Reddit reviews Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Extremism and Democracy)

This isn't exactly all that new, there was a pretty comprehensive section about it in the recent book about UKIP's rise. Basically under Blair labour realised that the working class was a shrinking demographic with insufficeint votes to get them into power, as opposed to the 50's and 60's when it was a very sizable voting bloc. So they went after the growing educated urban middle class in the 90's and their core working class vote kind of just came along for the ride because many were lifelong labour voters and many would never vote tory.

However, after 20 years of being ignored and one financial crisis which hit them fairly hard, lots of the core labour vote have got sufficiently alienated and pissed off that they're either alienated from the political process and don't vote or are abandoning them for UKIP. At this point in time, there's an absolutely massive difference in the values between young urban labour voters and the older trad who are now abandoning them, which is pretty obvious from all these stories (the "bigoted woman" thing being perhaps the first obvious instance). Anyway, some kind of pitch from a man called Tristram to regain 'english patriotism' is frankly nowhere near enough to overcome the schism (and will probably be percieved as quite condescending by those it's targeted towards), if indeed it can be overcome at all.

If you read Revolt on the right (which is the best book about UKIP right now) they suggest that the BNP hindered UKIP's success in the north when they were prominent and that up to 2010 one of UKIPs main aims was to squeeze them out iirc.

Other people have addressed the EU question, so I'll focus more on politics in general. There's some decent BBC media which covers current politics, it can sometimes be a bit tedious, some shows are better than others, and I certainly wouldn't recommend rigorously following all of them, but it's pretty good for familiarising yourself with the current state of affairs. Some TV and radio shows to follow -

Daily Politics - daily show analysing politics, which often gets high profile politicians on.

This Week - weekly show, airing after Question time, with a slightly comedic approach to political analysis.

Andrew Marr Show - weekly show, the one which senior ministers (the prime minister, the chancellor, the home secretary, etc) are most likely to appear on.

Question Time - weekly topical debate program, with questions from the audience directed towards politicians.

Any Questions - radio version of Question Time. Often not quite as annoying as Question time.

Today in Parliament - daily radio show covering news from parliament.

 

Parliament.uk and gov.uk are both great resources for learning how parliament and government functions, and learning about legislation. If you'd prefer a less fragmented read, such as a book, then Exploring British Politics by Garnett and Lynch seems like a good introductory source, though I will add the disclaimer that I've only used it occasionally as a reference book, and it is fairly pricey.

 

It can sometimes be difficult to understand the significance of things in politics without a basic grounding in the historical context, so I will recommend some more books to help with that (although much of the info can be found online). Two of the most important figures in recent British political history are Thatcher, and Blair. Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One is a good book for starting to understand the political context of the Thatcher era, although it is obviously quite biographical too, and being the first volume it only covers roughly the first third of her time in government. The comprehensive tome on Blair and his wide-ranging effect on the functioning of british politics is surely Seldon's Blair's Britain, 1997-2007, although I will warn you that is it most definitely a tome - incredibly thorough and a bit of a slog. The best way to approach this is probably to read the sections on things you are interested in, like the NHS, and leave the rest until you feel you want to learn about them. Sections of Seldon's Cameron at 10 are definitely worth a read if you want some more insight into the first Cameron ministry, and the coalition years.

 

I can't really recommend any comprehensive histories on the political parties (although what I've read of Tim Bale's The Conservatives Since 1945 is pretty good). One I would recommend is Goodwin's Revolt on the Right, which offers a fairly original analysis of the phenomenon that is UKIP. There's a more up-to-date follow-up to that, (UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics), which I imagine is also pretty good, but I haven't read it. Familiarising yourself with general political ideologies (to rattle off an incomplete list: one nation conservatism, high toryism, classical liberalism, social liberalism, libertarianism, social democracy, democratic socialism, etc), how these relate to each other, and how they have manifested in the various 3 main parties over time is a must for understanding the parties and the political tensions within them. Wikipedia should suffice in filling in the details there (and in other places), for now.

This is not about the Guardian and 'what it believes'. If we can be mature for a moment, this is another fascinating article by the irrepressible Matt Goodwin and Robert Ford, professors at Manchester University and regular columnists to the Guardian, who have spent 10 years surveying UKIP support and have a greater understanding of their support-base than anybody else right now.

Their credentials are indisputable. If you don't like well researched observations (rather than bigotry and arrogance)... you can always lump it and bury your head in the sand.

If you give a shit (and I have a feeling you don't), read, their widely acclaimed book on this subject

When you say "Radicalized" do you mean, like UKIP, because if so I highly recomend Revolt on the Right.

I assumed you meant non-fiction, but if you meant fiction, perhaps you'd like House of Cards.

Other than that, books are usually released at the end of a particular era in politics such as Tony Blair's Premiership, although I haven't read it. One of the political memoirs of either himself or Alastair Campbell.

Hope this helps.

> Bringing it up solely in order to make nasty

Calling your remarks repetitively stupid is nasty? You really are a sensitive soul.

> Bringing it up solely in order to make nasty

Oh dear.

> then refusing to retract

You talk utter nonsense. Indeed, one more time... your repetition is stupid. Why should I retract it?

> yet you're unable to actually explain why you think any of these things.

'Coalition of the BNP and Colonel Blimp make up their support'. The stupidity and ignorance speaks for itself. Try reading a book. Profs. Goodwin & Ford know what they are talking about.

> Four times! What kind of person replies to somebody who they claim is boring them four times!

Just ramming the point home that whilst everybody else jumped ff the bandwagon in around about June, and realised that UKIP is a little more than BNP-lite and 'Colonel Blimp', you stubbornly remained on it. Boring.

Could you link the original studies here? I'd love to take a look since I spent a ton of my undergrad researching this exact topic. One variable I noticed that was interesting was education (I.e. eurosceptic in France for example were overwhelmingly the most educated (Masters/Phd's by in large. I also would reccomend these two books, i've read both and while they are focused primarily on Britain and UKIP the first is a good primer while the second is riddled with data, graphs, number sets, trends, and scatter graphs!

1)Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Extremism and Democracy)Mar 18, 2014
by Robert Ford and Matthew J Goodwin

http://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Right-Explaining-Extremism-Democracy/dp/0415661501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462988605&sr=8-1&keywords=revolt+on+the+right

2) UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics 1st Edition
by Matthew Goodwin (Author), Caitlin Milazzo (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/UKIP-Inside-Campaign-British-Politics/dp/0198736118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462988668&sr=8-1&keywords=ukip

I'm going to be pessimistic and provide this book by Ford and Goodwin - admittedly, however, books of a similar disposition could be archetypal of all over Europe at the moment, but people coming to the UK (especially from outside of Europe) should definitely give the book more than a passing glance. It's contemporary and, following the 2008 Wall Street crash, it doesn't look like it'll be going away any time soon.

The book is called "Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain", and focuses primarily on the rise of Farage and UKIP into the public conscious - for those unaware (to use a few gross simplifications), UKIP is the UK's "Front National"/"Swiss People's Party"; Farage is the UK's Geert Wilders.