UKIP: Who will have the last laugh?

The fruitcakes, loons and clowns have been having a fabulous conference. It almost felt like a circus – what with Nigel Farage coated heavily in foundation and Godfrey hitting someone over the head. In many ways, watching UKIP’s conference was like watching an episode of Some Mothers Do ‘ave ‘em, as we saw them all muddle round, making fools of themselves – oh, how we laughed!

Picking fault with UKIP has become political commentators new favourite sport – I mean it is so easy! The material writes itself. Unfortunately, treating UKIP in this way is immature and irritating. Why can we not engage with UKIP on an adult level instead of laughing at them? It has been something that many people do not want to talk about; but at some point we are going to have to acknowledge that UKIP may win the European elections next year and gain more council seats to give themselves a good chance of securing a few MPs in 2015. We need to realise that on the ground: they are winning.

Okay they have a bigoted member – but then again so do most parties. I am sure that there are plenty of Conservative MPs who share Mr Blooms’ patriarchal opinions about women, but we need to realise that the political bubble’s game of ‘who is the most liberal’, is of little to no interest to most of the electorate. People want answers regarding job creation, growth, the NHS, education and, increasingly, Europe.

We all sit back and laugh, as the hearts and minds of those that the plutocratic capitalist system has failed, are won over by a bunch of clowns. The left is doing nothing – absolutely nothing to combat it. Can we not try and empathise with these people? When you don’t have a job, and you’re in debt, and someone is telling you that they can solve the problem if you let them into office; and claim: when we get out of Europe everything will be fine, because it is the immigrants’ fault that we are where we are – not the fault of the system – these people will listen. They will listen regardless of whether the person is using the right PC terms or not.

If you need to feed your children you are not so interested in which words are acceptable and which are not and you certainly are not interested in whether someone now pronounces their surname differently. These are questions we are concerned with – but UKIP is not trying to win us over. UKIP is winning people over because they have answers that people want to hear about regarding jobs and growth. Perhaps they are not accurate and perhaps they do not make economic sense, but politics is not about being right: it is about being persuasive.

So please laugh at UKIP, laugh at how un-liberal they are, laugh at how un-PC their comments are, laugh at how out of touch they dress and how patriarchal their stance is. But remember, unless the political class or a new radical movement start saying something that the electorate want to hear, you probably won’t be laughing for much longer.