David Cameron’s Conservatives suffer blows in UK local elections from anti-EU UKIP

[pampango]

Source: Washington Post


United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage arrives in Westminster, London, Friday May 3, 2013,
after a successful night in the local council elections. David Cameron’s Conservative Party has taken a drubbing in local
elections amid a surge of support for right-wing UKIP, an anti-European Union and anti-immigration party.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party has taken a drubbing in local elections amid a surge of support for an anti-European Union and anti-immigration party, heaping pressure on the prime minister to shore up support ahead of the next general election.

The early results Friday show that the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, won 42 county council seats, while the opposition Labour Party gained 26. The Liberal Democrats — junior partners in Britain’s coalition government — were down 16 county council seats, while Cameron’s ruling Conservatives lost 74 seats.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage — whose party Cameron once referred to as a bunch of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” — said the results will send a “shock wave” through the British political establishment. “This is a real sea-change in British politics,” Farage told the BBC.

The rise of UKIP adds to pressure on Cameron to staunch a flow of voters from his party ahead of the next general election in 2015 and to take a harder line on European reform and immigration.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/david-camerons-conservatives-suffer-blows-in-uk-local-elections-from-anti-eu-ukip/2013/05/03/75e5b3ac-b3d9-11e2-9fb1-62de9581c946_story.html

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Seems like UKIP is dragging the Conservative Party further to the right, just like our tea party does to the republicans. At least the big loser in these local elections was Cameron's Conservative Party so the UKIP's popularity is coming at their expense. Labour gained seats.

Some articles I have read say that the drubbing the Tory party took was as much a vote against the government's austerity policy as it was a vote for UKIP. The post-election analysis should be interesting.

[harmonicon]

1. If UKIP are closet racists, is Cameron admitting that Tories are out with their racism?

As promised, the Tories radically curtailed immigration by both reducing numbers for a few visa types and simply eliminating several others. It worked to get me out of the country. I think this result (even though, or possibly especially because county councils have nothing to do with immigration) demonstrates that limiting immigration - which only hurts the UK economically and culturally - was never really the point, but a stand-in issue to demonstrate hatred and intolerance.

The losers here are not the Tories, but all of the residents of the United Kingdom.

Hate and fear. That's what drives people. I see it more and more on DU these days. If you sow hate and fear, that's what you'll get in your government, social policy, and daily lives.

[NewJeffCT]

2. Nope

they're not racists at all, of course. I'm sure David Cameron even has a black friend he can point to as proof as well.

[harmonicon]

3. I actually quite doubt that he does. (nt)

[pampango]

4. If you sow hate and fear, that's what you'll get in your government, social policy, and daily lives.

Well said. And it sounds just like the republicans' electoral strategy at work. When you base your campaigns on hate and fear, you bring the haters and fear-mongers out from their hiding places. It may work in the short run, but it poisons politics for everyone.

I see it more and more on DU these days. - I don't think there is more of it. There is always a considerable amount but I hope it is balanced by a reliance on facts, evidence and history to present our policies.

The parallels between the UK Conservative Party - UKIP and our republican party - tea party is sometimes eerie. UKIP is anti-immigration and wants the UK out of the European Union. Our tea partiers are anti-immigration and rant about the evils of a North American Union that does not even exist.

[harmonicon]

5. I think the parallels are more basic than that.

Racism and anti-immigration are not only usually intrinsically tied, but have the same purpose. The point is to keep the working class divided between itself, which only helps the wealthy and powerful. What they can't deal with is having a united workforce and united class. THEY are strongly united but sell the lie of "competition" to everyone else. It's the main thing that bothers me about the LibDems. They've made themselves the sort of liberal party of the educated and well-off. They suggest nice policies, but in the end don't really feel the effects of their implementation or lack thereof, so in effect, going along with the Tories is easy. Isn't that the same as the Democrats and Republicans who are actually in office? All of these people went to the same private schools, belong to the same clubs, etc.

The media sunk Gordon Brown in the last election because he had the gall to call a woman who was basically bigoted "basically bigoted," for her nonsensical anti-immigration views. They tried to do the same thing to Obama in the 2008 campaign when he said that poor people are disenfranchised and so cling to guns and religion, because those are basic rights they can directly experience and hold on to. I didn't think that was a negative comment on his part, but actually quite prescient; just look at some of the largest issues in the country right now.

When on DU I call people bigots and hypocrites for their nonsensical (oh, they think they have reasons: "they done took er jerbs!!&quot anti-immigration stands, I get labelled a tool of the elite, or big business, etc. Here I'd always thought that workers should stick together, and that helping the least of us was better than helping ourselves.

[pampango]

6. I have seen some of the "tool of the 'elite' or 'big business'" jabs regarding immigration.

Your profile indicates that you are from Michigan and living in Switzerland now.

I think you should remember that many Americans are quite different from Europeans in terms of their attitudes towards movement between countries or working in a country other than your own. Europeans have learned from their history (as I am sure you are well aware) that, done properly, open borders between neighboring countries creates more peace and prosperity than did the closed borders of the first half of the 20th century. The French and Germans are probably so used to working in each others' countries by now that they do not think any more of it than someone living in Connecticut and working in New York.

Europeans have also learned that problems in one country will affect others in time. If one country gets taken over by a crazy militaristic dictator, others will suffer in time. They now know that you cannot just say "As long as the crazy man just messes up his own country we can build a wall and breathe a sigh of relief that we will not be affected."

The US has not had a similar history. In the old days they used to say that the oceans protected us, so we did not have to care that much what happened in Europe or Asia. Their problems were not our problems. On our own continent we have not had the history of wars with our neighbors that say France and Germany have had. Our only wars with Canada and Mexico were so long ago that they are not really part of our consciousness anymore. We do not really have the sense that peace and prosperity in Canada and Mexico are really that important to our own. In fact, many republicans want to build a wall to keep Mexico's problems in Mexico.

So I think that many Americans look at foreigners as a "THEM" who are out to get "US" simply because we have not been forced by history to change the way we look at foreigners. Americans have come a long way (with a long way still to go) in terms of learning not to distrust someone who is of a different race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. but someone who is of a different nationality is more 'different' from us than someone of a different race or sexual orientation and, thus, still a "THEM" to worry about. I am sure that the French and Germans used to view their respective nationalities with much distrust back in the day, too. Nationality seems to be fading as an "US vs. THEM" determinant in Europe but not here.

Add to that the fact that the republican party was historically the party of high tariffs and restrictive immigration laws, while the Democratic Party was just the opposite. This was true until the 1980's when their party - for their own reasons - came over to the Democratic side. While the republican base has to some degree gone back to historical republican views on immigration and tariffs, the corporate wing of the party still embraces their new "1980's wisdom". To me that makes it understandable that some liberals view the relatively recent republican conversion to supporting immigration and lower tariffs as a sign that the "elite" and "big business" have always supported those policies. Of course, prior to the 1980's big business supported high tariffs which limited foreign competition in the American domestic market and helped keep profits high.

"I'd always thought that workers should stick together, and that helping the least of us was better than helping ourselves." - I have said essentially the same. Democrats, in general I think, subscribe to the idea that "We are all in this together", while republicans are more into the "It's a dog-eat-dog world out there" mentality. But even for Democrats nationality is a tough thing to get over when it come to "We are all in this together" - at least tougher to get over than it is in Europe. We try hard, with some success, to get over differences in race, gender and sexual orientation among others, but differences in nationality are tougher.

[harmonicon]

7. I think the current anti-immigration stance in the US is quite new though.

Of course there were huge problems of discrimination in the past, against Catholics (loads and loads of Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants, for instance), and non-whites (with the US specifically preferring by quota immigrants from white and Christian countries), but not immigrants per se.

Now that I write this, I'm not sure that it is so different these days. I don't see people complaining about Canadians, Britons, or Germans coming to the US to "take our jobs," even though there are great numbers of them living and working in the US at high levels; it's telling that the attack on the World Trade Center also caused the largest loss of life of any single attack to the UK. I do however see a lot of anger projected towards Latin Americans and South Asians.

Not only is the US a country largely of immigrants (most of us are probably something between one and four generations away from it, I'd guess), but US leftist politics and organization are as well. I don't know how on earth there would have been an organization like the IWW without all workers coming together. It wasn't just US-born workers in the Chicago stock yards unionizing and protesting to get the basic working conditions established which so many people now take for granted.

I guess what might be new is this resistance to acknowledge that what's good for a new immigrant family is likely to be good for a US-born family. This sort of Reaganism idea of the wealthy being more worthy and the poor being inherently inferior seems to have become so ingrained that people fail to see that they have so much in common with that person who's just one step below them economically or socially and instead wall themselves off from that, having the false sense that they're somehow protecting the little they have instead of trying to work together to better the lot of both.

[pampango]

8. I am not sure that the anti-immigrant sentiment is really that new. Americans seem to be proud of

our immigrant heritage and the diversity that has gone with it, but the pro-immigrant sentiment seems focused on those that immigrated here a generation or more before the present time - whenever that is. Current immigrants have often been viewed as competition for jobs, uneducated and a drain on society. From the Know Nothings of the 1840's (who actually did have some temporary success as an anti-Catholic immigrant organization), the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1880's, the immigration restriction laws of the 1920's there frequently been a distrust of immigrants and their effect of society and the economy.

Even then few had anything negative to say about past generations of immigrants. (After all, most of us would not have been here if it were not for them.) It was the current and possible future immigrants that were the problem.

You are right. US leftist politics used to be more about "all workers coming together". Not surprisingly the PTB were and are afraid of that prospect. Nationalist (that old go-to ideology of the far-right) rhetoric serves, not coincidentally, to divide workers among the good "US" and the bad "THEM" and plays well into the hands of the PTB. "Don't worry about me," says the CEO. "I am an American. One of "US". What you have to worry about are those workers 'over there'. They are a bad "THEM".

[harmonicon]

9. I think you've figured this out better than I have.

Obviously I 1/2 changed my mind mid-thought, but wanted to put that thought in the thread.

Just thinking off the top of my head for the last two minutes, I think it's not just about previous immigrants (who always get a pass, unless someone wants to admit to being a hypocrite), but who you know.

I think about the man who was my mom's boss when I was young. He came to the US from India, and when I knew him ran his own small company (three employees, at most). He gave my mother a job when, despite her great education, she faced a lot of discrimination because of gender, and because she had been out of the workforce for so long to raise three kids. I'd like to know whose job he took. I know that he helped my family. I went to school with his kids, and they were really great people. I can't imagine anyone who knew that family saying a single negative word about them.

I think of one of my teachers in grad school who lived in Denmark and came back to the US with a Danish husband and children. I didn't know the guy well, but I assume he had a job, and that his children will eventually (or now... this was 10 years ago) have jobs. Whose jobs did they take?

I can't imagine anyone thinking that these people didn't enrich both the economy and the culture of the US. It's not the immigrant people who are hated, but the idea of fear and a sense of helplessness.

The thing is, I know what it's like. I was working for minimum wage with a master's degree when I left the US seven years ago. When I had to go back to the US last year because the Tories changed the immigration law, I was working for just above minimum wage with a PhD. It never occurred to me at that job to hate the Chinese guy who's a cook (in the summer, when he's not in college) for getting paid a bit more than me at the restaurant where I worked because he "took my job."

There's no doubt that the US economy - and economic model that drives it - is fucked. It's completely fucked, but if someone were to make a list of reasons why, I couldn't imagine immigration - illegal, H1b, or otherwise - being in the top 200. Same goes for the UK, which - for the time being, assuming Tories don't hold power for too long - is slightly less fucked.

[bemildred]

10. We have always been schizophrenic on the subject.

We like the cheap labor and congratulating ourselves on our "openess", we hate the economic competition and when they want to vote. Not unlike Europe I would think, except that the subject was intrinsic here, we started out as a colonies, whereas it mostly arose in Europe after WWII, when they started to import lots of cheap labor from the second and third worlds.