A Polite Insurgency: The UKIP Campaign
Gawain Towler offers an account of the party’s breakthrough in gaining an unprecedented four million votes while simultaneously failing to make a significant impact in terms of gaining parliamentary seats. The campaign is discussed and evaluated, and comp
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A Polite Insurgency: The UKIP Campaign Gawain Towler
One sign that things are changing in British politics is that the United Kingdom Independence Party is present in this volume, contributing a chapter to the post-election Political Communications series, something that has never happened before. The plates are shifting. To start with, a couple of observations about our campaign. I’d like to point out one thing, we didn’t have a battle bus despite how the excellent TV comedy Ballot Monkeys portrayed us. No such thing existed in our campaign. I think that points to something that I think is very important to the UKIP campaign overall and that is surely a simple question of resources. In her chapter, Olly Grender talks about how the Tories outspent the Liberal Democrats by such a large margin. Well, at the risk of being lowliest than thou, we had a mere one and a half million to play with. Go to the night of the election itself and it was astonishing for those of us in the purple corner in that it was deeply bittersweet. We were having a phenomenal night. The first few numbers that came in from Sunderland with UKIP vote shares all in the mid- to high twenties were amazing. The numbers, the sheer weight of people who had voted for us in the General
G. Towler (*) United Kingdom Independence Party, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2017 D. Wring et al. (eds.), Political Communication in Britain, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40934-4_13
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G. TOWLER
Election was astonishing. And yet obviously it was also massively disappointing: only retaining Douglas Carswell’s seat in Clacton and failing to gain any seats. Meanwhile, we saw the courageous Mark Reckless losing his seat in Rochester. So it was a very odd feeling that night. How could we not be pleased with 3.9 million votes? How could we not? With the resources we had, with the campaign capacity we had. And yet, and yet, we didn’t make those breakthroughs that we would have liked to have done, and which until the last few weeks the polls had been predicting. There are various reasons for the election outcome, some of which have already been mentioned in the other chapters covering the parties’ campaigns. But you’ve got to remember that this was all in the wake of the 2014 European election, where astonishingly UKIP had managed to win an election, a national one. It was the first time either the Tories or Labour had not won a nationwide contest for over 100 years. After that, most of the pundits, most of the wise, most of the greats and most of the good were very happy to say “well, you know UKIP do well in the Euros and do dreadfully in national elections. Last time, in 2010, they’ve dropped back down to three per cent. Nothing to see here. Move along. European elections are their thing. Westminster elections are certainly not their thing”. Obviously, I don’t know if you recall the promise and bet of Daily Telegraph columnist Dan Hodges who had to run down Whitehall stark naked having bet that UKIP would not achieve more than 6 per cent in the W
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