Last week a Guardian Live audience debated the future of Ukip and discussed how far the party could go. John Harris says the idea of peak Ukip is fantasy, and we’re a long way off it yet

During the first seven months of 2014, a convenient fantasy took root among some metropolitan commentators. Whenever the UK Independence Party was the subject of a negative story, there were mutterings about “peak Ukip”, and the inevitability of its decline. The peak Ukip theory itself peaked over the summer when the party’s runner-up position in the Newark byelection and a couple of months of relative quiet suggested it was in retreat.

I wrote in the Guardian at the time that anyone who assumed that this was the case was guilty of the kind of self-delusion common to four-year-olds and people on bad acid: “If I can’t see the monster, the monster can’t see me,” and all that. Because look what happened. On 9 October, the Conservative defector Douglas Carswell won the Clacton byelection for Ukip on 60% of the vote. The same day, Ukip came within 600 votes of taking Heywood and Middleton from Labour. In recent opinion polls, the party has consistently scored some of its highest-ever ratings – close to 20%, according to some – while combined support for the Tories and Labour has come in at record lows. If broadcasters have their way, Nigel Farage will be included in one of the party leaders’ General Election debates, underlining the idea that his party is now a major force in British politics.



Meanwhile, both “main” parties try and make tough noises on Ukip’s favoured issues – immigration, chiefly – so as to somehow stop them. The message seems to be: “Ukip are right, but please don’t vote for them.” The bubble, then, is not about to burst and if “peak Ukip” is to arrive, it may be for a while yet.

Over the past year, I have spent a lot of time talking to people who support Ukip and the same themes have come up time and time again. For millions of voters, their political views are now defined by a bundle of concerns and furies focused, chiefly, on immigration and the EU, which, to many minds, is one and the same. Crudely put, this can be illustrated as the intersection of a Venn Diagram split between left and right. Although they meet in the middle, some Ukip supporters believe Labour has lost touch with “the working man” and that the certainties of post-war Britain have been ground into dust, while other, ex-Conservative, Ukip voters wonder what has happened to the kind of cast-iron Tory politics they got from Margaret Thatcher.

But just as many Ukip supporters float free of that analysis, favouring the party for reasons that fit no conventional left/right category. What is certain is that just about all Ukippers feel ignored and patronised, and think politicians understand nothing of their lives. This is the core of the analysis offered in the watershed book Revolt on The Right, by academics Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford. Their shorthand term for Ukip’s support base is “the left behind”. It denotes people not just abandoned by politics, but marginalised by the turns taken by the economy over the past three decades. In this reading, Ukip are a quintessential product of the winners-and-losers reality created by globalisation and the long-overlooked grievances produced by deindustrialisation. All this has a strong geographical dimension, reflected in Ukip’s redoubts in the English east, and its strong performances in the north of England.



When stories emerge of some of Ukip’s more unsavoury elements, or the particularly stupid behaviour on the part of some its elected representatives, it has precious little effect on their support. The reason for this is simple: supporting Ukip is essentially an act of defiance and a hostile media is one of the forces Ukip’s most enthusiastic fans think they are resisting. Indeed, the place of the media in this story shows the rise of Ukip to be as much a cultural phenomenon as a political one.



Tellingly, a lot of Ukip supporters defiantly describe themselves as “English”, a deep, complex identity that transcends the dry stuff of elections and voting behaviour. At its core is a latent anger about snobbery and the supposed sidelining of the white working class, and antipathy towards most things considered “politically correct”, which can explode in response to stories and events that are said to fit that basic narrative. This is why, in the face of fierce criticism, Ukip have been campaigning on the issue of child sexual exploitation in such northern towns as Rochdale and Rotherham.



A few other things are obvious. Although it is not ideal Ukip territory, the party has enough momentum to win the Rochester and Strood byelection, which will send the Conservatives into real panic and only embed the idea that Nigel Farage is dictating the political weather. And after that? Between now and the general election, Ukip’s profile and popularity will surely stay much the same as it is now. As part of the peak Ukip hypothesis, there has long been a political-class theory that in May next year, people will somehow wake up to the idea that the general election is a Tory versus Labour/Cameron versus Miliband contest, and move away from Ukip. That may well apply to some voters, but there again, some polls have suggested that about half of Ukip’s voters are likely to stay put, and if Farage performs well in a TV debate, this number could go through the roof. Remember: if culture is as central to all this as conventional politics, the usual rules will not apply.



Ukip will not win all of the Westminster seats it is targeting, not by any means, as proved by Labour’s win in last week’s South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner byelection. Even where Ukip campaign furiously, there are limits to its organisation, and a sizable cohort of Labour voters, in particular, want nothing to do with them. But make no mistake, Ukip’s support now runs deep and wide, the public’s faith in mainstream politics shows no signs of any revival and through 2015 and beyond, what Nigel Farage calls his “people’s army” is hardly likely to go away.

Guardian journalists and readers discussed the future of Ukip at a Guardian Live event in London on 5 November. Find out more about upcoming events and debates and how to sign up as a member.