Mr Cameron, to his shame, ever did, the populists would move further to the extreme. By comparison, Ed Miliband’s decision to sack a Labour frontbencher who tweeted a picture of a Strood house festooned with the St George’s cross flags was merely hapless. The Labour Party leader accused her of sneering at the patriotic working-class. He hoped to suggest he was its champion; he sounded patronising and inept.

Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband should treat UKIP as the normal party it claims to be and rip to shreds the inconsistencies and illiberalities in its policies. There are plenty to choose from.