It’s the EU immigrants stupid! UKIP’s core-issue and populist rhetoric on the road to Brexit (original) (raw)
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The UK Independence Party (UKIP) has moved from being a single issue party par excellence to a broader party of protest, taking advantage of broader feelings of discontent and disconnection. However, the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the EU fundamentally challenged its development and operation, by removing a core part of the party's rationale and identity, and radically shifting the overall political landscape. This paper considers the re-positioning through the referendum period, both rhetorically and organisationally. Drawing on party press releases and media coverage, the paper argues that UKIP has become caught in a set of multiple transformations, pushing it in the longer term towards a more conventionally populist position, in a way that carries important resonances for other eurosceptic parties across the continent.
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This paper presents a case study of the emergence of the issue-linkage necessary for a cross-cutting EU cleavage to become electorally salient. We argue that a key political decision on immigration in 2004 facilitated the emergence of a new dimension of party competition and growth in popular support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leading eventually to the 2016 EU Referendum. To examine this thesis we trace the impact of the UK's government's immigration policy on (i) rising immigration, (ii) the political salience of immigration, (iii) the increasing association between concern about immigration and Euroscepticism, and (iv) the emergence of a cross-cutting dimension of party competition coalescing around support for UKIP. The analysis combines information from official immigration rates, media reporting on immigration, Mori polls, Continuous Monitoring Surveys, and the British Election Study.
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Britain has long been identified with a strong tradition of Euroscepticism, yet we know little about the drivers of support for openly Eurosceptic parties. In this article, we draw on a unique large-scale dataset to undertake the first ever individuallevel analysis of the social and attitudinal drivers of support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) at the 2009 elections to the European Parliament. We find that while Euroscepticism is the most important driver of UKIP support it is not the whole story.
Britain has long been identified with a strong tradition of Euroscepticism,yet we know little about the drivers of support for openly Eurosceptic parties. In this article, we draw on a unique large-scale dataset to undertake the first ever individual level analysis of the social and attitudinal drivers of support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) at the 2009 elections to the European Parliament. We find that while Euroscepticism is the most important driver of UKIP support it is not the whole story. Other attitudinal drivers, namely dissatisfaction towards mainstream parties and xenophobia, are also important. Examining vote-switching between first and second order elections we also find evidence of a distinction between two types of supporter: more affluent middle class ‘strategic defectors’ from the mainstream Conservative Party who support UKIP to register their Euroscepticism; on the other are more economically marginal and politically disaffected ‘core loyalists’ who are attracted to UKIP by its xenophobic, increasingly Islamophobic and populist anti-establishment strategy. Our analysis suggests that UKIP is well positioned to recruit a more stable and enduring base of support from its extreme right-wing competitor, the British National Party (BNP), and become a significant vehicle of xenophobia and, more specifically, Islamophobia in modern Britain.
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