David Cameron only has himself to blame for his problems with UKIP

This week’s defection by Douglas Carswell to UKIP was a hammer blow for the Prime Minister’s authority.  David Cameron and the Tories are running scared of UKIP and are more divided than ever before. With Stuart Wheeler, the former Tory donor and now UKIP treasurer, declaring that at least two more MPs are “seriously considering” defecting, we know that the introspection and turmoil is set to continue.

As the Tories’ identity crisis deepens, it becomes clearer and clearer that they cannot provide the answers to the challenges the country faces.  But this is a crisis all of David Cameron’s own making. Like John Major in the fag-end days of the Conservative government in the nineties, Cameron is a prisoner of the right wingers in his party.  Every concession has left him weaker and weaker.  In abandoning the centre ground, he has tried desperately to keep throwing fresh meat at his right wing, not realising that this is a beast that never gets full.

David Cameron claimed that he wanted to end the Tory party’s obsession with “banging on about Europe”, but his weakness saw him forced to offer an EU referendum that he had previously argued against to try in a vain attempt to stave off the threat of UKIP. As a political strategy, this simply hasn’t worked. Cameron also became the first leader since John Major not to win a European election. Tory party membership has fallen through the floor and now Cameron’s own MPs are looking to UKIP.

Douglas Carswell isn’t the only (now former) Tory MP to call for closer links, or even an electoral alliance with UKIP.  Numerous right wing Tory backbenchers, MEPs and Peers have openly indulged the prospect of a union with UKIP.

Michael Fabricant, the former vice chair of the Conservative party, called for an electoral arrangement in 2012 to help ensure a Conservative majority at the General Election.  Peter Bone and Jacob Rees-Mogg have called for joint Conservative and UKIP candidates at the next general election.  Edward Leigh and Daniel Hannan have called for UKIP and the Conservatives to “unite the right” while Lord Tebbit, the Thatcherite former cabinet minister, has called for Tory candidates to withdraw in favour of stronger UKIP candidates.

David Cameron has retreated from the centre ground to the traditional Tory right. Rather than hugging huskies he is now about cutting the “green crap”.  N-H-S were supposedly his three priorities, but he’s broken his promise to have no top-down reorganisations and diverted £3bn from the frontline. He’s given a tax cut to millionaires when before we were apparently “all in it together”.  He’s abandoned the hard working majority in Britain who are struggling to make ends meet, whilst embracing his backbenchers who seem determined to adopt a UKIP platform.

We already know that UKIP are even more right wing than the Tories. They want to charge people to see their GP, deliver bigger tax cuts for millionaires, scrap rights at work and ensure even deeper cuts to public services. The fact that a Tory MP has now joined UKIP shows that the message to working people is clear: vote UKIP and you not only get policies that are more extreme than the Tories, you also get the Tories.

We know that this is a government that is failing. David Cameron promised that net migration would fall to the tens of thousands, but instead it has gone up by nearly 70,000 in the last year. Working people are now £1,600 a year worse off. Family energy bills have been allowed to rise by almost £300 since the election.  Over 800,000 young people are now unemployed. We’ve had the lowest level of peacetime house building since the 1920s. Waiting lists are up, it’s harder to get a GP appointment and vital services are being cut back. And under the Tories, we have had the slowest recovery for 100 years, breaking their promise to balance the books by 2015 and borrowing £190 billion more than they planned.

Douglas Carswell himself said that the Conservative party were “not serious about real change”. The British people are seeing starkly that he is right, but it is Labour that has been offering the change this country needs. This summer, Labour has been setting out ‘The Choice’ facing the British people at the General Election in 2015. Labour is the party with a positive vision for a Britain that works for all working people, not just a privileged few. We will tackle the cost of living crisis by freezing energy prices and breaking up the big six energy firms. We will guarantee appointments with a GP within 48 hours and the same day for those who need it. We will build an extra 200,000 houses a year by the end of the parliament in order to ease the housing shortage. We will back the next generation with a job guarantee for the young unemployed and more apprenticeships. And we will cut income tax for hardworking people with a lower 10p starting rate, and introduce a 50p top rate of tax as we pay off the deficit in a fair way.

David Cameron is famous for taking several holidays a year. As the summer winds to a close, perhaps he is already in need of another. There is no escaping the fact that after this week’s defection and the apparent intention of others to jump ship, Cameron is now a weakened prime minister running out of time, ideas and now MPs. And he only has himself to blame.

Michael Dugher is MP for Barnsley East, Labour vice-chair and shadow minister for the cabinet office