What Kind of Party Is the UK Independence Party? The Future of the Extreme Right in Britain or Just Another Tory Party?
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717723509 |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717723509
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(3) 577 –600
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717723509
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What Kind of Party Is the
UK Independence Party? The
Future of the Extreme Right in
Britain or Just Another Tory
Party?
Anders Widfeldt1 and Heinz Brandenburg2
Abstract
This article aims to further our understanding of the nature of the UK Independence Party. Our
approach differs from much of the existing literature on party families, by analysing public attitudes
towards the UK Independence Party in comparison with other parties. Multidimensional unfolding
is utilised to map UK Independence Party’s place in the British party system, Tobit regressions
are employed to compare UK Independence Party’s support base with that of the British National
Party and the Conservatives and, finally, latent class analysis is used to assess the heterogeneity
in UK Independence Party’s support base. The conclusion is that, with increasing success, the UK
Independence Party has established itself as the only viable electoral option for British extreme
right voters while also making serious inroads into more traditional conservative circles, who are
Eurosceptic but not extreme. This bridging position between the mainstream and the extreme
makes the UK Independence Party distinctive from other British parties and has parallels with
the positions of anti-establishment, European Union sceptical and immigration-critical parties
elsewhere in Europe.
Keywords
UK Independence Party, extreme right, party families, censored regression, latent class analysis
Accepted: 31 May 2017
Single-Issue, Mainstream or Extreme Right?
Despite considerable electoral impact, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has been
largely overlooked in the comparative literature. It is striking how much more attention
has been paid to the much smaller British National Party (BNP), as a quick check on
1Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK
2School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Corresponding author:
Heinz Brandenburg, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1QX, UK.
Email: heinz.brandenburg@strath.ac.uk
723509PSX0010.1177/0032321717723509Political StudiesWidfeldt and Brandenburg
research-article2017
Article
578 Political Studies 66(3)
Google Scholar would show. The most plausible reason is that BNP has been treated as
the only British extreme right party of interest, with UKIP brushed aside as a single-issue
oddity. An illustrative example is Roger Griffin (2007: 246), who notes that UKIP has
made manifesto statements about immigration which ‘would not be out of place’ in con-
tinental neo-populist parties, but still argues that the single-issue anti-European Union
(EU) nature means that it cannot be classified into the same category as BNP (compare
also John and Margetts, 2009). More in-depth studies of UKIP also tend to play down its
degree of radicalism. Ford and Goodwin (2014: 7), for example, argue that BNP and
UKIP ‘are very different parties’ in terms of ideology and origin. To this can be added
different patterns of international co-operation (e.g. McGowan, 2014), and the fact that
BNP is quite often labelled as ‘fascist’ in serious scholarly work (e.g. Copsey, 2008;
Goodwin, 2011), which is not the case with UKIP.
That there are important differences between UKIP and BNP is quite clear. This, how-
ever, leaves the question about the nature of the former party unanswered. On its own, the
distinctiveness from BNP does not preclude UKIP from being treated as a member of the
broader, quite diverse, family of European far right parties. That the party cannot be dis-
missed as an irrelevance, or as a transitional phenomenon, is increasingly clear. It has
been represented in the EU parliament since 1999, it was the biggest UK party in the 2014
EU election and it received the third highest number of votes in the 2015 General Election.
Even though the EU membership referendum on 23 June 2016 resulted in a majority for
‘Brexit’, it cannot be assumed that UKIP will disappear.
To treat UKIP as a single-issue party may have been justifiable in its early years but
has become increasingly questionable. In the 2015 General Election, UKIP produced a
76-page manifesto, covering a wide range of areas. Of course, EU opposition is a key
priority, but in addition, the party wants to reduce taxes, repeal the Climate Change Act,
increase the number of grammar schools, increase resources to the police, increase prison
capacity, make convicted criminals serve their full sentences, introduce citizen initiatives,
recall votes for Members of Parliament (MPs) and so on. Not least important, UKIP wants
to tighten control of immigration and rejects multiculturalism (UKIP, 2015).
The main purpose of this article is to add to the rather sketchy knowledge about the
nature of UKIP. The analysis will be conducted with two main points of reference. One is
the view of UKIP as a somewhat more radical but non-extreme, extension of mainstream
conservatism. There is much to suggest that this is the preferred self-image in large parts
of the party. Indeed, several leading UKIP representatives, including its two MPs elected
in 2014–2015, were defectors from the Conservative Party. It is, of course, true that UKIP
has also targeted disgruntled Labour voters, but they have not done so with left-leaning
economic rhetoric or policies. Rather, the attempts to woo former Labour voters have
highlighted immigration and how money saved from leaving the EU can be used for
health care, education and so on. A second approach is to view UKIP as a member of the
broader European extreme right party family. The vociferous EU criticism, and the
increasingly negative stance on immigration, means that UKIP has at least as much in
common with, for example, the Swiss People’s Party and Lega Nord – at a stretch even
the ‘de-demonised’ French Front National – as with the British Tories.
What we, thus, aim to investigate is which of two models fits UKIP best – the Tory
model or the European Extreme Right (EER) model (the label Extreme Right will be used
in full awareness that other designations exist). Our approach will be different to the
existing literature on party classification and party families. Instead of looking at party
history and documents (compare Mair and Mudde, 1998), focus will be on perceptions in
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