The hype surrounding the 'success' of UKIP at the last UK local elections ignored an interesting fact: that the Green Party secured a similar number of seats. Despite this, and the fact that they hold a seat in parliament whereas UKIP don't, the Greens were largely ignored (Farage, 2013).
This isn't a new trend. Moderate groups have often struggle for visibility and support, caught between more aggressive and more vocal opponents. However, groups such as the old UK Liberal Party show that even when reduced to a political irrelevance, moderates still maintain persistent support. The question is whether it is possible to turn support into polling success, without playing the game of publicity grabbing, sensationalism, and emotive appeals to identity.
On the one hand, a strong assertion can be made for the argument that says moderates do not do enough to promote themselves. The media thrives by gaining the eyes and ears of their audience, and those who aren't doing the exciting or the odd are often simply ignored.
This is particularly relevant when you compare the two parties currently competing to become Britain's newest third party. UKIP has, on paper, little to match the Green Party. Whereas UKIP struggles to compose policies and select candidates (Hyde, 2013), the Greens are well organised, with a federal party co-ordinated right across Europe, with solid representation as broadly across the UK as UKIP. Despite these serious efforts they receive little acknowledgement for it.
The difference, the effective difference, between the two appears to be headlines. UKIP causes controversy, breeds conflict, gives rise to sensationalism, and brings headlines. History has a habit of being revised in much the same way.
The women's suffrage movement in Britain was a long drawn out process of negotiation and protest, in the later stages of which militant groups emerged - born from those who had grown frustrated with the lack of progress. The broader, peaceful, and better supported suffragists of Millicent Fawcett are often forgotten however, obscured by the fame of those militant suffragettes, like Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Davison.
And the time of revolutionary terror in France is for what the Jacobins are remembered. Yet a closer look reveals the Jacobin Club to have been home to several strains of republicanism, of which the Montagnards of Maximilien Robespierre - the proponents of the terror - were but one loose faction. They themselves formed in opposition to the Girondins, whose number included Madame Roland and Thomas Paine, who supported a more moderate revolution, to establish a constitutional republic. Their opposition to the terror is now obscure as well, reduced to a bit part in the sensationalised story of the murder of the Montagnard Marat, stabbed in his bath by the Girondin Charlotte Corday.
It seems that the most controversial problem facing moderates is that there is an apparent connection between a lack of publicity and the lack of aggressive or emotive campaigning. By taking a higher road you face the peril that comes with not playing those games - of becoming an irrelevance. Those perils are weighed against the effectiveness of fighting power with power, using violent or aggressive tactics, or using the politics of identity. While those kinds of tactics have rarely helped movements achieve their social goals, they have usually succeeded in raising awareness of them.
When you trust people to do their own research and come to their own opinions and conclusions, you risk being bitten by those who don't, or who adopt the views popularised in the media. It is also a much longer road. But the old Liberal Party showed that there will always be demand for moderate groups, and the Liberal Democrats managed to unite small liberal and social democratic parties into a governing party. But that journey took a long time, and required the building of trust on the personal, and local level, and a good reputation, something that can be shattered all too easily.
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references:
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+ Zoe Williams' 'Nigel Farage gives good telly, so Ukip trumps the Greens'; in The Guardian; 9 May 2013.
+ Marina Hyde's '"Which curry house is open late?": Nigel Farage and Marina Hyde go for a pint'; in The Guardian; 20 July 2013.
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