Whatever happened to Red UKIP?

Today, Nigel Farage says that he’ll resign as UKIP leader if he fails to win a seat in Parliament. But evidently March 16th is the day each year when the UKIP leader threatens resignation, as exactly a year ago, Farage said that he’d resign as leader if Ed Miliband became Prime Minister.

A Tory government (preferably one propped up by his rag-tag assortment of former Tory MPs, former Tory donors and former Tory members) has always been Farage’s electoral objective for 2015. Without a Tory Prime Minister in No.10, he won’t get his chance to drag Britain out of Europe. Without a partnership with the Conservatives, he’s got no chance of overturning the discrimination laws that he’s so keen to get rid of.

And yet over the past year, we’ve seen the attempted rise of “Red UKIP”. Before the European elections a senior Kipper told me that the party faced a challenge in the years ahead. Whilst most of their members, activists and elected politicians were affluent, Libertarian and Southern, the voters they were targeting were more likely to be Northern, poor and think of themselves as on the Left.

Whilst the UKIP hierarchy and their early supporters were more likely to back the party for social reasons (the “stop the world I want to get off brigade” who find modern, multicultural society off-putting) these new UKIP supporters were more likely to back the party for economic reasons. Nevermind stopping the bus – these voters felt like they’d stood at the bus stop for years as buses, driven by both Labour and Tory leaders, thundered passed them without stopping.

And so the great “Red UKIP” wooing of working class voters (especially those in the North) began. Farage claimed that he’d “do a deal with Labour”, despite his earlier recoiling from a Labour government. There were attempts made by senior Kippers to tone down the male, white and privileged appearance of the party.

But it was only ever a new lick of paint on a distinctly Tory edifice. Two MPs defected to become UKIP MPs. Former Tory voters bankrolled the party. I’m not always keen on Labour Party slogans – but “more Tory than the Tories” had the benefit of being true.

In large parts of the country, UKIP have become the party you vote for if you don’t want to vote Labour but you can’t bring yourself to vote Tory. They’re the Neo-Thatcherite Party pitching themselves to voters who loathed Thatcher’s Tories. So Farage has done Labour campaigners a real favour by stating – plain as day – that a vote for the purple Tories of UKIP is a vote for a blue Tory government.

The question now is, as Labour have ruled out a coalition with the SNP, would Cameron do the same for UKIP? Or is Cameron happy to be steamrollered into an EU referendum later this year, for the opportunity to work with the sort of cranks who think immigrants and their kids should be kept out of state schools?