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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Anders Heger UKIP and British Politics Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D. 2015 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. ..................................................... Author‟s signature Acknowledgement I would like to express my thanks towards the Masaryk University and the Czech Republic for providing me with free education and I would also like to thank my supervisor, Mr. Hardy, for his support and much appreciated counsel. Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 5 The History of UKIP ..................................................................................................................... 8 Allan Sked and the First Years .................................................................................................. 8 Change of Leadership and Becoming the Fourth Largest Party ............................................. 12 Becoming a Political Party ...................................................................................................... 16 The Beginning of a New Era ................................................................................................... 21 Analysing the Party‟s Policies .................................................................................................... 25 Leaving the European Union .................................................................................................. 25 Immigration ............................................................................................................................. 34 UKIP and the BNP .................................................................................................................. 40 Explaining the Support for UKIP ................................................................................................ 42 The Social Profile of UKIP Voters ......................................................................................... 47 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 52 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 56 Résumé (English) ........................................................................................................................ 62 Résumé (Czech) .......................................................................................................................... 63 Introduction ―Challenger parties are like bees . once they have stung the system, they quickly die‘‘ (Hofstadter qtd. in Ford and Goodwin: 8). This citation alludes to the problem that new political parties face in British politics – the difficulty in establishing themselves in the first-past-the-post electoral system. British politics have been dominated by the competition between the two major parties in the last hundred years – Conservative party and Labour – with the Liberal Democrats making an appearance on the political scene in late 1980s. The latest contender for the British voters – the United Kingdom Independence Party – started its campaigning in 1990s and has since then become a highly scrutinized and significant political party in the United Kingdom, winning the 2014 European elections. However, the party, its members and policies have been controversial and the party has been accused of populism and scaremongering. It has met with ridicule and outright refusal from the other political parties, which see it as a dangerous contender and many voters see the party as outright racist and prejudiced against immigration and multiculturalism – something which the party itself has been trying to deny. However, even though the party has been in existence since the early 1990s, it gained prominence and media spotlight only in the last few years after a few electoral successes. Before that the party was largely ignored and not assigned any significance. It might then not come as a surprise that relatively few studies and analyses have been made to try and understand the party, where its support comes from, what issues the party proposes to address and what its ultimate goals are. The importance of answering these three questions and understanding the party‟s policies and arguments are the reasons for my writing this paper. Shedding light on the - 5 - history of UKIP‟s development from a single-issue pressure group to a political party might serve as a to-do (or not to-do) manual for future political party-hopefuls, as overcoming the entry-barrier has proven fatal for new political movements in the past. It further provides an analysis of the party‟s policies on the two key issues that it has been building its campaigning on – namely leaving the European Union and immigration – and attempts to answer the question of whether the party‟s policies have any substance to them or are just pure populist rhetoric and what their place in British politics is – that means comparing them with those of Tories and Labour. The last question it explains is where and from whom UKIP gets its support in the United Kingdom and why these people support the party in the first place. The first chapter focuses on the development of the party and provides a chronological evolution of the party and its policies. It describes how UKIP‟s leaders shaped the party and provides analyses of UKIP‟s electoral successes and failures. This chapter relies chiefly on the information collected by Ford and Goodwin in their analysis of UKIP Revolt on the Right and various media articles and statistical data. It does not provide an analysis of the development of the party‟s policies. The second chapter provides an analysis of UKIP‟s policies on immigration and their arguments for leaving the European Union. It puts the data and suggestions provided by the party under scrutiny for accuracy and offers an analysis of the data based on critique and collected statistical information. The chapter also provides a brief comparison between UKIP and the BNP. The sources for this chapter are the manifestos of UKIP, BNP, Tories and Labour from various years, UKIP party Constitution, various studies conducted on the issues and analyses and comments in media articles, especially Roland Rudd‟s No power, no influence and we would still have to pay the bill, a report by Oxford Economics: An Indispensable Relationship: Economic Linkages between the - 6 - UK and the rest of the European Union – all of which provide useful data on the economic and legal ties between Britain and the European Union. The third chapter explains where UKIP gets its support and why the voters support the party. The main sources for this research were relevant chapters from Ford and Goodwin‟s Revolt on the Right and Lord Ashcroft‟s ―They‘re thinking what we‘re thinking‖ research into the topic. - 7 - The History of UKIP Allan Sked and the First Years The history of UKIP begins with Dr. Allan Sked and the founding of a single-issue cross-party political movement – the Anti-Federalist League. Sked was a former Liberal candidate in Paisley, Scotland, who had first started to be politically active when he was fourteen years old. He found and deepened his Euroscepticism as a lecturer at the London School of Economics, where he later became a head of the European studies department (Hodges: Singular man of sceptical faith). ―I decided the whole idea was mad. I became so sick of Europe after ten years and it did seem so fatuous supporting all the myths about Europe - that it was a cure-all and a great ideal for the future whereas in fact in practice it was a kind of sotto governo of corrupt bureaucrats who are a danger to democracy‖ (Hodges: Singular man of sceptical faith). He also joined the Bruges Group*, from which he was, however, later dismissed after founding the Anti-Federalist League in 1991 (Ford and Goodwin: 22). The Leagues main point of programme was opposing the Maastricht Treaty**. However, the group attracted only limited attention and wasn‟t really taken seriously. Their run up against the Conservatives in the 1992 General election proved to be a disaster. In Bath Sked polled only 0.2% of the vote (Farage: 73) and the group soon called for a change in the Leagues policies. The ensuing result was the founding of the United Kingdom *,,The Bruges Group is an independent all-party think tank . Set up in February 1989, its aim was to promote the idea of a less centralised European structure than that emerging in Brussels.‗‗ (brugesgroup.com: The Bruges Group) ** A founding treaty of the EU that entered into force in 1993 and deepened the European integration, enhanced the powers of the European parliament and introduced the economic and monetary union (EMU) (europa.eu: Treaty of Maastricht on European Union) - 8 - Independence Party on the 3rd of September 1993 at a conference at the London School of Economics (Ford and Goodwin: 22). Even though the name was not the most favoured among the members of the League, it was chosen in the end because having British in the name was perceived as giving a bad, nationalistic name to the group because of the ultra-right BNP* (Farage: 79). It was not even a year until
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