Ukip’s win is a blow to Tories, Labour and Lib Dems

Anna Sonny, 21 November 2014

Ukip, as expected, have now gained their second MP in the Rochester and Strood by-election that took place yesterday. Former Tory MP Mark Reckless, who triggered the vote by defecting to Ukip, won the election by 2,920 votes; this wasn’t as high a margin as predicted, but it still managed to deal a massive blow to the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems.

The Lib Dems came fifth after the Greens with their lowest share of the vote in a by-election since 1948. Labour’s Naushabah Khan came in third with 16.8% of the vote – a share that was almost halved.

But another blow for Labour last night was Emily Thornberry’s ill-judged tweet, posted hours before the vote: a picture of a house with 3 England flags flying and a white van outside. The shadow attorney general was accused of snobbery, and resigned after apparently making Ed Miliband furious.

Although the caption was ‘Image from Rochester’ and made no comment on what the image portayed, it did come across as a tourist snap, taken by someone landing in a foreign place and finding something unusual or alien to report back. Thornberry called the sight ‘remarkable’ and claims to have never seen this sort of thing before in the UK. The whole episode immediately paints Labour as the party that is out of touch with voters outside of the capital.

But there is a double-edged irony in the furore over Thornberry’s tweet. The rhetoric coming from the right on immigration usually has the effect of making immigrants feel as though they don’t belong here, or as though they are alien, when they are accused of swamping the country, stealing British jobs and stealing benefits –  despite the figures telling a different story. Thornberry’s tweet seems to have inverted this by posting a symbol of English patriotism as something foreign.

At the same time, the spectrum of politics that delights in complaining about political correctness gone mad and people taking offence at the slightest thing has now taken outrageous offence at a photo.

The developments last night only tell us more of what we already knew; Ukip are continuing to succeed, helped along by the major parties, who are falling out of step with their own voters, mostly by tripping over their own feet, or by putting their feet quite directly into their own mouths.