2015 UK General Election

[Fidel_Castronaut]

The thing is, we have to face some uncomfortable truths in the UK.

We have a 'political class' (I'm against sorry to use such inaccurate terminology but allow me this for now) that is divorced from large swathes of us in society. We don't have anything in common with SPADS and they don't have anything in common with us. Say whatever you will about Farage, but his appeal is that of the 'everyman'; the man on the street saying what most others are (or think they are) saying about things like Europe and immigration.

People like David Mitchell can label them, accurately or otherwise, as a party of haters (or nasty people), but it doesn't detract from the fact that, in my opinion, that UKIP get a third of the votes in this election. You can't 'ignore' views, reprehensible or not. You can't brush under the carpet large percentages of society who, again, rightly or wrongly, feel they have no voice and have been ignored for a long time again on topics like the EU and immigration.

People are divorced from national politics here, and I don't need to post the dreadfully low voting percentages over successive elections to evidence that. People don't know anything about, for example, the economy, the defecit, the funding of the NHS. They think they do but they don't, and UKIP speaks to those people. 'Saying it how it is'. Whether it's actually like 'that' is actually irrelevant. You can post all the stats in the world that show, overall, the net effect of migration to the UK is a positive thing economically. But people don't care about that. They care about seeing their streets changed irrevocably by the influx of migrant labour, and the pent up frustration that they are not socially mobile enough to be able to move out of these (poor) areas in places where their peers are moving (in the past this was called white flight, now it's social mobility and variants therein).

In short, people care more about their own perceptions of the political, economic and social landscape than the reality, and this is where I think the mainstream parties will increasingly fall down. They can't speak on those terms because they either don't know how or won't. This again evidences why the SNP are doing well in Scotland.

Hey, did you know that under the SNP, the number of students from poorer backgrounds going to University has actually gone down, whilst under the new £9k/year tuition fee regime, the number of poorer students in England & Wales going to university has actually gone up?

http://blogs.ft.com/off-message/2015/05/...-students/
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/fe...07.article

The SNP paints themselves as progressive, but are actually doing worse than the Tories in some areas of the Scottish economy when it comes to enabling social mobility. Facts don't matter to people, perceptions of those facts do. IT doesn't matter if Farage is a loon and not an 'everyman', the perception of him is such that people will still flock to UKIP. If people want to confront this issue, they need to stop dismissing him and his party and actually start engaging them. Nobody is willing to do that, so we will see what happens next week.

If you want to talk to UKIP voters about why they will vote UKIP, I suspect their answers will be almost as varied as the people themselves, but ultimately they will revolve around the points I've made above. Disenfranchisement, ignorance of the political and social landscape of the UK, fear (warranted or not) of the net influx of migrants and the disassembling of certain social institutions under the strain (NHS as an example).