David Cameron’s Conservatives are running scared of UKIP

UKIP will spend their Conference this weekend trying to pose as a mainstream political party with mass appeal. As well as hearing from Nigel Farage, their leader, there’ll no doubt be an appearance from Godfrey Bloom, their resident cartoon sexist. It’s unlikely that there will be appearances for their two former MEPs who have been jailed for fraud. And they probably won’t showcase the various councillors and candidates who have been exposed in the press as having far-right views.

If you listen to their leader, UKIP are a party of straight talkers with credible, mainstream policies which, when delivered with a dash of bluff honesty, are the key to a plan to target ordinary working people. But the reality is quite different. The truth is that UKIP don’t want to communicate the truth about their policies. They don’t share your values – in reality they’re even more right-wing than the Tories. At the last election they ran on a platform of cutting public services even deeper and faster than the Tories, on cutting taxes for the wealthiest and on taking billions out of the NHS, subsidising the better off to go private. They want to abolish your right to parental leave and maternity pay. Bizarrely, their manifesto included a policy of paying the same level of benefits to absolutely everyone – even people who refuse to look for a job.

Far from being the breath of fresh air driven by idealistic beliefs that they’d like us to think, UKIP are no strangers to cynical policy u-turns, constantly chopping and changing for narrow political advantage. For instance, at the last election they backed high speed rail but now, aware of some Tories’ discomfort about the route, they have flip-flopped to explicit opposition to the scheme.

Despite their policies, though, UKIP are having an influence – on the Conservatives. If you don’t believe me, listen to David Cameron. In 2006, as a fresh-faced young leader, he described UKIP as “a bunch of, well, fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, basically”. This year, though, he changed his tune. After UKIP gained 139 seats, mostly from the Conservatives, in this year’s council elections Cameron was invited to repeat the insult. He refused, saying “it is no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for”.

It’s one more piece of evidence that David Cameron’s Conservatives are running scared of UKIP. In the early stages of his leadership of the Conservatives, David Cameron tried to demonstrate that he and his party had changed. He hugged huskies, hugged hoodies, asked people to “Vote blue, go green” and criticised his party for “banging on about Europe”.

But he failed to take his party with him. Between 2005 and 2010 the Conservatives lost 75,000 members, and the decline has continued in Government – figures revealed by the party this week showed that membership has almost halved since David Cameron became leader. As the Conservative Party’s membership has declined, UKIP’s has risen – and UKIP’s appeal to former Tory voters threatens Conservative prospects at the next election.

David Cameron has started responding to the UKIP threat, changing his language and his policies and moving to the right. Not only on Europe, where pressure from UKIP and his own backbenchers has forced him to make concessions, but on policy after policy David Cameron has moved the Conservatives onto UKIP’s ground. Sometimes – as on the notorious “Go home or face arrest” anti-immigrant van – even Nigel Farage has attacked them as “nasty”.

With Conservative backbenchers demanding that Cameron go even further, with an electoral pact or even a coalition with UKIP, it’s clear that many Conservatives’ sympathies lie with Nigel Farage’s party. As the Conservative Party drifts to the right, David Cameron weakly tags along in its wake.