The benefits of Brexit may yet be unclear, but there is a tangible positive – the gutting of Ukip. In the early days after the referendum, when those more prescient than I predicted that this would at least take the wind out of the party’s sails, I was unconvinced that anything would lance that boil. But it happened quicker than anyone imagined. Ukip was wiped out in the 2017 general election, and then suffered more losses in this year’s English local elections.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that, as the party’s mainstream voters have migrated back to a more reactionary Conservative party, its reach for relevance has extended to the darker corners of the right.
Take a look at three of its newest members. Mark Meechan, Carl Benjamin and Paul Joseph Watson – who have collectively been defined as “YouTubers” due to the vagueness, or perhaps absence, of anything else they actually do – have announced that they have joined the party. All three have built their reputations and social media following primarily by spreading conspiracy theories.
Watson, who describes himself as a “classical liberal”, is editor-at-large of InfoWars, a site that claims the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in the United States was staged and that 9/11 was an inside job. Meechan came to mainstream attention via some freedom of speech controversy involving a dog and a Nazi salute. And Benjamin’s most notable work so far has left him accused of sparking a series of rape threats against the Labour MP Jess Phillips.
To those unfamiliar with Ukip’s new members and their social media bottom-feeding breed, they trade in a sort of insurance-scam-type politics, where they throw themselves at a person, and then claim they are victimised by political correctness, or the left, or women (or all of the above), and then cash in on the attention. If there were no internet, they would not exist.
These individuals could either be a kiss of death for Ukip, its final consignment to the fringes, or a shot in the arm. What they have in common is less a coherent political position, and more a sort of uber-troll politics that – once plugged into a global network that has managed to infiltrate mainstream parties and power – can be significantly disruptive. It is a movement that broadly aligns with the anti-immigration, anti-feminism and anti-Islam agenda of the “alt-right”, but it is mostly grounded in effective attention-seeking rather than the promotion of any political goals.
Watching how the founder of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, has been resurrected – after being written off as a desperate irrelevance just a couple of years ago – is both alarming and instructive. After he knowingly and deliberately violated court reporting restrictions and was consequently and predictably convicted of contempt, and jailed, his prominence has increased, and he is once again a person around whom fake grievances can coalesce. A far-right rally demanding his freedom attracted 15,000 to central London this month; and he has now come to the attention of the Dutch demagogue Geert Wilders and a whole new audience in the US, as a “censorship” martyr.
The Breitbart White House nexus as personified by Steve Bannon made it clear that there was no longer a separation between the real world where serious politics happened, and the virtual world where yahoos staged food fights with the left. The anti-racism campaign Hope not Hate has said it was “no surprise that, even if it was originally for a joke, Meechan (AKA Count Dankula), Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad) and Watson have found common currency with the increasingly extreme rump that remains of Ukip and joined up with the party.”
It should not be assumed that courting such far-right individuals will make Ukip more toxic to the British media, so indulgent has it become of ever more extreme views and false equivalence. It might be just a matter of time before we are subjected to the spectacle of someone called “Count Dankula” (I am embarrassed for all of us just typing it) invited on to a BBC Newsnight panel as a Ukip member to espouse his views on freedom of speech.
Unable to woo back its old voters with the carrot of Brexit, Ukip’s last manifesto focused on trying to mop up the most hardcore anti-immigration sentiment by more clearly spelling out an anti-Muslim agenda. How much the party accepts these far-right individuals will be a good indication of what Ukip is prepared to do to stay relevant – and also how much its new members’ support can be leveraged.
I would like to think that there will be no indulgence of this trio’s views in the name of “controversy” by a cynical media, or in the name of freedom of speech by a gullible left. But I am not optimistic. In the absence of values, it seems all that is left is provocation.