"His policies fill me with dread. But this is what you get when a smug metropolitan elite treat the people with contempt."

His policies fill me with dread. But this is what you get when a smug metropolitan elite treat the people with contempt, writes DOMINIC SANDBROOK

By DOMINIC SANDBROOK

PUBLISHED: 00:12 GMT, 24 May 2014 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2637925/His-policies-dread-But-smug-metropolitan-elite-treat-people-contempt-writes-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK.html

Nobody can say it hasn’t been coming.

Yet as the local election results filtered through yesterday morning, there was a palpable sense of shock inside Britain’s political establishment, which had spent weeks writing off Nigel Farage and his motley band of grassroots insurgents.

‘The Ukip fox,’ Mr Farage said delightedly yesterday, ‘is in the Westminster hen house.’

That is putting it mildly — not least since the results in the European elections, which will not be counted until tomorrow, are expected to be even better for Ukip.

To get a sense of how far Mr Farage’s party has come, consider this. In the 2010 General Election, Ukip won just 3 per cent of the vote.

It does not have a single MP, its last election manifesto was wildly incoherent and, with the exception of the ebullient Mr Farage, its representatives are utterly obscure.

Yet for the second consecutive year, Ukip has won around a fifth of the national vote.

Defying all the predictions, it has gained more than 100 council seats. In Essex, it denied the Tories victory in Basildon, Castle Point and Southend.

And in Rotherham, supposedly a working-class Labour bastion, its candidates averaged a whopping 47 per cent of the vote.

By any standards this represents a political earthquake.

Since the 1930s, British politics has essentially been a two-and-a-half-party system, with the Tories and Labour monopolising the dance floor and the Lib Dems, in their various forms, lurking half-heartedly on the fringes.

What is now clear is that those days are finished. Neither David Cameron nor Ed Miliband has the slightest hope of winning as much as 40 per cent of the vote at the next General Election.

And given Ukip’s performance over the past few years, it would be a brave man who would bet against them picking up at least 10 per cent of the vote — and maybe more — in May 2015.

The really extraordinary thing is that this has been the achievement of one man.

Who would have believed that the outspoken Nigel Farage, a privately-educated former City trader who has never won a Westminster seat, would inspire such enthusiasm among ordinary voters from the housing estates of Essex to the post-industrial towns of South Yorkshire?

‘When he walked on to the stage in Portsmouth,’ wrote one reporter in last week’s Spectator magazine, ‘the crowd rose for him with a fervour I’ve never witnessed at a mainstream party conference.’

There is, of course, an obvious explanation. What Mr Farage has tapped into is a widespread national discontent that cannot merely be dismissed — as some metropolitan commentators have tried to do — as racism or xenophobia.

Ukip was founded in 1993 as an obscure anti-federalist pressure group. For years it struggled to gain attention.

Mr Farage’s tactical genius was to turn it into a populist anti-Establishment party, articulating deep-seated public anxieties about the two great taboos of modern political debate: Europe and immigration.

In many corners of the media, as well as in Westminster itself, both of these issues are regarded as toxic. Yet by ignoring them, the politicians have simply handed them to Mr Farage.

In the few days before Thursday’s elections, most of the coverage hinged on immigration.

When an exhausted Mr Farage said he would not want Romanians to move in next door to him, many commentators declared that he had committed an unforgivable gaffe which would poison his national reputation and destroy his support overnight.

I was reminded, however, of an interview Margaret Thatcher gave during a by-election campaign in Ilford in 1978, when she remarked that people were frightened of being ‘swamped’ by immigrants.

Like Mr Farage, she was seen as having committed a dreadful error. However, the supposed gaffe struck a chord, and the Tories promptly romped to victory.

The truth is that the immigration issue has been simmering unhealthily away for at least 40 years. As early as the late-1960s, polls showed that among young and old alike, mass immigration was by far the most unpopular development of the decade.

Among Britain’s politicians, however, immigration has always been the ultimate taboo. When Enoch Powell spoke out in 1968, he was roundly condemned and thrown off the Tory front bench.

Yet, whatever you or I might think of Powell’s famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (a line he never actually used), a Gallup poll at the time found that 74 per cent of people agreed with him, while only 15 per cent disagreed.

Then as now, in other words, there was a wide gulf between what people thought at Westminster and what people thought in the rest of the country.

Writing a few days after the speech, the Guardian’s star columnist Peter Jenkins dismissed arguments that Powell and his admirers were merely racist.

What motivated them, Jenkins wrote, was the feeling that ‘the politicians are conspiring against the people, that the country is led by men who have no idea about what interests or frightens the ordinary people in the back streets of Wolverhampton’.

That sounds pretty familiar to me. Some of Mr Farage’s supporters may, indeed, be racially prejudiced, and certainly one or two of his councillors have some jaw-dropping medieval opinions. But I think there is much more to it than the prejudices of a minority.

For decades, surveys have shown that millions of ordinary people dislike the European Union and are alarmed by the influx of so many newcomers, especially in working-class towns struggling to cope with the decline of industry and the rise of unemployment.

Contrary to what the sneering metropolitan commentators like to think, the vast majority of these people are not racists. What worries them is the evaporation of jobs which are going overseas, the stagnation of real wages, the shortage of decent housing, the overcrowding of primary schools and the rising pressure on hospital wards and A&E departments.

Britain’s political and media classes, however, have shown themselves almost entirely uninterested — and for depressingly obvious reasons.

Most British politicians inhabit a gilded bubble. They are often born into comfortable households, go to private schools (or elite comprehensives) and then spend three years at Oxford or Cambridge before becoming political researchers, special advisers and MPs.

Well-heeled politicians such as David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, like their friends and allies in the liberal media, see only the benefits of European membership and the unfettered movement of labour. To them, immigration means cheaper au pairs, cleaners and builders.

Because they rarely see the world outside Westminster, except on flying visits to their constituencies, they have no sense of the anxiety in working-class communities and are quick to condemn anybody who violates their shared taboo.

One example tells a wider story. Last year, the former editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart, published a book (serialised in the Mail), arguing that immigration was undermining national solidarity and the welfare state, and should, therefore, be curtailed.

As the incarnation of liberal-minded intellectualism, Mr Goodhart was very obviously not a racist. Yet to many people in London’s political and literary elites, he had put himself beyond the pale.

Not only did his expected invitation to the Hay Literary Festival not materialise, but there were howls of protest when his book was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. This will surely strike a chord with many Ukip supporters, who, for the past few weeks, have been dismissed as a gaggle of lunatics, losers and would-be Nazis.

Perhaps I should say, by the way, that I am very far from being a Ukip supporter and almost certainly never will be.

The party’s manifesto seems to me largely fantastical, and the thought of its representatives running our nation’s schools and hospitals fills me with dread.

Yet I was shocked by the sanctimonious, patronising coverage in much of the London media. Indeed, reading some columnists, as well as listening to most of our current MPs, it was hard to miss the stench of social and cultural snobbery.

As the maverick Left-wing writer John Harris remarked yesterday, there was ‘a collective outbreak of sneering, which started to transcend the party itself and blur into a generalised mockery of anyone minded to support it’.

On Twitter, a BBC News channel editor, Jasmine Lawrence, declared that Ukip appealed only to ‘white, middle-class, middle-aged men with sexist/racist views’.

And others were little better. Almost incredibly, one Evening Standard columnist, after insisting that Ukip was a ‘racist party’, declared that it was ‘left to Londoners to speak for the nation’.

The truth, of course, is that Londoners spend rather too much time speaking for the nation. That is part of the problem.

Too often our self-regarding political classes forget that in reality (as opposed to their Westminster bubble), most of us do not live in London and are sick of having to endure the condescending jibes of those who do.

As Ukip’s Cheltenham branch chairman, Christina Simmonds, remarked yesterday: ‘They patronise us and try to make out we don’t know what we’re talking about just because they don’t agree with us. But what we’re saying is making sense to good, ordinary people.’

So where do we go from here?

It seems certain that tomorrow night’s European results will bring more good news for Mr Farage, and it seems highly implausible that his support will melt away, like the snows in spring, in time for next year’s General Election.

For Ed Miliband, the elections have been a wretched embarrassment. As the Labour MP John Mann rightly remarked, the ‘pointy-heads’ at the top of his party seem to have no idea of the pressures facing their working-class voters, while Mr Miliband’s student-union socialism has conspicuously failed to arouse public enthusiasm.

For David Cameron, though, the Ukip challenge seems even more urgent. Ever since becoming Tory leader in 2005, the PM has been determined to dismiss and patronise Ukip’s supporters, even calling them ‘loonies, fruitcakes and closet racists’.

Far from reaching out to them, Mr Cameron has effectively pretended that Ukip’s supporters do not exist.

That strategy has comprehensively failed; indeed, it is Mr Cameron’s condescending, lord-of-the-manor approach that has driven so many working-class and lower-middle-class Tories into Nigel Farage’s embrace.

It now seems very plausible that Ukip will pick up at least 10 per cent of the vote at next year’s General Election. In many parts of Britain, especially Southern England, there will almost certainly be a comfortable centre-right majority.

But that majority will be divided. And unless there is a stunning collapse in Ukip’s vote, they will surely cost the Tories several seats, perhaps even dozens, next May — thereby putting Ed Miliband into Downing Street.

Mr Cameron has always resisted the idea of an electoral pact with Ukip. But I wonder if he is now rethinking his position.

The Tories, after all, have a long history of election-winning pacts. In the late-Victorian period they governed in alliance with Joseph Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists; in 1918 they organised a slate with David Lloyd George’s Liberals; and in the 1930s they formed an alliance with Ramsay MacDonald’s renegade National Labour party and Sir John Simon’s National Liberals.

A pact with Ukip would not, therefore, be unprecedented. It would certainly be risky. But since Mr Cameron may well decide that it offers the only chance of retaining the keys to No 10, I would not be surprised to see him change his mind.

At the very least, Mr Cameron has to find a way of speaking to those parts of Britain — unsung, ordinary, provincial working-class and lower-middle-class towns up and down the country — that he has so far failed to reach.

If he fails, then this time next year he will be looking for a new job. That ought to focus his mind.