Sir,
I trust all readers will agree that the UK needs a credible opposition in
the House of Commons, if the UK is not to become, in effect, a one-party state.
From 1918 to 2010, the Labour Party was a very effective alternative to the
Conservatives.
The Labour Party is now like a badger that has been seriously injured by
a motor vehicle, but not killed, and now lies twitching at the roadside. It
needs to be put out of its misery in England and Wales, just as it has already
been in Scotland in 2015, and where the Conservatives look set to become the
second largest party.
The LibDems are a one-policy non-entity. That policy (a second
referendum) will shortly become impossible (when Article 50 Notification is
given), and the party will become completely irrelevant. However, in February
2013 they won a significant by-election in Eastleigh, and the key figures are of
immense importance:
- LibDem 13,342
- UKIP 11,571
- Con 10,599
In other words, if UKIP and the Tories had been one party, that Party
would have won with a 8,828 vote majority over the
LibDems.
More recently, of course, we have had the infamous Stoke Central
by-election, and again the figures are telling, though admittedly on a meagre
turnout of 37%:
- Lab 7,853
- UKIP 5,233
- Con 5,154
Here, our hypothetical UKIP/Con party would have won, with a majority of
2,534 votes over Labour.
The Labour Party claims Stoke as a victory. It got 37% of the vote on a
37% turnout. That means that just 13.69% of the electorate voted for it. More
significantly, of course, it lost Copeland. The badger twitches
still.
Meanwhile, rats are leaving a sinking ship, which we shall call “HMS
Twitching Badger”. I doubt whether the Labour Party will ever again have an MP
called “Tristram”….
What all this data proves is that UKIP can replace the Labour Party as HM
Loyal Opposition, and it is actually quite an easy thing to do, subject to the
political will being there on both sides. All it would take would be a pact
between UKIP and the Conservatives not to stand against each other in any of the
600 constituencies up for grabs in 2020. Oversimplifying the position, UKIP
would stay out of all the historical Lab/Con “marginals” (such as Copeland) and
the Tories would be absent from seats which they could not win, like
Stoke.
It is actually in the symbiotic interests of both UKIP and the
Conservatives to enter into such a pact. It would mean the end of the Labour
Party, possibly as soon as 2020, which would be a good thing from all possible
points of view. It would effectively guarantee a Conservative government for a
long time; but sooner or later all governments become so unpopular that the
Opposition gets a look-in, and that would mean a UKIP government one
day!
The implementation of the pact would of course need 600 separate
agreements, so any such process would have to start fairly soon, and someone has
to make the first move. The time has come for someone at the UKIP office to make
a phone call which could change the face of UK politics for a
generation.
Respectfully,
Septimus Octavius (Pseudonym.)
Blogger: Two points which need to be addressed in this letter to
UKIP Daily:
1) It would be nothing less than folly to assume that you
can simply add Ukip votes to Conservative ones - and this figure will still hold
when one of the parties withdraws.
On what is this absurdly simplistic logic
based?
2) I joined Ukip to fight the Liberal Left and not just to
dispose of the Labour Party - irrespective of how mouthwatering that prospect
might be.
The Lib Dems, Labour and Greens are all despicable in their
philosophies. BUT, the Tories are riddled with the likes of Cameron, Soubry,
Clarke, Hammond et al. Any of these MPs would slip, all too comfortably, into
the aforementioned parties.
A plague on ALL their houses!
