My Friend the Ukip Voter

 

Dartmouth. Devon is blessed with many picturesque harbours and votes UKip

A friend is a friend

I have a fine friend, a hard working, working class, classless in attitude family man who lives in Devon. He’s a skilled craftsman, the kind with an unshakeable pride in his work that motivates him to work long hours to get the job done, not well, but to perfection. We met years ago when he wrote to me in admiration of my writing and sense of humour.

To my surprise (and apprehension!) he made me godfather to his young son. He has a young daughter too, and a pretty wife, and an easy going manner.

He’s what we call a devoted father. He’s one of those friends you can rely on. He’s so reliable I know if I ever got in trouble with the law and jailed he’d be the one friend guaranteed to visit me. Regularly. (I trust he’s reading this.)

A smart guy

My Devon friend is a smart guy. Talented too, he recreates conservation level tiled floors and fixes old ones. Top of his craft, he is. From time to time he sends me questions about Scotland’s economy and its politics, knowing where he lives the news he gets through the agencies of the right-wing power holders is about as reliable as a multi-national conglomerate promising to pay its taxes in full. He feels Scotland has a right to self-determination. For that, I like him all the more.

I regard him a good person. Like us all he has weaknesses, failings, nothing serious, nothing to cause a man to deny he knows him.

Only one weakness stands out. In the last election he voted Ukip.

I did my best to dissuade him but as a democrat he feels compelled to exercise his vote. Before he made the leap across the political midden he called me worried about his ‘only choice.’ “We feel just as remote from Westminster as the Scots” he averred.

“The other party candidates are all crap down here”, he argued. “I don’t have a  choice. The patronising Tories are loathed, and Labour is more Tory than anything. The Lib-Dems are a bunch of idiots, but the Ukip guy is saying things I think too.”

England’s Tea Party

In part, Ukip supporters – to my observation predominantly lower-middle class, working class, less educated – are reacting to the perception, largely accurate, that they have simply been left by the wayside. No matter how hard they work, no matter what they do to better their circumstances, nothing improves and a lot gets worse.

They feel trapped. I see the same happening to my two talented daughters, neither of whom can afford the deposit for their first home. The social ladder was pulled away from them and thousands more like them twenty years ago. It’s all very depressing.

A Californian man listens at the Tea Party Express rally in Waco

Ukip and Tea Party – two peas in a pod

In many ways, Ukip supporters mirror the American Tea Party, for like Ukip it’s corporate financed, deviously kept afloat to voice the will of the power elite.

The Tea Party is made up of disenfranchised poor folks mainly from the east coast of America. Among a welter of bizarre beliefs, they feel government over-taxes them. This is true to a degree, but they are deflected from the knowledge governments allow global companies to avoid paying taxes, often billions of pounds annually.

Authoritarianism is on the rise

The Tory Party  plead with Scotland to stay in the Union and remain a valued member of Westminster, only to marginalise Scottish MPs, and stop them voting on Union matters.

We can see Golden Dawn in unionist reaction to a narrow win over Scotland’s democracy greeted with Nazi salutes. We can see it in the rich and powerful such as Murdoch and Rowling going out of their way to influence democratic rights negatively.

We can see it in Greece, in France, and in power in Spain. No wonder so many want out of the European Union. The tragedy is, we have it in Britain already.

Supporters of Spain’s late dictator Francisco Franco raise their arms in a fascist salute

Our last chance

In Scotland the SNP responds with constructive measures.

We have largely avoided the attacks on organised labour and the poor, unlike Thatcher’s England, but each day brings greater difficulties to sustain protection as Westminster tightens economic constraints. Tory or Labour led councils are determined to undermine our elected government and restore pretenders to the throne.

We can see it in the rich and powerful such as Murdoch and Rowling going out of their way to influence democratic rights negatively. We can see it in Greece, in France, and in Spain’s right-wing residual support for long-dead but not quite buried General Franco.

I believe Europe is ripe for the emergence of a proto-fascist regime. If only England used that argument to leave the EU, instead it emulates the xenophobia.

Demagogues abound

Ukip’s policies have been adopted by all the British parties with the honourable exception of the Greens, and the SNP.

However, if you lived in England you will see entire areas that are given over to Indian and Pakistani families and shops. Try and imagine a China Town or a Korea Town in every town. These areas are a result of England’s imperialism when countries they invaded were given British passports so people ‘felt proud to be British’. Many of the inhabitants looking for a better life immigrated to Britain because they were told it is ‘the greatest nation on earth.’ Once here they saw themselves as ‘British.’

There are places I’ve visited easily the poorest, run down areas. They were districts with poor housing conditions before ethnic groups settled there. They make the best of it, in the same way Mexicans assume the menial jobs in California, the ones Americans think beneath them, or too arduous to take on.

A good man laid low

The 19th century reactionary to Scotland’s Enlightenment, Joseph de Maistre, criticized the Roman phrase, “man is a wolf to man,” observing that it is unfair to wolves, who do not kill for pleasure. The UK has political parties who base their policies on the dictum:  life is tough, let dog eat dog, let the strongest survive.

They wish to dump Europe, reinstate the Cold War, bomb the hell out of the Middle East and North Africa, fork out trillions to renew weapons of annihilation, and withdraw to Little Piddlington-on-Sea to fish and sail barges up their alimentary canals.

My UKip friend only wants a reasonable life and some political stability, and fewer immigrants, alas.