UKIP draw the battle lines

The shock defection of Douglas Carswell, MP for Clacton in Essex, from the  Tory Party to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) gave UKIP their first MP. Moments later, UKIP lost their first MP as Carswell also resigned from the House of Commons. He wants to come back though – by fighting the resulting by-election as the UKIP candidate. On the plus side for him, UKIP did very well in Essex in last May’s local elections and Carswell has a strong personal following. On the negative side, UKIP has a sitting prospective candidate who is not going quietly. Nonetheless, we’re likely to have a full-on, short, sharp UKIP “take us back to the mythical golden age” campaign leading to a UKIP victory.

The move has clearly been planned very carefully. UKIP has set the political agenda for this autumn: the mainstream political parties will have to respond and risk being dragged to the right as they try to halt the UKIP bandwagon. With UKIP’s dangerous, extreme right wing programme, the danger is that we have months of divisive political posturing ahead, which can only encourage right wing extremists to organise their followers and plan stunts to try to intimidate black and Asian communities.

UKIP will be hoping they can stay in the driving seat as we enter 2015 and the run up to next May’s General Election – and they’ve hinted that there may be further defections, which could keep their momentum going. It’s well possible that the Defectors Second XI doesn’t exist at all, and claiming that it does is just a way of stirring up more trouble in the Tory ranks (and possibly inspiring the odd waverer to come forward if he or she imagines he or she is not alone). On the other hand, there are so many loopy MPs with vastly over-inflated ideas of their own importance that there may be a crowd of MPs, desperate to keep their seats in May 2015, that they will jump as soon as Carswell is successful.

UKIP would benefit more from a steady stream of individual defectors than from a group leaving once. Their tactics echo those of the Labour defectors who set up the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s – a  blow from which Labour took years to recover. UKIP will be hoping to wreak havoc on the Tories – but at what cost to peace, multiculturalism and the safety of the rest of us?