The problem isn't Ukip, it is Europe.

 

Ukip in Gateshead last week. 'The long-term threat to any party is minimal. It is like other passing political phenomena … ' Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

The problem isn't Ukip, it is Europe

David Cameron has fallen into the same trap as John Major. Now the politics of citizen identity lurks everywhere

Simon Jenkins

The Guardian, Wednesday 30 April 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/ukip-europe-racism-david-cameron

“The point at this moment in time is not Farage; it is Europe. It is not Ukip, but Europe. It is not racism, but Europe. For a quarter of a century, calling any critic of the evolving architecture of the EU "anti-European" was not just inaccurate but stupid. It played into the hands of the rejectionists. The chickens are now coming home to roost.”

(…)

“Brussels oligarchs tend to decide what they want to do and leave consent and democratic accountability to national governments to sort out, the European parliament being a noncombatant. They regard nations as a hangover from some antique political dispensation. Like the pre-Reformation church, they make the rules and leave underlings to enforce them.”

Simon Jenkins

I cannot tell if this week's cross-party plan to brand Ukip as racist emanates from the spin doctors of Nigel Farage's party or from some madcap ivory tower in Westminster. On all previous evidence, it will do Ukip no harm and, by keeping the party that wants Britain out of Europe in the headlines, will probably do it some good.

Like project fear, which was intended to scare Scottish voters into saying no to independence, but which did the opposite, it shows how bad some politicians are at politics. As the former Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith said yesterday, "There are many potential and actual Labour voters who feel all the frustration and insecurities expressed by Ukip. Telling them they are wrong and, worse, closet racists, is unlikely to win their support." David Cameron learned that lesson when he called Ukip members "loonies and fruitcakes", and then watched their popularity surge.

Four polls at the weekend on next month's European election show Farage's Ukip in the lead or running neck and neck with Labour. The avalanche of scrutiny, abuse and ridicule that rival parties and the media have dumped on Ukip has not dented its appeal. It has, rather, driven home its message that Britain's political establishment has lost touch with the electorate and is running scared. As Lord Tebbit remarked: "If I suddenly discovered my customers were walking past my shop and going to a competitor, I would not stand in the street cursing them."

The long-term threat from Ukip to any party is minimal. It is like other passing political phenomena, such as Powellism in the 1960s or the social democrats in the 1980s, a litmus test of the parliamentary responsiveness to public opinion. Farage has capitalised on the woodenness of current party leadership to express plausibly what many think about the state of their nation. He will not last (unless perhaps he runs for the Tory leadership), and nor will his party. It is a flash in the pan.

The point at this moment in time is not Farage; it is Europe. It is not Ukip, but Europe. It is not racism, but Europe. For a quarter of a century, calling any critic of the evolving architecture of the EU "anti-European" was not just inaccurate but stupid. It played into the hands of the rejectionists. The chickens are now coming home to roost.

Polls everywhere indicate rising disillusion with European union. One survey recently for Open Europe , an independent thinktank, was unequivocal. Majorities of 73% in Britain and 58% in Germany want their parliaments free to block new EU laws. A mere 8% of Britons and 21% of Germans support the legal sovereignty of the European parliament. A BBC poll this month showed British support for our continued membership down to little more than a third. While opinion is evenly divided on actual withdrawal, such uncertainty is hardly a sound basis for a referendum in the next parliament. Consent to the union is collapsing.

Another poll calculated that as many as one third of the seats in the new parliament could be taken by sceptical or rejectionist parties. These groups may agree on little else, and thus fail to cohere within the parliament. Not all want withdrawal. Most seek an end to the euro straitjacket and a return to flexible currencies. Some are fighting for more subsidies, others for more protectionism. But all reflect one thing: a concern for the nature and status of Europe's nation states. It is not necessarily EU policy that they reject, only the fact that is the EU's.

As Jon Henley argued in yesterday's Guardian survey, dissident groups are rampant across Europe, frightening conventional parties across the political spectrum. All seek to repatriate the ideals of true self-government, of democratic citizenship, with implications for their identity and borders. They want once more to determine what and whom they regard as their political culture. Call this chauvinist, nationalist, patriotic or racist, but it is the reality of what they want. Henley concludes: "If Brussels does not listen, the rebels believe there will eventually be an explosion violent enough to blow the whole European construct to pieces."

In Britain, Ukip has succeeded in gathering up the insecurity, pessimism and unease of voters still emerging from many years of recession and consequent hardship, and thrown them in the face of conventional politics. However naively, Farage has declared the EU and its open borders to be the scapegoat for the nation's ills. It is not racism he has made to seem respectable, merely EU withdrawal.

In doing so, he has manoeuvred Cameron into precisely the trap that undermined his forebear, Sir John Major, in the mid-90s. He swore his leadership would not be poisoned by Europe, and did so by promising a referendum. Had he kept that promise, and probably won a swift post-election poll, the poison might have drained away. Instead, he broke that promise.

Brussels oligarchs tend to decide what they want to do and leave consent and democratic accountability to national governments to sort out, the European parliament being a noncombatant. They regard nations as a hangover from some antique political dispensation. Like the pre-Reformation church, they make the rules and leave underlings to enforce them.

Not for the first time in history, a wind of dissent is sweeping Europe from north to south. No one, in Brussels or in national capitals, can sensibly ignore it, however marginal or absurd may seem the political movements that have made it their cause. Repatriating sovereignty is the name of the game – repatriation or the path to a possibly disastrous European dissolution. Cameron's diplomats may now to be running around Europe seeking support for renegotiation, but it is a bit late.

If any cause was thought dead and is now alive, it is the politics of citizen identity. It may take a regional, provincial or local form, and apply to matters of migration, devolution, employment, currency or border control. It is consuming Scotland. It is tearing apart Ukraine; it lurks beneath the surface in Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Baltics, the Balkans, everywhere.

Inept politicians are as much to blame as archaic, over-centralist constitutions. A patrician contempt for the self-image of subject peoples is the occupational disease of privileged rulers throughout history – and a gift to demagogues and upstarts. But dismissing them all as racists plays into their hands. It is the desperate cry of a political class on the run.