THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION

4. The Purple Ceiling
Why talking too much about immigration puts voters
off
UKIP made the political weather on immigration during the last
Parliament. Having campaigned to get Britain out of the European Union
for over a decade, Nigel Farage’s decision to make immigration UKIP’s
core issue helped to propel the party to victory in the 2014 European
elections. UKIP also broke into the House of Commons, thanks to
the defection of two Conservative MPs. Much of the latter half of the
Parliament saw the Conservatives, and then Labour, debate and try out
a range of strategies to try to check the party’s appeal, often with mixed
and rather limited success.
UKIP’s anti-immigration campaign did win votes for the party.
Its 2015 result was impressive in historical perspective: 3.8 million votes
(13%) was the strongest ever General Election result for a party that had
not won any seats at the previous election. Though it won only one seat
in the House of Commons, UKIP finished second in 120 constituencies,
creating the possibility of establishing a sustained presence in several
areas in future local and national elections.
Yet 2015 was undoubtedly also a disappointment for the
Eurosceptic party, which went into the campaign with two MPs and came
out of it with only one.
Party leader Nigel Farage had often been the dominant political
personality of the previous two years, yet he failed to win a seat in his
chosen Kent constituency of Thanet South. The defeat of Conservative
MP Mark Reckless in Rochester and Strood will make it much harder
for UKIP to attract future defections, removing a source of potential
pressure during the EU renegotiation process. David Cameron’s majority
victory, rather than the hung parliament which many had anticipated,
suggested to many Conservatives that UKIP’s bark had been worse than
its bite.
UKIP strategists had been confident of securing at least four to
six seats, and to compete seriously for a dozen or more constituencies.
The failure to achieve a more significant breakthrough largely reflected
public doubts about UKIP’s tone of voice and approach to immigration.
The party provided a voice that many of its supporters thought had
been missing for far too long from mainstream politics – but it also put
most voters off, including many voters who are sceptical about EU free
movement and the scale of UK immigration but who found UKIP’s
campaigning on these issues too divisive.
The purple ceiling: why UKIP’s hopes of a
breakthrough were frustrated
Why didn’t UKIP win more seats? Clearly, the party got a raw deal
from the first-past-the-post electoral system, and so found unusual allies
in Greens, Liberal Democrats and other electoral reformers in arguing
17 British Future / The Politics of Immigration