“UKIP success prompts Cameron to reach out and show respect”

Man. Calling UKIP a bunch of clowns and fruitcakes was probably the most sensible thing David Cameron ever said and now he’s taken it back. Still, if these local election results mean that UKIP are now a “proper” political party, I suppose it means it is no longer theoretically impossible for me to ever vote Tory, since there may come a day when I have to just to keep the lunatics out.

Anyway. This is what happens when the 3 main political parties are too ideologically close. When all three of them are pro-cuts, anti-union and anti-immigration (but not anti-immigration enough for some), dissatisfaction at the way things are going was always going to result in people turning away from those three parties. I like to think that people are not naturally racist, that they don’t really believe that immigration is the reason we’re in this financial situation. They can’t really believe that, because they watch the news and they know just as well as anyone else that the financial crisis was caused by the banks.

The problem is, UKIP stand out because they’re actually tapping into people’s dissatisfaction. Nobody has the balls to be genuinely left wing or to argue significantly with the status quo, so people go to the right instead. When people can look around them and see that things are not going well, they will look for an explanation and UKIP, in scapegoating immigrants, have given them that explanation. And in a situation where no politician has the courage to say “actually the fault lies with the rich people who are asking you to blame immigrants,” this is what happens.