Farage attacks backfire on Labour and Tories. England's identity crisis: what does it mean to be English?

Farage attacks backfire on Labour and Tories

Attacks have confirmed Ukip leader as anti-establishment candidate, according to telephone polling and focus groups

Patrick Wintour, Rowena Mason and Nicholas Watt

The Guardian, Wednesday 21 May 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/may/20/labour-tory-poll-ratings-farage-attacks

Labour and Conservative polling is showing that attacks claiming Nigel Farage is a racist have backfired since voters do not regard him as such and see the assaults as a sign members of the political establishment are ganging up to undermine him.

The apparent backlash is coming to both parties from telephone polling and focus groups, which say that the attacks have raised Farage's profile and confirmed him as the anti-establishment candidate. It does not tally with published opinion polls that show the Ukip lead in the European elections narrowing slightly.

One source said: "Calling people names does not work. It confirms the old politics."

The findings on the penultimate day of campaigning before Thursday's European and local elections are especially acute for the Labour party, which has been locked in an internal battle about how aggressively to attack Farage. Ed Miliband has studiously not called him a racist and tried instead to offer policy solutions to the issues driving the Ukip vote. Other strategists within the party are arguing that only a more direct attack will bear fruit with traditional Labour voters.

The row over whether Ukip is racist spilled into the streets on Tuesday when Farage failed to attend his own mini-street carnival in Croydon, south London, after it descended into bitter rows and one of his local candidates, Winston McKenzie, described the area as an unsafe "dump".

The event was organised after a series of controversies over allegedly racist comments made by Ukip candidates and Farage's suggestion that people might not want to live on a street with Romanians.

Farage later insisted the organisers of the event had wanted him to go but he "didn't have time" and was busy.

At a rally later in Eastleigh, Hampshire, Farage quoted Gandhi as he dismissed criticism of his party by the political establishment and media. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you … then you win," he said, predicting that Ukip would definitely come first in the European elections.

Miliband had his own personal nightmare when he appeared on BBC Wiltshire and tried to bluff his way out of the fact that he did not know the name of the Labour leader on the local Swindon council, one of Labour's key target councils.

He also looked uncomfortable when he appeared on morning TV and was asked how much he spent on groceries in a week.

The chancellor, George Osborne, is planning to mount an eve-of-poll attack on Labour and Ukip urging the country to "reject the forces of pessimism on the left and the populist right".

In a speech to the CBI on Wednesday he will say: "Political parties on the left and the populist right have this in common: they want to pull up the drawbridge and shut Britain off from the world.

"They want to set prices, regulate incomes, impose rent controls, wage war on big business, demonise wealth creation, renationalise industries – and pretend that they can re-establish control over all aspects of the economy. Whether from the left or the populist right, we now see a deeply pessimistic, depressing, anti-business agenda.

"It takes advantage of the understandable anxieties of a population unsettled by the pace of globalisation, and peddles a myth that Britain can stop the world and get off."

Farage's Ukip Croydon event started to go wrong when two members of the steel band hired to provide a carnival atmosphere said they were uncomfortable and had no idea they would be playing for Ukip.

Marlon Hibbert, 22, whose parents are Jamaican, said he thought Ukip was racist and he was upset about the booking. "They are something I don't like the idea of," he said. "My parents came over here to work. Our country is for everybody with opportunities for everyone."

Fellow musician, 16-year-old Kishan Shorter agreed, saying he was not happy with Ukip's views.

As the band played for a short while, one of the party's most prominent black activists, Winston McKenzie, a Croydon council candidate, used a loud-hailer to say he was proud to be a supporter.

But he was interrupted by two protesters, who claimed to be from Romania and declined to give their names, accusing Ukip of being a Nazi party and holding a banner saying "Nigel Farage Racist Scum".

Farage and Ukip were defended by several candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds, including Rathy Alagaratnam, who is standing in Merton. The former Labour activist, who tried to take her former party to a tribunal for racial discrimination, said accusations of racism against Ukip were "an excuse because people do not want to debate the European question".

Marjorie King, a black Ukip candidate in north Croydon, said she did not think Farage was racist and had not seen his comments about Romanians. She said she was attracted to Ukip because it was the only party "standing up for Christianity".

Asked whether Farage was frightened of attending, McKenzie, standing in Croydon North, explained : "If he hasn't turned up he is a very sensible man. Croydon, which was once the place to be, the place to shop, has now become sadly a dump … How can you ask an international leader to turn up somewhere where he feels unsafe?"

Labour will be reviewing how it is briefing Miliband after he stumbled on radio and television.

He ran into trouble when he was asked on BBC Wiltshire for his views of Jim Grant by the presenter Ben Prater, who stopped short of mentioning that he is the leader of the Labour group on Swindon borough council.

"You will enlighten me I'm sure," Miliband said when he was asked by Prater whether he knew who Grant is.

Miliband then wrongly described Grant as the leader of the Tory-led council. "Well he is doing a good job as leader of the council – Jim is. And I think that is the case."

When Prater pointed out that Grant is not leader of the council, Miliband said: "Well, I think he is doing a good job for Labour on the council. He is doing a good job for Labour on the council."

Miliband's awkward radio interview came after he said he was well placed to focus on the cost of living crisis in Britain even though he appeared to underestimate his family's weekly grocery bill.

The Labour leader, who said it was right to place the issue at the front of his general election campaign even though he is "relatively comfortably off", told ITV's Good Morning Britain that his family spent at least £70 to £80 a week – and probably more – on groceries.

When he was told that the average weekly bill for a family of four was more than £100, he said: "Right, well it [the grocery bill] is more than £100."

Multicultural Britain: Englishness can be seen as insular and xenophobic. Photograph: Janine Wiedel Photolibrary/Alamy

England's identity crisis: what does it mean to be English?

The pending Euro and Scottish elections are raising tumultuous debates about English identity and governance. So what do these uncertain times mean for the country's future?

John Harris

The Guardian, Tuesday 20 May 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/20/england-identity-crisis-english-euro-scottish-elections-ukip-patriotism

Let's face it: we are living through the most important phase of British politics – indeed, British society – since Margaret Thatcher's first government. Everything seems uncertain: the result of the next election, the long-term fate of all three main parties, the reputation of such British institutions as the BBC, the police, and the NHS – and the future of the United Kingdom itself.

The relentless modern news media has a tendency to make even the most convulsive events look like just another item on the "breaking news" ticker. But the importance of the debate about Scottish independence, which is reverberating throughout the whole of the UK, is clearly massive. Recent polls have put the pro-independence side only a few points behind the "no" camp.

In early May, a source close to David Cameron served notice that if the pro-independence side won, he would not resign as prime minister, which spoke volumes about where we have somehow arrived: facing a once-unthinkable scenario, senior politicians are matter-of-factly considering their options.

Whatever happens in the September referendum will have profound consequences. All three main UK parties are now of the opinion that if it sticks with the union, Scotland should be given more powers over its affairs, and as and when that happens – let alone if Scotland decides to split away – the imbalanced nature of the UK's governing arrangements will be revealed as never before. The long-ticking question is about to explode: if it's so important for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland people to have increased control over their affairs, what about people in England?

Political anoraks refer back to the so-called West Lothian question, named in honour of the former Labour MP Tam Dalyell, who first raised the point in a debate about devolution in 1977. Back then, his point remained hypothetical, but it sat under British politics like a time bomb: "For how long will English constituencies and English honourable members tolerate … at least 119 honourable members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?" Thirty-seven years on, we are getting used to people talking about "English votes for English laws", an English parliament, and giving English voters an increased say via a new kind of regional government.

The last of those ideas was floated by the previous government, only for a plan for an elected regional assembly in the north-east to be resoundingly defeated in 2004, whereupon everything went quiet. Now, a new Yorkshire First party has just been launched, arguing that "Yorkshire has a larger population than Scotland and an economy twice the size of Wales, but … the powers of neither."

In the north east, despite what happened a decade ago, something similar is said to be on its way. The same restive mood was highlighted last month, when the EU formally granted the people of Cornwall "national minority" status, and there was renewed talk about giving that county – the poorest in the UK – much more control over the spending of European regeneration money.

There are other signs of a new, uncertain era. A revival of passions about England has been obvious in things that have looked unremarkable but are freighted with political meaning: the splurge of documentaries about national history and geography, the revival of interest in English folk, increasing celebration of St George's Day. Ideas about what this might mean for England's future identity vary wildly. One long-standing school of thought goes back to The Break-Up Of Britain, a prescient book written by Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn in 1977. In this view of things, Britain and the UK are concepts loaded down with the stuff of empire and colonialism, which all four countries in the UK should shrug off. As Nairn put it, the English perhaps need to "reinvent an identity … better than the battered, cliche-ridden hulk which the retreating tide of imperialism has left them". Recently, a crisply phrased version of this view was dispensed by Scottish author Irvine Welsh: "England had a mission to be an inclusive multicultural nation and this old-fashioned imperialist UK has stopped it from fulfilling its national destiny." (Scots often seem to be the most vociferous mouthpieces of this theory – viewed from a certain perspective, they may be open to the charge that they are simply trying to make themselves feel better about leaving the rest of us in the lurch).

By contrast, other people see a "British" identity encompassing a huge range of people, as against an Englishness that is too often crabby and xenophobic. In the census of 2011 – the first to ask people to tick boxes for their national identity (or identities) – 60% of people in England described themselves as English only, but there were fascinating variations swirling around that number. Perhaps most interestingly, in England, 38% of people from an ethnic minority said they were exclusively British, as against only 14% of white people, and the ethnic groups in England most likely to say they were British were Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and people who trace their background to India. It's not difficult to interpret those differences: for many people, Britain is an inclusive, outward-looking place, but a solitary England would represent something much more problematic.

In this reading, the first word in "English Defence League" has a sharp significance. So does the existence of the English Democrats, a rather nasty pro-English political party who advocate an English parliament and the honouring of St George's Day with a public holiday, and wage war on "political correctness" and "mass immigration" – they're a kind of Poundland Ukip, said to have been infiltrated by former members of the BNP.

And then there is Ukip itself: the conduit for a specifically English political revolt, and full of people who highlight the notion of England as an angry, introverted place. In this England, there is seething resentment about differences in public spending north of the border (an annual £1,300 per head greater than in England, according to Alex Salmond), the press whips up hysteria about halal meat, and millions of us want out of Europe, as quickly as possible. If Nigel Farage – who, when he was last asked, supported the case for an English parliament – and his people top the poll in this week's European elections, that view of England will only be given more credence, which will perhaps push Scotland even closer to breaking point.

There is now a small library of books that examine all this, among the most impressive of which is The Politics Of English Nationhood, written by London-based academic Michael Kenny.

"That image of an insular, sour, grievance-fuelled Englishness – that dominates a lot of liberal worries about perceptions of Englishness," he says. "But I'm sceptical about whether that's the dominant strand of English identity. I certainly think it's become more prominent, and Ukip have emerged to express it. But there's also a quieter kind of everyday small 'c' conservatism, which has attached itself to a sceptical view of the unions to which England belongs, and a growing disaffection with politics and politicians. It's complicated: that isn't necessarily the same thing as the mood that Ukip speaks to.

"And there's something else going on as well: a number of different attempts to put together a more liberal, multicultural face. That's the weakest one, but it's there. All those faces are at play, but there hasn't been any political engagement with them."

He warns: "The debate for people who support the union is whether it's becoming more damaging to cross your fingers and hope that Englishness will go away, or think about engaging with it constructively. But whatever happens in Scotland in September, all this will come on to the agenda."

Voices outside the political right – whether you call them "progressive", "liberal", "on the left" or whatever else – have long had difficulty dealing with questions about England. They have largely welcomed the rise of new, inclusive kinds of national identity in Scotland and Wales, but for some reason, the prospect of anything comparable happening in the UK's biggest country is still viewed with suspicion. "We see patriotism as essentially pathological," a senior Labour figure tells me. "It's something to do with the mob. And we're scared by it."

Among people grouped in and around Labour, there is also a deep-seated anxiety about whether or not England is a conservative country, with both a small and a large "c". The electoral evidence is ambiguous: the Tories won more English votes than Labour at the last two general elections, though Labour optimists are fond of pointing out that of the 18 general elections since 1945, only three – in 1964, Februaray 1974 (there were two contests that year) and 2010, when we'd have ended up with a majority Tory government – would have produced different results in Scotland's absence. Unfortunately, though, that is not nearly the conclusive point it's sometimes cracked up to be: it's complicated by the fact that pre-Thatcher Scotland returned sizeable numbers of Tories, and the question of how Labour would do without votes and MPs from Wales.

Whatever, even if the creation of an English parliament remains unlikely, the likelihood is that we will soon be talking about new, England-focused arrangements within the UK parliament (promised by the Tories in their last manifesto, and which might leave any Labour government with only a slender grip on day-to-day business), or the need to disperse power around the English regions. There will also be an inevitable discussion about values, history and culture. Are people on the liberal left prepared to let England be defined as the country of kings and queens, Victorian values, the Anglican church, Margaret Thatcher, Downton Abbey and Nigel Farage? Or might they finally talk about the place that produced the Diggers and Ranters, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, nonconformist Christianity, Clement Attlee, Two Tone – and great cities that are now the absolute embodiment of everything the Farage-ists take against?

Billy Bragg has been discussing questions about England for well over a decade, in both his writing and songs. In 2002, he released England, Half English, an album that stole its title from George Orwell, and was adorned with a St George's flag. Its title track found him tentatively exploring what his home country was, and is: "My mother was half English and I'm half English too/I'm a great big bundle of culture tied up in the red white and blue/I'm a fine example of your Essex man/And I'm well familiar with the Hindustan/'Cos my neighbours are half-English, and I'm half-English too."

"We've got no reason to hide behind the Union Jack," he says. "If that period has passed, and the Scots go, and ultimately, the Welsh decide to go too, we need a civic renewal in England. And I've got a lot of faith in English people being able to do that."