The rise of UKIP:
Time will tell
Comment
One thing
that many commentators and voters of the Tory party appear to have either
forgotten, or just failed to take into account, is that the government led by
David Cameron is a coalition, and that his freedom to carry out the policies he
believes in is tempered by the willingness of his coalition partners. When did
we last see a coalition government in Britain? No, not in this generation. This morning Lord Lawson declared that he
would vote for Britain to leave the European Union; this is hardly helpful to a
beleaguered Prime minster. It is easy
for UKIP to promise heaven and earth to voters from a position where they don’t
shoulder the burden of responsibility. Word
is cheap!
You only
have to look at the United States to see what the equivalent of UKIP, the Tea
Party, is doing, not only to the fortunes of the Republican party, but to the
American body politic in general. So bad
is the disunity in the Republican Party brought about by the extremeness of the
Tea party, that the speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner,
himself a Republican, can not even get his own bill passed.
In December
last year Speaker Boehner was humiliatingly forced into withdrawing his own
finance bill because his fellow Republicans threatened to vote it down. A similar pattern of dissent was repeated
when Republican senators twice withheld the appointment of one of their numbers
recommended by President Obama to the post defense secretary. It took a third attempt before they finally relented
and Chuck Hagel’s appointment was ratified in February this year.
In the
provinces too, the Tea party’s style of politics brought strife and
deep-running divisions, just like UKIP is sowing the seeds of discord here. I remember with dismay how Senator Richard Lugar,
a moderate Republican who has held his Indiana seat for 35 uninterrupted years,
was dramatically displaced by Tea party hardliners peddling the politics of
hate. The crazed gunman who shot
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords claimed to have lifted his manifesto directly
from the extreme rhetoric’s of the Tea Party.
It was not
long ago that Nigel Farage stood on the floor of the European parliament and
lambasted the then newly appointed President of the European Council, Herman
Van Rompuy. It was a completely
unprovoked tirade on the president and a terrible insult on the honour of that
legislative house. This in a way shows
the nature of the man we are dealing with, combative without a cause and ready
to upset and trample down on the established order, without any regard as to
how much damage and destruction his actions wrought.
David
Cameron rose through the ranks to become the leader of the Conservative party
and the Prime minister of our country; he has duly served to get to the
position he is in today, and will now in turn,
rightly expect faithful service from those under him. At a time of worldwide economic and political uncertainty,
those near the PM should close ranks and give him all the support he
needs. Time will tell if UKIP has the
keys to heaven, as they would like us to believe.
