There is a lane at Barmeath called the Headless Horseman because, according to legend, a horse bolted back from the Battle of the Boyne with its decapitated rider still on board.
Its arrival gave the family the first news that the battle had been lost. This is highly improbable if not actually impossible. But the legend persists, at least in politics, to this day. The latest steed galloping across the political firmament with a headless rider is UKIP.
They garnered 3.8 million votes in the 2015 General Election but only won a single seat in Parliament because of the iniquity of the First Past the Post voting system. They fielded candidates in 624 constituencies, only seven fewer than Conservative and Labour. This seems to me proof that they have in a remarkably short time built up a national political base with a committed, hard-working membership and credible candidates. They are the grassroots of UKIP that have been betrayed by their National Executive this Summer.
They made their voice heard in the referendum. Now the party should be putting forward detailed recommendations for implementing Brexit with maybe some red lines that they as a party insist on. Instead the members of UKIP have been three-times betrayed.
First the in-fighting as to the eligibility of candidates for the leadership was a disgrace. Secondly, they don’t have a leader and thirdly, while all this has been going on they have shown no leadership to their long-suffering members many of whom will be wondering if it’s worth sticking with the project.
Meanwhile in Annecy the patron of a restaurant where I was having luncheon gave me his felicitations on Brexit. He really meant it. I told him that I thought General de Gaulle would be pleased that the UK was leaving which prompted a tirade against the inexcusable loss of Algeria. He wasn’t too keen on Churchill and Eisenhower either.
Are you quite fair in calling the “first past the post” system “iniquitous”? There are many ways of considering the rights and wrongs of representation, of course. Our system demands that each constituency sends its most successful candidate to Parliament, as its representative. It tends to produce a system within which much political debate occurs within a few large parties, each of them a broad church of views. Above all, it tends to encourage parties to build a plausible platform or manifesto for actual, real-world, government. We can’t have both these benefits and the benefits of PR, except in hybrid systems which arguably don’t do justice to either arrangement.
As to UKIP, they are fatally divided between their libertarian and their nativist tendencies. The Lib Dems sound socialist or conservative according to the reading of the politics of the day or constituency. (BTW: I quite liked the late coalition, but didn’t its fallout demonstrate some important downsides to coalition?)
Contrary to, or complicating, the above, I guess our present dilemma and opportunity is in building a plausible, operational post-Labour, or reformed Labour, centre left “government in waiting”. I am radically unclear whether this betokens a new splintered politics, or a tectonic shift.
Reinforcing my FPTP argument, I think it is fair to say that from Thatcher on it has delivered government which is at least as good as the country deserves.