Anyone who has spent time arguing with Kippers on Twitter - and I confess here and now that I have spent FAR too much time doing just that - will realise that for many devotees of Nigel, one of the principle attractions of the "People's Army" is the hope that it will return the nation to a golden age. This sentiment is usually expressed with the punchy declaration that:
I want my country back.
Frankly, it's a bit of a theme.
So I've been looking closely, too closely perhaps, at pictures of the delegates at the UKIP Spring Conference and wondering what that "country" is. According to a YouGov poll the typical UKIP voter is male, over 50 and white. Studying the delegates in Margate, one would have to assume that the average "die-hard" supporter is a bit older than that and closer to the 60 mark.
I think we have to assume that "I want my country back" means they wish it returned some Back to The Future style fixed point in their youth. Otherwise it's a fairly redundant statement. So given their ages, one might suppose that they want to go back to when they were in the (Godfrey) bloom of their youth. For most, that would be the early 1970s. In the last fading rays of light before we entered the EUSSR - or whatever they're calling it today.
Ah. 1973. Gary Glitter was riding high in the charts with his Glam Rock hit "Touch Me". Popular Radio 1 DJ Jimmy Savile was encouraging us to "Clunk Click, even on the shortest trip". On TV, star family entertainer Stuart Hall was charming a nation with the hilarious "It's a Knockout". The IRA too were enjoying a "golden era" of bombings, knee cappings and sectarian shootings. Britain was in the grip of a splendid recession, replete with mass unemployment and widescale industrial unrest that was to last a decade. Oh, and Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips at Westminster Abbey - to much rejoicing.
Happy days.
If you had wanted to BUY BRITISH in 1973 you could have got yourself a lovely new Austin Allegro and been the envy of all your neighbours. Or had a newly built asbestos lined home that has probably killed you by now. The industry of course knew the dangers of asbestos in the seventies, but in those joyous pre EU regulation days it was still being merrily fitted to most new homes.
The fact is actually - and please whisper it quietly lest our UKIP friends hear this - Britain was shit in the early 1970s. I mean really shit. Sure there was David Bowie and Nicolas Roeg but that really was it. Life expectancy was around 70. Racism and sexual abuse and sexism and (as we now know) paedophilia were rampant in a society that had yet to embrace political correctness - or as some call it - decency. It was still perfectly OK to eject people from your shop or lodgings on the grounds of their colour or race. In the workplace in those pre Health and Safety GONE MAD days you were far, far more likely to die or suffer a serious injury. In schools, teachers could still beat your little ones with a cane.
And they did.
If you had a baby out of wedlock you were still ashamed and made to feel really ashamed. If you had a boyfriend or girlfriend of a different colour you were pretty much ostracised. And heaven help you if you were gay. Sure - homosexuality had been decriminalised in 1967 - but it barely registered. Women's rights were a joke. Maternity leave didn't exist. Nor a minimum wage. If you got cancer you probably died.
Thing is - UKIP is not really a political movement at all. It's a "mood". A party of people that genuinely think the past was better - despite all the evidence to the contrary - because in reality they are actually harking back to the loss of their own youth. It is a personal lament writ large in political form.
Now come on everyone - all together now
