Ukip's Rochester win shows voters no longer trust the main parties

The headline on this column last week was “

It is taking the main political parties and most of the mainstream media a very long time to adjust to how things are changing.

On the BBC news yesterday morning, I heard its political correspondent telling us that “the [Rochester] result was never in doubt”, and implying that it had not been all that good for Ukip. Never in doubt! Who would have predicted, even six months ago, that two Tory MPs with safe seats would resign them and re-present themselves to their voters, standing for a party which had never before won a seat? Who would have predicted, if they were mad enough to do this, that they would win? Certainly not the BBC. Yet they did all these things.

At the Conservative Party conference last month, the leadership boasted that although it might not be able to halt Douglas Carswell in Clacton, it would crush the treacherous Mark Reckless in Rochester. David Cameron and the Tory part of the Cabinet more or less stopped governing the country to pound the streets of Rochester (and Strood). Every Tory MP was ordered into the constituency. Yet Mr Reckless won. The Tories did very badly. Labour did worse. The Liberal Democrats did worst of all. What are they all misunderstanding?

Charles Dickens lived in Rochester for some of his life, and used it, under the name of Cloisterham, as the setting for his last (unfinished) novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood: “A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose…that all its changes lie behind it, and there are no more to come…All things in it are of the past.”

I wonder if this Dickensian version of Rochester clouds the view of our political leaders and helps explain The Mystery of David Cameron (and Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg) in failing to get on top of the problem. The persistent mainstream charge against Ukip and its supporters is that they are nostalgists, dwellers-in-the-past, people who just don’t like the modern world. There is some truth in this: like the Scottish Nationalist Party, Ukip trades in dreams of old glory more than policies for future success. But the wrong conclusion is drawn.

In any old, stable, free country, there are many losses which deserve to be mourned. It is not irrational or unpleasant to wish you could still leave your house unlocked, expect your children to share school classes with pupils who can all speak English, or not find your wages, at the lower end of the income scale, threatened by foreigners who will work for less. In such a civilisation, of which Britain is a prime example, change is welcomed only if the best of the good, old things are secured in the process.

In Britain today, many people feel that the good, old things have not been secured and that the changes are not helping them. If they are indigenous, and from the poorer half of society, they are probably right. It is true, for instance, that modern sophisticated societies need quite a lot of immigration; but it is even more blindingly obvious that extremely high rates (we have double the number of immigrants of 20 years ago), which, because of the EU, the Government cannot control, are unpleasant for the poor communities which have to accommodate them. This makes them socially dangerous. If, when you complain about this, you not only get no help, but are also told that you are a horrible person, you get angry. And if you get angry, you are much more likely to vote Ukip.

Modernisers, in all parties, are often right to urge change on their supporters. Tony Blair was right that Labour needed to welcome the lower tax rates inherited from the Thatcher era and to develop a “respect agenda” which confronted crime and supported good neighbourliness. Mr Cameron was right that if his party could find nothing to say about public services because these were “Labour subjects”, it was not fit to govern.

But modernisers have two great faults. The first is to assume that what is modern is inevitable. Soviet Communism was modern once, and part of its power lay in its claim that it was inevitable. It wasn’t, and now it is dead.

The second is to equate modernity with virtue and so to treat its critics as moral inferiors. In Britain, the saga of same-sex marriage is a classic case. Parts of the Western world are heading in that direction: “therefore” it must be welcomed: “therefore” its opponents are bigots: “therefore” they should be virtually disqualified from public office.

All those “therefores” are wrong. A moderate conservative approach would try to balance the age-old, universal view that marriage is between a man and a woman with tolerance of homosexual relationships. This balance was achieved by civil partnerships, but violated by the way that Mr Cameron casually imposed gay marriage. His approach insulted settled beliefs, and therefore wounded him politically more than people like to state directly. In times of wrenching economic change, social conservatism (not to be confused with social authoritarianism) helps reassure people. Instead, we have had doctrinaire, finger-wagging modernism from a party that calls itself Conservative. And, broadly speaking, the better off and better educated have been lecturing the less fortunate. Again, a reason to edge towards Ukip.

Nevertheless, the mainstream parties would carry 80 or 90 per cent of the electorate with them if we believed their analysis of the way the world is going. But what if we no longer accept their versions? What if their account of the future might itself be trapped in the past? This is the question that constructive eurosceptics such as Owen Paterson, who will address the subject in a speech on Monday, and Daniel Hannan MEP, are asking. But it is still forbidden on any party’s front bench.

Those who berate the Ukip nostalgists the most are those who most uncritically believe that the European Union is the future. Isn’t there more and more evidence that they are wrong? We have now lived beside the eurozone long enough to realise that it truly, madly, deeply does not work. It cannot correct its original flaw: most of its members cannot be like Germany, and so the single currency has become a machine for joblessness, recession and political alienation across half the Continent. Far from being modern, the eurozone is the product of a mid-20th-century, top-down, bureaucratic Utopianism. It cannot deal with the connected, competitive, global character of the 21st century.

On the same BBC programme in which the reporter told us that the Rochester result had “never been in doubt”, Sir James Dyson, the inventor, was interviewed about his expanding businesses. What did he think, the interviewer asked as an afterthought, about the EU? Would he mind if Britain left? “Not particularly, no”, was his answer. The policies which concerned him most were under the control of Germany, he said, which always acted in favour of the heavy-industrial interest against the innovator. So the EU obstructed him. His was not the voice of the nostalgist, but of a man who lives by the future.