Ukip is not an anti-establishment party

Delingpole: Shilling for Ukip - and the establishment.

When I heard James Delingpole was moving to Breitbart to write for their UK operation I was pleased.  Sadly I have been let down. Breitbart has joined The Commentator in writing puff pieces for the Cult of Farage.

Delingpole has largely suspended his critical faculties, and instead of the robust journalism and humourous banter I always liked him for, he now writes propaganda for Ukip.  How the mighty have fallen.  Sadly this is what happens to any intelligent person the moment they join a tribe.

He is feeding the narrative that Ukip are the plucky underdogs challenging the status quo. "Politicians and the mainstream media are part of the same Establishment and have a mutual interest in preserving the status quo." says he.  But if you have ever read any policy from Ukip, you will see that it is still largely within the same framework of the establishment - and very much the status quo. Their policies are reactionary diktats the likes you would expect from a Daily Mail reader, that in most cases would be immeasurably worse than the piss-poor illiberal diktats we already get from Westminster.

Were one to examine Ukip as to whether they were serious contender for government, any rational person would run a mile.  Especially a party that doesn't even see the need to formulate an EU exit strategy on which to campaign.  How do they expect to win a referendum without an exit policy that reassures those with very legitimate doubts?

What we see on close examination of Ukip is not a party that seeks to overthrow the establishment, but to take over and run the establishment according to its own barn-pot whims.  It has no "ism" and it has no philosphy.  Only a desire to depose those in power.  For what reason, other than a vague and unplanned exit from the EU, we do not know (and even that looks dispensable to Ukip).

There is no uniting ethos nor a desire to return power to the people - or dismantle the establishment as we know it.  They can point to a few tinkerings around the edges that sound like good ideas, stumbled upon by happenchance, but would be just as easily be dropped as the 2010 manifesto since these ideas do not lie at the bedrock of their thinking (whatever that is).  Thus we are looking at a populist personality cult - not a movement.