Purple Power

Or the lack of it.

I have known many people to be Independent Councillors in the North of England. Here in the old District of Derwentside, they have been using purple as their colour for decades. But I have never heard of any, by no means only in this area, who has joined UKIP.

On the contrary, against those of them who are still in service, UKIP has often taken to fielding candidates in recent years. With a spectacular lack of success. UKIP cannot recruit them. It cannot recruit their voters. It has exactly as much appeal as one would expect.

American libertarian economists have only a niche market even in their own country. They have less than that in the South of England, or in the hitherto Conservative parts of Wales or the Midlands; in all of those, UKIP's support would collapse if there were any media analysis of its range of policies.

And they have none at all in Scotland or in the North of England. As I have suggested before, many Independent and even some Conservative municipal standard-bearers of an atavistic Northern Toryism, which has nothing whatever to do with neoliberal capitalism or with its neoconservative wars, might very well seek to save their political lives by joining the Labour Party, which is now also a stranger to those phenomena.

Those figures' already-existing machines at ward level might very well take over the Labour Party in the places that ever voted for such Councillors, places where Labour is often barely organised at all. Yet where it is increasingly able to win council seats with minimal effort.

If UKIP cannot win those council seats; if it therefore cannot recruit those who above all else, and not always or ordinarily with unworthy motives, wish to retain or to recapture those seats; then it simply cannot win in the North.

Such is demonstrably, and predictably, the case.