of a city and only half an hour’s drive from Gatwick – a picture, we reckoned, repeated all across the rural (or once rural) south of England. The rosy image people liked to have of the countryside was of a timeless, gentle place of seasonal rituals, home to farmers, craftsmen, vicars and parochial, patriotic yokels. The reality, as it appeared to us, is that it was populated by number crunchers and workers in the ‘knowledge industry’, most of whom had not a local outlook but an international and strongly pan-European one.
THREE Dam Busters and Morris Dancers – Woodbridge, Suffolk
After the 2005 general election defeat, and the arrival of David Cameron as leader, the Conservative Party quickly reduced the amount of energy it spent talking about criminals and the need to be tough on them. The thinking was that banging on about crime linked the Tories, in the public mind, to a past generation of boggle-eyed authoritarians who wanted to bring back hanging and corporal punishment, and who were unhealthily obsessed with all that sort of thing. In the hope, presumably, of making the Conservatives sound more approachable and less nasty and weird on the subject, one of Cameron’s first significant acts as party leader was to give a speech saying the public needed to try to understand criminals. This scored headlines saying Cameron wanted everyone to ‘hug a hoodie’.
But how would all this go down with the grass roots, many of whom, I reckoned, believed that cracking down on criminals was one of the main things that being a Conservative was all about? Some of the right-wing law and order fundamentalists had, in fact, already deserted the Conservatives and joined the United Kingdom Independence Party – UKIP for short – originally formed in a wave of disgust over the pro-European stance of the Conservative Party and the political classes generally. So when I read that UKIP was to hold a conference devoted solely to the subject of law and order, it seemed like the chance to get a good insight into a type of red-blooded law and order enthusiast who thought it was no longer right or proper to support the Conservative Party.
The conference was held in the Suffolk town of Woodbridge at the end of May 2008. It wasn’t hard, as we parked up outside a supermarket, to find the conference venue. All we had to do was follow the strains of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and the theme from The Dam Busters, which formed part of a medley of patriotic tunes being blasted out from a public address system inside a community centre, and flooding out into the supermarket car park through open emergency exit doors.
There were about sixty people inside the hall – all of them white and mostly elderly – sitting in rows of cheap plastic and tubular steel seats, facing a stage. Looking down from the stage was a row of six grim-faced UKIP leaders and luminaries who resembled a latter-day politburo reviewing a Red Square parade from the top of Lenin’s tomb. They sat behind a trestle table decorated with the red and white Cross of St George flag and a Union Jack. My arrival with David seemed to cause a stutter in the proceedings. We looked so out of place that it seemed the folks on the stage were, we thought, wondering whether they ought to confront us in some way, or perhaps stop proceedings to ask us who we were and what we thought we were doing.
But they said nothing and just sat staring at us as the patriotic music faded and things began to get going. The introductory speech of welcome was given by John West, a very thin man wearing a shapeless suit, on the lapel of which glinted an enamel Union Jack badge. John spoke with a harsh, nasal cockney accent and his eyes had a slightly faraway look. His delivery was the percussive jabbing of a megaphone-wielding street politician or market trader. ‘Now then – why’re we holdin’ a confrunce on loranorder?’ John asked. ‘It’s cos we’re losin’ the war on crime … a hundred and thirty million crimes are committed in Britain, every sinkle year.’ John ploughed on, throwing out the welter of similarly alarming statistics and doom-laden killer factoids which, we were to discover, were very much the hallmark of UKIP speech-making. John spoke quietly, but his message boomed and echoed around the mostly empty hall thanks to overamplification. ‘Do ya remember David Camrun’s advice to hug a hoodie?’ he sneered. ‘Huh! So much for the Conservatives bein’ the loranorder party. WE are the new loreanorder party now!’ John paused, seemingly expecting applause, which did not come. He deflated a little.
John had brought his wife Alison along and she was sitting beside him on the platform. Husband and wife teams seemed to be more common on the political right, where there is capital to be gained from being seen to embody traditionalist family values – the examples include former MP Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine, and the current MPs Nicholas and Ann Winterton. Alison had shoulder-length black hair, cut severely, and wore a lilac skirt suit and high heels. She had a Lancashire accent which was as strong and irritating on the ear as her husband’s cockney.
Alison based her speech largely on crime stories she had read in the Daily Telegraph and on the internet. The UKIP speakers seemed to like the information superhighway a great deal – it provided them with endless new snippets about crime – and they were evidently a lot more familiar with the new age of email and online politics than most of the Richmond Tories I had met. Criminals, thought Alison, were simply refusing to take personal responsibility for themselves – ‘criminals don’t have to choose to re-offend,’ she told the audience.
But Alison’s main beef was with ‘sur-called experts’ who lacked common sense and didn’t seem to have ‘a grip on reality’. These so-called experts, said Alison, came up with trendy ideas like ASBOs. These initiatives were meant to deter crime but then, she said, ASBOs had come to be worn as badges of pride by ‘gangs who wander the streets’. So-called experts sent offenders on luxury adventure holidays, which were just a ‘slap on the wrist’. Under a UKIP government, she said, schools would have the freedom to use corporal punishment if they wanted to: ‘Kids are out of control and we need to take back control of our streets.’ It struck us that everyone in the room looked as if they had heard this speech or some version of it many, many times before.
Later a younger man called Rob Burberry was called to speak. He was introduced as a former special constable and an ex-policeman, and a member of UKIP’s youth wing. Rob told a favourite tabloid news story about an alleged criminal who was chased onto a roof by policemen in the Midlands. The police could not follow the man onto the roof because of health and safety considerations. There was a bit of guffawing and jeering at the mention of the much-derided politically correct concept of ‘health and safety’.
Rob laboured through the story, which everyone already seemed to know, to the extent that some were actually mutely mouthing the words. But the audience seemed to be enjoying it, as if a much-loved song were being sung by an interesting young performer. Rob reached the climax of his account by saying that the police had supplied the suspected criminal with a bucket of KFC. To illustrate the point, Rob had brought an empty red and white striped KFC ‘bargain bucket’ with him. He waved it in the air and said, ‘We need less of these …’ – he picked up a policeman’s helmet which he had brought with him and said – ‘… and we need more of these.’
After the speeches there were questions from the floor. ‘Should we bring back borstal?’ asked a member of the audience. ‘Yes – very much so,’ Alison responded. An elderly guy in a blazer and slicked-back hair didn’t ask a question, but instead made a speech of his own. He wanted to abolish the Race Relations Act; abolish the Howard League for Penal Reform and abolish the Commission for Racial Equality. ‘And while we are at it,’ he continued, in the midst of an apparent brainstorm, ‘we should abolish those foreigners who are always interfering and always sticking up for prisoners, erm, what are they called now? They begin with an “A”. Erm …’ Someone shouted out, ‘Do you mean Amnesty International?’ The old guy’s face lit up with recognition. ‘Yes! That’s them! Amnesty International – they are a bloody nuisance, too.’
Another interjection from the floor put the focus back onto the borstal question: ‘Y’know, I
